Metabibliography
A metabibliography is a
bibliography of bibliographies, also termed a biblio-bibliography.
When one has to identify
documents about a given subject it is a
great help if somebody has already identified the relevant documents and listed
them in a bibliography.
The next question is then: How do you know whether there exists a bibliography that organizes the relevant documents on a given subject? One answer could be: you look it up in a metabibliography.
Example: You are interested in psychological contributions to peace research. You may find some documents by browsing in different collections or searching the Internet. Depending on your purpose, that may be enough. If your relation to this topic is serious and long-term, you would probably benefit from using a bibliography such as: Peace; abstracts of the psychological and behavioral literature, 1967-1990 (Blumberg & French, 1992). The question is: How do find such a bibliography? One answer might be: You look it up in a metabibliography. There exist a number of metabibliographies on peach research, for example Peace and war ; a guide to bibliographies (Carroll; Fink & Mohraz, 1983). This specific title is published before 1992, why you will of course not find Blumberg & French (1992) among the entries. You have to search for other metabibliographies.
One might imagine an infinite regress: primary documents are found in bibliographies. Bibliographies are found in metabibliographies, metabibliographies are found in meta-meta bibliographies and so on. Such an thought is extremely different from real-life information search strategies. Why is this the case?
The answer is: Primary documents also contain bibliographies: they may be more or less like a self-sustained bibliographical system. If you have found one article on psychological peace research it will refer to other primary papers on the same topic. It may also refer to a review article and monographs on the topic. The review paper may refer to other reviews and also mentions metabibliographies and so on. (Even if the first paper you got on peace research do not refer to a review article, it may refer to other papers, who do).
Bibliographies, on the next level, do not only register primary documents, but also other bibliographies. The above mentioned bibliographies and metabibliographies of peace research may be found, for example, in the catalog of the Library of Congress (available online). (So here you may identify monographs, bibliographies and metabibliographies in one and the same search). Similarly you may identify primarily literature, bibliographies and metabibliographies in one search for peace research in a psychological bibliography such as PsycINFO).
What then are metabibliographies good for? The answer is that they are specialized tools that are adequate for certain specialized tasks. They are, for example, important tools for building a library from scratch. One of the "classic" works is "Walford's guide to reference material" (Lester, 2005). In a recent announcement the tasks for which it is suited is described in this way:
"Who is it for? This new reference book will be valuable for professionals worldwide who need to suggest resources to people who are relatively unfamiliar with the nuances of a topic and who are asking ‘where should I start?’
The focus is on resources that are most likely to be found and used within public, government, education or business information services. If you are an LIS professional responsible for developing and revising a reference collection, new to reference work, staffing an enquiry desk, a research worker or student, you’ll welcome publication of this new work – it's your paper portal to the world of reference resources."
Whether or not it is a good advice for people to start with such a work may be questioned. People may need to start with selected quality literature, not with, for example, comprehensive databases. That "Walford" is widely considered "a bible" for information professionals is, however, true. In my opinion the genre of "information guides" may be seen as a way that library and information science (LIS) professionals contribute to providing "interfaces" (in a generalized sense) between users and the universe of information sources. The mapping of information sources in a top-down fashion is a way that LIS can contribute to progress.
Kinds of metabibliographies
There are many kinds of metabibliographies, each serving different purposes. Some cover all subjects. Important examples are Balay (1996), Besterman (1965-1966), Bibliographic Index, Lester (2005-), Madsen (1993) and Totok & Weitzel (1984-1985). Some of these list only bibliographies, other also other kinds of reference material such as dictionaries and encyclopedias.
Other cover broad subject fields like the social sciences (e.g. Webb, 1986), single disciplines (e.g., Hjørland, 1989) or specific topics (e.g., Carroll; Fink & Mohraz, 1983).
Some cover specific media such as electronic databases (e.g. Gale Directory).
Database hosts such as Dialog contain many bibliographies, why an index to such hosts in reality is a kind of metabibliography (See Dialindex). A search on all 435 files in Dialog for metabibliograph? provided a list of seven bibliographies containing this term:
1 2: INSPEC_1969-2005/Oct W2
1 10: AGRICOLA_70-2005/Oct
1 11: PsycINFO(R)_1887-2005/Aug W2
1 47: Gale Group Magazine DB(TM)_1959-2005/Oct 24
3 66: GPO Mon. Cat._1978-2005/Oct
1 148: Gale Group Trade & Industry DB_1976-2005/Oct 24
1 438: Library Lit. & Info. Science_1984-2005/Sep
(Initial numbers are the number of "his" in the file. Some files such as Library of Congress catalog were for some reasons not searched, which was reported by the system during the search).
Libraries may provide web-based lists of bibliographies. Examples are: University of Illinois Guide to the Arms Control Collection and F. W. Crumb Memorial Library. SUNY Potsdam: Peace and War: a guide to library resources.
Metabibliographies may be annotated or naked. To serve users' search strategies, they should not only be annotated, but also be critical: Illuminating Bias in the Coverage. Metabibliographies are important tools in User education.
Literature:
Balay, R. (Ed.). (1996). Guide to reference books. 11th ed. Chicago: American Library Association.
Besterman, T. A.
(1965-1966). A World Bibliography of Bibliographies and of Bibliographical
Catalogues, Calendars, Abstracts, Digests, Indexes and the like. 4. Ed. Vol.
1-5. Totowa.
Bibliographic Index: a Cumulative Bibliography of Bibliographies. New York: Wilson, 1938-. Vol. 1-. http://www.hwwilson.com/Databases/biblio.htm
Blumberg, H. H. & French, C. C. (Eds.). (1992). Peace; abstracts of the psychological and behavioral literature, 1967-1990. Washington, DC : American Psychological Association.
Carroll, B. A.; Fink, C. F. & Mohraz, J. E. (Eds.). (1983). Peace and war; a guide to bibliographies. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio. (War/peace bibliography series. #16 ).
"Dialindex" (File 411). Dialog. (See description in Dialog blue sheet: http://library.dialog.com/bluesheets/html/bl0411.html ).
F. W. Crumb Memorial Library. SUNY Potsdam, State University of New York. Peace and War: a guide to library resources. http://www.potsdam.edu/library/Guides/PeaceandWar.html
Gale Directory of Online, Portable, and Internet Databases.
see Dialog's description in blue sheet: http://library.dialog.com/bluesheets/html/bl0230.html
Hjørland, B. (1989). Psykologi og grænseområder. Kilder til Information. København: Det kongelige Bibliotek.
Lester, R. (Ed.). (2005-). The New Walford Guide to Reference Resources. Vol.
1-3. (Vol. 1, 2005: Science, Technology
and Medicine. Vol. 2 (planned 2006): The Social
Sciences; Vol. 3 (planned 2007). Arts, Humanities and General Reference).
(1st edition published 1959).
Madsen, M. (1993). Dokumentsøgning. Et udvalg af bibliografier og kataloger. København: Danmarks Biblioteksskole. (Revised ed. of Erland Munch-Petersen (1979). Kilder til Litteratursøgning. Et annoteret udvalg af bibliografier og kataloger. 2.udg. København: Danmarks Biblioteksskole).
Totok, W. & Weitzel, R. (Eds.). (1984-1985). Handbuch der bibliographischen Nachschlagewerke Bd. 1-2. Hrsg. v. Hans-Jürgen und Dagmar Kernchen. - 6., erw., völlig neu bearb. Aufl. - Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Education and Social Science Library. Guide to the Arms Control Collection. http://www.library.uiuc.edu/edx/armsguid.htm (Visited October 22, 2005).
Webb, W. H. et al. (Ed.). (1986). Sources of Information in the Social Sciences. A Guide to the literature. 3. ed. Chicago: American Library Association.
See also: Bibliographic guide; Information search strategy;
Birger Hjørland
Last edited: 14-05-2006