Library science

From Memography

Library science distills centuries of work on how to categorize and then classify and catalog documents.

Memography proposes that a meme ID is something like a call number for a web document. Because a document may be about many things and thus have multiple memes, the call number analogy is not really correct, since a library book has only one number.

Memography is more like the many descriptors or facets used in a colon classification scheme. But that too is not precise.

A meme page on this site that corresponds to a meme ID is something like the index card in a subject or author card catalog. Index cards often contain a short description of the document, and meme pages describe what the meme is about - its aboutness.

Memography achieves three of the formal bibliographic objectives that are desired by librarians:

1. The finding objective: to find items that correspond to search criteria.

2. The collocating objective: to bring all these items together.

3. The navigation objective: to find items related by equivalence, association, and hierarchy.

Because each meme ID is a globally unique ID (a GUID), searching for the meme ID finds and collocates all the documents tagged with that ID. By using existing taxonomies and thesauri to arrange memes, memography accomplishes the navigation objective.