First off, welcome back. It's a new semester and I'm studying collection management, including collection development. As a core function of libraries, I've been looking forward to doing it and I'm even excited about our assignments for the semester.
And following our first week of classes, on our class discussion board, we've been talking about different types of collections, differents formats for collecting, different patron groups. And I find myself thinking a great deal about the nature of texts. Harking back to the very first lecture on literature I attended, which drew heavily on semiotics, I keep thinking about what the lecturer, Dr Alan Maher, said about texts. He defined texts as "an ordered arrangement of signs". He went on to say that "man is a text-producing animal" (this was pre-political correctness - these days, no doubt, he would phrase it as "humans are text-producing animals"), and that we see patterns in everything, whether they are intentional or not.
Those of you with even a passing familiarity with semiotics will have noticed the use of the word "signs". In semiotics, signs have two parts - the signifier and the signified. At its simplest, it means that the word "tree" is composed of two parts - the letters and their arrangement being the signifier, the object they are referring to (with wood, leaves, trunk, branches, roots, etc) being the signified. It also means there is no necessary relationship between the two.
But, as interesting as this is, what does it have to do with librarianship? Well, it occurs to me that as librarians, it means we have to expand our understanding of what a text is and consider not only books and journals and maps, all objects that encode information in their "ordered arrangement of signs" but also photographs, films, audio recordings, personal papers, artifacts, etc.
Of course, a short visit to any library will show that librarians have done just that. And so the variety of texts available for the patron is quite broad. But this notion of text carries a lot of implications, not just for developing a collection but also managing it, which overlaps another core function of libraries - the preservation of culture. But that's a topic for another day.
Cheers!
Catherine
