A brief history of finding and organizing information

CMS 100, Fall 2024

Phoebe Ayers

Hello!

• I’m Phoebe
• Course 6 & 18 librarian
• Long time Wikipedian and Wikimedia Foundation volunteer

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• One of 100+ staff at the MIT libraries who is here to help you!

Today

Let’s take a step back in time…

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And think about how information is produced and how we find it

Think about a recent question you had

What was it?

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Ex:

• What is the dining hall serving today?
• How do I do this pset?

How did you answer your question?

What resource or tool did you use?

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Why did you pick this resource or tool?

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Now… how would you answer your question(s) with no internet?

What types of sources, resources or tools would you use?

How would you find the resources or tools you named…. with no internet?

A very brief history of collecting knowledge

1. Sources as material objects

3000+ BCE: Cuneiform and clay tablets

The library of Ashburnipal, King of Ninevah, c 700BCE, est 30,000 tablets

A sales contract for a house, 2600 BCE

3000ish BCE – 692 AD: Papyrus scrolls

The Book of the Dead, c1275 BCE

The Villa of the Papyri, “the only surviving library from the Graeco-Roman world that exists in its entirety”, destroyed in 79AD in Vesuvius

1600-1046 BCE: Shang Dynasty libraries

Oracle bone collections

• Lots still unknown
• Archeology suggests a catalog/arrangement

300 BCE - 275 AD - The Library of Alexandria

Between 40,000-400,000 scrolls at its height

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The librarians here:

• Standardized the Homeric poems
• Calculated the circumference of the earth (accurately)
• Made the pinakes, the first library catalog by author/works and author/subject (120 volumes!
• Tetagmenos epi teis megaleis bibliothekeis, the 'scheme of the great bookshelves'

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Scrolls were alphabetized by first letter of the author

A contemporary fragment of Orestes c200 BCE

500s-1450 AD: Medieval libraries in Europe

• Private and personal collections or attached to religious institutions, occasionally universities
• You were cursed if you took a manuscript

1500s-present: Sankore Madrasah & the manuscripts of Timbuktu

• Held primarily in private family collections
• Recently “re-discovered” by west, threatened by war / destruction

1300ish-present: The Bodleian (Oxford)

• One of the oldest and largest libraries in Europe
• Grew rapidly with the growth of printed books
• Still forms the core of the Oxford libraries
• Had the first printed library catalog in Europe (1605)

Library catalogs (1600s-present)

How do you find what you are looking for in a large library?

Discussion:

• How have the libraries you’ve used been arranged?

The most common cataloging schemes in the US

• Dewey Decimal system (after Melvil Dewey, 1851-1931)
• Library of Congress system (1897-present), after the Library of Congress

Not the only ones!

• Universal Decimal Classification, 1895-present
• Various local and specialty schemes

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What do you do when something new gets invented?

Where do you put a book on computer programming?

• Dewey: 005, “generalities” (next to library science)
• LC: QA76, a subsection of mathematics (QA)

Technology in LC classification:

• QA: mathematics and computers
• TF: railroads
• TR: photography

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Encyclopedias (1200s-present)

What if you just want to “look something up” or learn about something new without a lot of reading?

What if you wanted to know where a piece of knowledge fit in the world?

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“An outline of the scope and history of encyclopaedias is essentially a guide to the development of scholarship, for encyclopaedias stand out as landmarks throughout the centuries, recording much of what was known at the time of publication.”

1751-1772: the Encyclopedie of Diderot and D’Alembert

• French Enlightenment thinkers
• Covered all knowledge
• Including “everyday” arts & sciences

(eg engineering)

The Encyclopedie’s classification

Legacy of the Encyclopedie

“The goal of an encyclopedia is to assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth, to demonstrate the general system to the people with whom we live, & to transmit it to the people who will come after us, so that the works of centuries past is not useless to the centuries which follow, that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous & happier, & that we do not die without having merited being part of the human race." (Encyclopédie, Diderot)

• Printing suppressed
• Detained, searched and jailed
• Destroyed the proofs
• Led to the French Revolution?

1768-present: Encyclopedia Britannica

“The Propædia specifically was a reader’s version of the circle of learning on which the set had been based and was organized in such a way that a reader might reassemble in meaningful ways material that the accident of alphabetization had dispersed.”

1993-2009: Encarta

• Based on earlier print encyclopedias (Funk & Wagnalls, Groliers)
• CD-Rom, then bundled with Windows
• Moved to the web in 2000
• Just one of many unsuccessful online encyclopedias

2. Sources as non-material objects

1995-1999: web directories, search, webrings

1998

1995

1999

1997: Google

1997

1999

January 15, 2001: Wikipedia

Wikipedia

• Grew out of an experiment called Nupedia, which didn’t work
• Based on a wiki (software first invented in 1995)
• Open source philosophy -> free knowledge philosophy
• Self-governance, “ignore all rules” + community-building principles
• 100,000 articles in the first two years
• An experiment

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Wikipedia in 2003

Me in 2003

2003-2024++: Me and Wikipedia

• Book author, researcher, speaker
• Int’l conference organizer
• Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Foundation (2010-2015)
• Board of Trustees, Wikimedia Endowment (2021-present)
• Wikimedia project editor

Break!

Wikipedia

Today’s Wikipedia

• Multilingual - 300+ editions of Wikipedia
• 6.8M articles in English, 63M articles in total
• 200M+ behind the scenes pages
• 100,000s of editors from around the world, 9M edits a month to all WPs
• Largest reference work to ever exist

Also:

• Free to use and freely licensed
• No ads, no tracking
• Only non-profit in top 10 websites

Wikipedia is also a community

Editing Wikipedia

Have you ever edited?

Wikipedia editors are…

• Unpaid
• Largely anonymous or pseudonymous
• Work under an umbrella of rules and guidelines:
• Statements require sources
• Neutrality - articles don’t take sides
• … but do report the world as it is
• All content is freely licensed (no copying from books etc)

Let’s look at an article together

The talk page

The page history

September 2001

The external links, references and categories

The other language editions

Editing a page

Let’s make an edit!

Questions to ask about Wikipedia articles

• What’s missing?
• What are the tags?
• Are the sources reliable?

Building knowledge is a long game

Diderot spent 25 years working on the Encyclopedie

Wikipedia has been going for 23 years

Libraries last 100s or 1000s of years

Millions of books, recordings, articles, sources aren’t yet digitized / aren’t online

What you get with a search engine is just the tip of the iceberg of sources in human history

Why the historical tour?

• Sources and collections of information are created for a reason
• Support the interests of the King of Ninevah
• Show off the wealth of Alexander the Great
• Distribute the ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers
• Idealism/experimentation online
• No collection (at any point in history) has ever been “complete”
• How collections and sources are arranged and organized affects their meaning and what you can find in them
• Organization and inclusion is an editorial choice, which is made by people (or by systems that are designed by people)

When you ask a question and are looking for answers….

• Is this source likely to have the kind of answer you need?
• What are the motivations behind the creation of this source? (persuasion, spreading scientific knowledge, clicks/ad revenue)
• What might be missing in this source?
• Do you know where the information came from in this source and how it is produced?
• Does this source confirm or contradict your existing knowledge and biases?

Discuss!

• How does these questions fit (or not) with how you use sources?
• How do the choices knowledge tools make affect what information you find and use?
• How does this relate to readings about Google and privacy?
• Questions?

Bonus: let’s talk about registering to vote!

• If you are able to vote in the US, where are you registered?
• What do you need to vote?
• * * Where might you find this info?
• Deadlines!

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Voted_sticker

Ask your librarian!

Phoebe Ayers

Email me: psayers@mit.edu

Make an appointment – in person or zoom

https://calendly.com/phoebeayers

• Focus your literature review
• Learn about publishing
• Ask me anything!