ORGANIZATION OF

INFORMATION
RESOURCES 1
Organizing the objects in a library (e.g. books, CDs, maps etc.) and the
knowledge (e.g. main and additional subjects) about them in a coherent
and consistent way is of vital importance to effectively support the
requests of patrons and the retrieval of needed information.

The organization of information in library and information science is

referred to as bibliographic control.
Hagler (1997) defines bibliographic control as “the sum of all the practical
operations a librarian undertakes to organize documents and their description
so that relevant ones can be located most directly and efficiently in answer to
any user’s expressed need”. It means that bibliographic control is a broad
term, integrating all the tasks involved in creating, organizing, managing,
updating and exchanging the information about the items in a library or an
archival collection.
3 main functions of bibliographic control tools can be summarized as
follows (Taylor, 2006):
1. identifying or finding a particular bibliographic item
2. collocating or gathering closely related materials
3. evaluating or selecting the most suitable item that contains the required information
and/or is in the appropriate physical form (e.g. on paper or on disc).
For each item in a library, a bibliographic record is developed as a result of one of the
basic tasks of bibliographic control. This record, known also as an entry or metadata,
is a uniform description of the item’s characteristics, both:
1. physical, e.g. title, author, number of pages, and
2. intellectual, e.g. main subject of the item.

The development of bibliographic records is both an art and as cience. It is a science

because several principles, codes and rules are involved in systematically describing
resources in a uniform style.

Gorman (2003) points out, it is the good judgement and the fruits of experience that
make a good cataloguer (one of the job roles involved in bibliographic control).