“You Keep Using This Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.”
There was an interesting discussion over at Boing Boing earlier about libraries and how they handle books on the occult.
Cecile Dubuis wrote a master’s dissertation for University College London titled “Libraries & The Occult.” I’ve only read bits of it,but the challenge she identifies is that occult books are, by their nature, anomalous and hard to categorize, much like the phenomena discussed in their pages. As a result, they are often unsearchable in the context of traditional library classification systems.
Sadly, the discussion wandered off into weird, symbolic arguments about Remote Viewing and whether or not it can be scientifically validated (short answer: it can’t. Remote Viewing has about as much science in it as Voodoo Economics has dolls and magic potions).
But it is an interesting topic and early on there were some good points made. One of these was that Occult information, by it’s nature is hard to pin down. Which is true. That which is Occult (hidden) is not knowable in the usual sense. As pointed out, many practical, every day bits of knowledge, from how to make fire up to evolutionary biology, were Occult at one time but have since been dragged into the light, tested, verified and organized accordingly. The useful bits are put someplace easily identifiable where they can be consulted on a regular basis by any old body that happens to be curious. The rest have been discarded as nonsense, mythology, or religion. Some people think these are useful and so they also get cataloged as well. Democracy is a beautiful, infuriating process.
The modern usage of the world Occult is misleading. It has an heir of the mysterious woo, that mystical force that surrounds us and binds the universe together. However, the topics of occult books are not so ambiguous. Having read quite a few, they aren’t even all that magical. Or Interesting. However, they usually fall into a handful of standard categories that are common to libraries: religion, mythology, psychology, history, etc. And so books on occult subjects end up being shelved in these areas, which are not necessarily next to one another or even on the same floor, depending on the size of your library.
And that’s the way it should be.
As I pointed out in the comments, hidden information cannot be cataloged. If an Occult subject is written about, tested, and found useful in some fashion, then it is no longer, strictly speaking, Occult. It has migrated into the open and therefore gets put in the appropriate (or an appropriate) location, based on whatever scheme the library employs. It’s really that simple.Cataloging is not an exact science but it is based on empirical,discernible qualities. There’s plenty of wiggle room in determiningwhat those qualities are for any given item. As a Catalog librarian, Ideal with the fuzziness of classification schema all the live long day.
But “Occult” is not a meaningful classifier. At best, it’s a populargenre term. Libraries don’t arrange books based on genre terms or tags.* Book stores sometimes do but book stores are notoriously disorganized. Which is a good thing. Nothing is more pleasurable than browsing through a vast store of books loosely organized into some personal, arcane system that an eccentric book hoarder has decided to use to keep his stock roughly contained on the shelves, boxes, tables, furniture and floors.
But that’s not how libraries work. Which is also a good thing. I personally would be suspect of any library that had an Occult section. It means they have bent their subject categories so far out of shape as to no longer be useful. Might as well file everything in Miscellaneous.
_________
*We can have a debate some other time as to whether books can or should be cataloged with tags and popular common terminology, andwhat might be the benefits of doing so.