Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington.
intlib@ischool.washington.edu
Column for January 2003
The other day, my first-year master’s class was discussing the evaluation of information resources. I asked them to list the criteria they thought most important, and the usual suspects emerged: currency, accuracy, format, navigation, and, of course, authority.
Afterwards, “authority” stuck with me, as I thought about how this aspect of an information source has evolved. Traditionally, authority was largely attributed to the reputation of the author, compiler, or editor of a work; and, perhaps, the nature of the publisher.
At the beginning, it wasn’t altogether obvious that a brewery could produce the definitive source on world records (originally compiled to settle bar bets, no less); and not everyone thought highly of a descriptive dictionary that employed a “usage panel” and included lots of dirty words (actually an early selling point for some of us). However, the Guinness Book of World Records and the American Heritage Dictionary made their cases and now belong to that large category of resources to which authority attaches by tradition—they’ve been around a long time and are thereby given the benefit of the doubt, along with Britannica and Who’s Who and hundreds of others. Both resources have been translated to the Web with little question to their authority, largely transferred from the print versions with nice additions like the pronunciation module in the AHD.
Two of my favorite Web-native reference resources are Who’s Alive and Who’s Dead and Elections Around the World. In addition to being informative, timely, and fun, both are the work of dedicated individuals who have built and are maintaining these resources on their own—and it shows. Wilfried Derksen does a good job overall with the latter resource; among many useful features she adds descriptive labels to political parties of various countries (the “xenophobic” National Front in France and the “separatist” Bloc Québécois).
David Carson, who maintains Who’s Alive and Who’s Dead, says he’s neither morbid nor obsessed with death; but he likes to know, well, who’s alive and who’s dead. Among his criteria for inclusion is that he has “to know something about the person and consider him or her interesting enough to include.” These folks are the heirs of Roget and Bartlett and Poole, who created works on their own to fill a perceived need, and who made a case for authority based on hard work and attention to detail, rather than affiliation or reputation.
And then there’s the Internet Movie Database. I’ve been a fan for years, and not only because I’m such a movie nut. The quality of the information is really high, perhaps because this appears on most of their pages: “Errors and omissions on this page may be reported to the IMDb database managers . . . they will be examined and, if accepted, included in a future update.” The compilers describe the multiple sources of information they draw from but say that “the bulk” is from industry people and site visitors. This means that a healthy share of the authority claim for the information on the site rests not with any external agency or institution but rather with the community of readers and users; it’s a strong claim at that, given the nature of the people who use and depend on the IMDb. Therefore, the more active, knowledgeable—and rabid—the users, presumably the more authoritative and correct the site.
Such examples of authority-by-community are perhaps only the beginning, and raise lots of issues. How will an outsider be able to gauge or measure communities’ performance? Some communities may just be better at this—more reliable, more informed, and more concerned about authority. So a case for the authority of a site may well rely on the users themselves, their orientation, inclination, activity, interest, and vigilance.
Finally, we’ve grown used to the notion that a site’s content could be dynamic; now it may well be that its authority is as well. Authoritativeness could, in extreme cases, be in flux or even momentary. For a profession like ours that cares a lot about authority—for reference purposes, collection development, organization, and so on—this could be a major point of concern, and it raises further questions about the variability of the quality of resources over the long haul. But that’s another story.