Two Kinds of Power: An Essay on Bibliographical Control

by Patrick Wilson

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

Genres: Nonfiction, Information Science, Library Science

155 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Patrick Wilson (December 29, 1927 – September 12, 2003) was a noted librarian, information scientist and philosopher who served as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and as dean of the School of Library and Information Studies (now the School of Information) there. Earlier in his career, Wilson taught philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Grits Helme · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this text, Patrick Wilson puts forth the idea that bibliographic control is a kind of power—and that, if knowledge is power, bibliographic control is a power over power. He argues that there are two kinds of power from bibliographic control: the power to find all resources about a single topic, and the power to find all the resources that will be most useful to the searcher. Wilson then embarks on a quest to figure out exactly how one can obtain and best use this second power of “descriptive control.” As a former professor of philosophy, Wilson pays special attention to clarifying the meaning of any term he uses, as a number of terms in the library sciences field can have multiple or nuanced meanings. (The term “relevance” receives special attention.) To conclude, Wilson argues for the equality of access to bibliographical apparatus, and thus for more equal access to information.