The Universal User
Technicalities 41(2) March/April 2021: 1-8
Welcome to the second installment of “Inordinate Maps of Knowledge from the Bibliographers Guild”, in which we consider issues of knowledge organization and bibliographic control, mixed with equal parts of my undergraduate philosophy degree and way to much time spent on popular culture. The first column was part academic lecture and part sermon, which is pretty sad because I was searching for my inner Lester Bangs. What I really know is that it did not result in a front page article. We might need to tinker with the formula a bit–I am jealous of you, Sheila Intner.
John Stuart Mill, writing in 1861, defined “the Greatest Happiness Principle” as the one that judges “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness.” [1] Correct moral action is the one the results in the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, and thus is labeled a “consequentialist” ethics. Holding aside the case where one person is made greatly happy at a modest cost to the many versus the case where many are made modestly happy at a great cost to one, Mill’s ethics are not only consequentialist but also majoritarian–the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
But what of the minority, are we not also concerned with their well-being? Mill addressed the issue of the “tyranny of the majority” in On Liberty. [2] Mill gives various remedies to address this problem including checks on government but also the establishment of a systems of rights guaranteeing the liberties of individuals. Foremost of his liberties, and with particular application for librarians, is the “liberty of thought and discussion.” [3] A system of liberties and rights is, by definition, an area where government may not tread, and in a general moral system is a restraint on individuals and institutions, and obliges us to respect those rights. Such a system is not consequential, but is one defined by obligation, and is termed “deontological” for the Greek word deon, meaning “duty.”
Michael Sandel illustrates the difference between consequentialist and and deontological ethics through his now-famous “runaway trolley” dilemma:
Suppose you are the driver of a trolley car hurtling down the track at sixty miles an hour. Up ahead you see five workers standing on the track, tools in hand. You try to stop, but you can’t. The brakes don’t work. You feel desperate, because you know that if you crash into these five workers, they will all die. (Let’s assume you know that for sure.) Suddenly, you notice a side track, off to the right. There is a worker on that track, too, but only one. You realize that you can turn the trolley car onto the side track, killing the one worker, but sparing the five.
…
Now consider another version of the trolley story. This time, you are not the driver but an onlooker, standing on a bridge overlooking the track. (This time, there is no side track.) Down the track comes a trolley, and at the end of the track are five workers. Once again, the brakes don’t work. The trolley is about to crash into the five workers. You feel helpless to avert this disaster—-until you notice, standing next to you on the bridge, a very heavy man. You could push him off the bridge, onto the track, into the path of the oncoming trolley. He would die, but the five workers would be saved. (You consider jumping onto the track yourself, but realize you are too small to stop the trolley.)
[4]
If you take action to minimize death and suffering, you are clearly adhering to a consequentialist/greatest happiness ethic. Many people, however, feel restrained in the second scenario to not actively cause the death of a bystander, even if it results in less suffering. Despite the constraints of the artificial scenario, we can perceive at work here the presence of a moral imperative to not take an action that will result in the pain and suffering of a fellow human being. Duty compels many to violate the Greatest Happiness Principle rather than taking an action that will cause harm.
Cataloging Ethics
Where exactly is this trolley headed? Is cataloging such a perilous activity, and have we been neglecting occupational health to the degree that all new MLIS students should receive training in workplace safety, and ethical training in making life and death decisions?
I hope not. But over the years and throughout cataloging theory we have witnessed an astonishing adherence to majoritarian ethics without a proper consideration of minority needs or protections. The latest manifestation of this problem is to be found in the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions “Statement of International Cataloguing Principles” which states as its first two general principles:
2.1. Convenience of the user. Convenience means that all efforts should be made to keep all data comprehensible and suitable for the users. The word “user” embraces anyone who searches the catalogue and uses the bibliographic and/or authority data. Decisions taken in the making of descriptions and controlled forms of names for access should be made with the user in mind.
2.2. Common usage. Vocabulary used in descriptions and access points should be in accordance with that of the majority of users.[5]
Clearly our focus is going to turn to that appearance of majoritarianism in principle 2.2, but let us take them in order. An occasional frustration in our field is the relatively slow pace of reform and technological innovation, and I think we have an outstanding case of the first in issue 2.1. Hope Olson’s commitment to pluralism does not just target linguistic practices of naming and nomenclature, but also the idea of the idealized universal user. [6] In 2001 she wrote of the idea of “Charles Cutter and the presumption of universality.” [7] The last column in this series was dedicated to the politics of knowledge and knowledge representation, which posited that social practices of knowledge follow basic social formations–that people are divided by various factors into different communities and groupings. Some of these groupings are non-controversial and self-apparent; people speak different languages and are divided by interests and levels of expertise. French-speaking doctors of infectious disease have different knowledge and reading practices and different needs than non-English speaking immigrant children that have recently arrived in the United States. More controversial are feminist, critical race, and postcolonial statements that knowledge practices also vary by gender, race, region and other factors. Users vary in the information they use and how they use it and in their vocabulary, including the vocabulary they use when constructing queries.
If all users were the same, the only differences among them would be in the various queries they pose on various topics, but we know there is a tremendous variety in search terms when searching on the same topic, and there is tremendous variety in how users judge the documents they retrieve. We can easily dispense with the idea that all users are the same, the open question is whether querying and other information practices exhibit patterns amongst groups or whether those varieties are purely random. We do not have much evidence on this. One consideration is the near-axiomatic statement that a community of people tends to develop and share a vocabulary, develop naming conventions and other practices of linguistic cohesion. Hashtag movements might be one weak example. But many groups often celebrate linguistic invention–a churn of new words and expressions. And, since we are talking about search behavior here, people conduct subject searching at the margins of their knowledge–the paradoxical situation where users have to name what it is they do not know, what Belkin called an “anomalous state of knowledge” a situation that might generate more terminological variety. 8 Whitmire examined the use of academic libraries use of undergraduates and found that students of color were more likely to use the library than their white counterparts. [9 ]As interesting as the results are, they do not tell us much about information seeking per se, or the use of the catalog. Bates described differences between scientists and humanities scholars in their query practices back in the age of Dialog searching–scientists tend to search for topics, and humanists tend to search for personal names [10], but while large patterns in search behavior are interesting, we still see variety in the selection of the individual terms.
The Importance of Context. Or Culture?
It is common to hear that there are no strong determinants in information seeking practices, and that what a user actually does, from selecting sources, entering terms, judging bibliographic descriptions, judging retrieved documents, etc., is highly dependent on “context.” Thus, for example, we have a conference, ISIC, or “Information Seeking in Context.” The job of contextual meta-theory is to identify the various contextual factors that influence query term selection and other behaviors. Such factors might include current knowledge, educational attainment, previous reading, is this for a school paper, age, early vs. late stage research, the nature of controlled vocabulary, etc. These factors pertain to the system, to the nature of the problem being investigated, and to user characteristics. Some of the difficulty here is the behavioral model in the first place. But I wonder sometimes if “context” is a lazy way of referencing the concept of “culture.”
So the evidence is… mixed? One the one hand we can clearly dispense with the idea that all users are the same–there is too much variety of information seeking practice and query vocabulary to support a model of the universal user. Is there perfect irregularity, that is, there are no patterns in vocabulary use that we cannot group users? Here the evidence in not so mixed as it is underwhelming. We see some broad patterns by disciplinary factors, and we see some variation by race and ethnicity in broad measures of library use. Some of the variety we see corresponds to user characteristics–educational attainment, previous reading, etc. that are traceable to other cultural factors like race, ethnicity and gender. But more so, given that we see cultural factors in so many of our social systems like policing, housing, education, income, health–the list is really long–it would be incredibly odd if those factors did not show up in information seeking and use. At this point it almost needs to be disproven rather than proven. So, as a weak theory, when it comes to using the library catalog, we can conclude that there are users of different types. The uncertainty is given more to our lack of investigation, and perhaps the complexity of the evidence, rather than the dubiousness of the claim. ICP 2.2 “Common usage” seems to imply users can be divided into a majority and a minority. So what do we mean by that? What are the implications?
Duty and the Politics of Difference
Universalist conceptions of the user would not be so offensive for obscuring human differences if they did not also obscure the politics of those differences. The politics are such that we see information practice favor certain kinds of users over others. This is what we mean by the politics of information: that some groups have their information needs met and others do not. Even what counts as information in the first place is defined by majoritarian culture. The contents of our academic library music collections would be one demonstration of that idea. So we need to stop saying “the user.” There are users, there are kinds of users, there are kinds of people. How those three statements relate to each other is an important question, but we know enough of people and of human variety that we should stop saying “the user.”
So, back to Mill. Meeting the needs the majority however defined prompts the question: “what of the minority?” Or even better, minorities, because we live in a multicultural society, not a bicultural one. How are they protected? Do they have rights? The ALA Bill of Rights makes it clear on an individual basis that they do.
We will discuss the idea of “literary warrant” and the use of syndetic structure in an upcoming column to find ways to assist users who deploy a minoritized vocabulary in their queries: popular terms, vernacular words and phrases for scientific or scholarly concepts, de-biased terminology where majoritarian policies deliver offensive names for things and people. We should consider these ameliorative methods for addressing a problem created by our embrace of a majoritarian policy in regards to descriptions and access points. And a frank assessment of these measures is long overdue. And as librarians, we hate things that are overdue.
But our professional duty ought not to stop there. We are not bystanders to a trolley accident. We built and operate the trolley line. We have an active duty to not only not create an information underclass, or to ignore such classes when we encounter them. Piketty says “the diffusion of knowledge… is the key to overall productivity growth as well as the reduction of inequality both within and between countries.” [11] Our quest for social equality is to appreciate human difference when it is important for cultural identity, but to remove the odious consequences that occur when we place groups into a hierarchy, which we do when we address the needs of one group and neglect the needs of another. “Difference without domination” is how Danielle Allen describes our task. [12] We need a duty-based ethics that not only obscures social difference, but one that promotes it, and advocates for the design of information services that meed the needs of a minority.
We started with a 19th century Englishman, so let us conclude there, and let us at the same time revisit an old friend, and one of our own kind, a bibliographer and librarian. In his testimony to the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the British Museum, in June, 1836, Anthony Panizzi said (Cowtan 1872, p. 40) “I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry as the richest man in the kingdom, as far as books go, and I contend that the Government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect.” [13] Doing so may yet result in increasing the general happiness. But it is certainly our duty as well.
Works Cited
1. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and Other Essays. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 121.
2. Mill, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and Other Essays, 8.
3. Mill, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and Other Essays, 18.
4. Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Macmillan, 2010), 21-22.
5. Agnese Galeffi, María Violeta Bertolini, Robert L Bothmann, Elena Escolano Rodríguez, and Dorothy McGarry, “Statement of International Cataloguing Principles.” (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, 2016), 5.
6. Hope A. Olson, “The Power to Name.” Signs 26, no. 3 (Spring 2001): 639-68; Hope A. Olson, The Power to Name: Locating the Limits of Subject Representation in Libraries. (Springer, 2002).
7. Olson, 641.
8. N.J. Belkin, R.N. Oddy, and H.M. Brooks, “ASK for Information Retrieval: Part I. Background and Theory.” Journal of Documentation 38, no. 2 (June 1982): 61-71.
9. Ethelene Whitmire, “Cultural Diversity and Undergraduates’ Academic Library Use.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 29, no. 3 (June 2003): 148-61.
10. Marcia J. Bates, Deborah N. Wilde, and Susan Siegfried, “An Analysis of Search Terminology Used by Humanities Scholars: The Getty Online Searching Project Report Number 1.” Library Quarterly63, no. 1 (January 1993): 1-39.
11. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), 21.
12. Danielle S. Allen and Rohini Somanathan, Difference without Domination: Pursuing Justice in Diverse Democracies. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020).
13. Robert Cowtan, Memories of the British Museum.(London, Richard Bentley & son, 1872), 40.