Lynch, J. (2016). You could look it up: The reference shelf from ancient Babylon to Wikipedia. Bloomsbury.
In an attempt to summarize “information” and how it has evolved to meet the needs of their respective cultures, the book “You could look it up: The reference shelf from ancient Babylon to Wikipedia” serves as an informative tribute to the history of information and its growths and struggles. Lynch’s book covers a broad array of subjects regarding information science as a whole, be it the earliest known tablets of the laws of Hammurabi dating back to the age of Babylon, early dictionaries of China and India, early accounts of plagiarism, the loss and destruction of information, and even the online databases of recent times. It is across these topics that the stories of many individuals are told by Lynch and how their actions not only impacted their own times but have helped shape how we view and access information today. As such, this book is akin to a constant stream of information from different times and communities, but Lynch’s descriptions and, sometimes humorous, accounts are kind enough to provide us a proper boat to navigate this deluge of information. My main takeaway from having read this book however is that culture and communities are the primary deciding factor on the type of information that is written down, preserved, and considered relevant and on the other side. The contrary is also true of these cultures and communities also decide what information is not recorded, destroyed, or considered taboo. As such, this book’s contents cover a lot of common ground with topics our course goes into in-depth.
The primary objective of this book is to cover the flow of information and its spread across various mediums and times, and the various stories of individuals responsible. Information, as described by Marcia Bates (2015), “…must be seen within the dense context of social relations, negotiations, and understandings operative in a particular social context” (p. 2054). As such, the definition of information is defined by the specific context of the society or group it is in and is capable of coming in a wide array of forms such as laws, definitions, history, science, etc. Information is also shaped to meet the information needs and behavior of its intended audience as well as to be made to better suit those needs over time. Most basic information can be relatively easy to digest and is often transmitted orally. One example of this is the alphabet which is a list of twenty-six letters that many can recite from memory. It is only once we amass complex information that is too much to pull from only memory that it becomes necessary for a pen to hit paper or in the case of the oldest laws, chisel hits the stone. Hammurabi’s Code is one of the oldest known collections of over 282 laws and, according to Lynch was also “… a digest of earlier legal writing, edited and reorganized to make it more suitable for finding what the reader needs.” (p. 15). It was through the creation of this historical reference list that we see one of the oldest examples of information being compiled to meet the information needs of individuals of the time.
On top of covering the flow of information, it also covers the various mediums and types of information is being spread by various information communities across different countries and periods of time. Information communities, as defined by Fisher and Bishop (2015), are a group of individuals who share a common desire to gain and increase access to a specific set of resources related to information. These can come in a variety of forms, such as a community of scholars in China around third-century B.C.E seeking to compile a dictionary of older terms that are explained with clearer terms or books on the various diseases of the mid 9th century. As information needs evolved over time, so too did the mediums to become more practical, streamlined, and able to reach wider audiences. Nothing embodies this desire for convenience better than the search engines like Google and Wikipedia which amass countless entries of information just about anyone or anything. Google, according to Lynch (2016), has become one of the most powerful singular sources of information, the likes of which have never been seen before in recorded history (p.385). These search engines are a pinnacle of information-seeking convenience and are the result of making the most of emerging technologies. Where information was potentially only available in a book or scroll in one region of the world, the internet makes it possible for almost any information to spread to the global information community.
Regardless of the era, various individuals and information communities have been responsible for compiling vast amounts of information and distributing their information across various formats to meet the needs of their communities. As the complexity of information has evolved over time, so have the mediums in which this information is shared and collected by information communities. It is no wonder we live in a time where we are subject to a flood of information and the water levels are only ever seeming to get higher!
References
Bates, M. J. (2017). Information behavior. In J. D. McDonald & M. Levine-Clark (Eds.), Encyclopedia of library and information sciences (Fourth ed.). Taylor & Francis.
Fisher, K.E. & Bishop, A.P. (2015) Information communities: Defining the focus of information service. In S. Hirsh (Ed). Information Services Today: An Introduction (pp. 22-23). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Lynch, J. (2016). You could look it up: The reference shelf from ancient Babylon to Wikipedia. Bloomsbury.
