Disciplining Knowledge at the library of congress

Abstract

The Library of Congress is a federal institution that occupies a critical space where medical, social science, political, literary, and other discourses are collected, arranged, and disseminated to Congress and the public. LC plays a vital part in discipline creation and maintenance, as it actively reproduces specific discourses, while silencing others, such as those from the humanities, social sciences, and the general public. Alternatively, social tagging seems to disregard conventions of disciplinarity and allows much more diversity of representations. Tagging may provide important insight for organizing materials in research libraries, as choices between single disciplines are no longer necessary and voices from various fields and audiences can name resources using their own terms, whether they prefer medical/technical jargon or everyday words. As the academy moves more toward interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary studies and aims to find the intersections across political, social, scientific, and cultural phenomena, the implications and effects of library organization based on classes and subjects needs to be interrogated.