Bibliographic Records as Cultural Artifacts

What is it about?

Founded in 1930 as the “house library” of a Jesuit seminary, the Regis College Library collection presents evidence of almost 400 years of Jesuit participation in the socio-cultural development of present-day Canada. Today, the Regis Library contributes to the University of Toronto Library system, the third largest aggregated research university collection in North America. The provenance of the collection offers a vantage on the cultural encounter between European Jesuits and indigenous peoples. The palimpsest of spine markings and other collection metadata signals the replacement of encyclopedic approaches to knowledge and subject mapping with a more empirical approach to book classification based on actual patterns of collection and use. A recent pilot research project extends this empirical approach by applying advanced analytic algorithms to digitized text collections.

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Why is it important?

Readers are challenged to reflect on the socio-political power differences introduced by book classification and challenged by access to sophisticated computational tools.

Perspectives