communication skills-Bibliography explaination ,it types and how can be prepared

Communication skills-Bibliography explanation,its types, and how can be prepared

you can follow us @freegooglenotes

Q. 5. What is a Bibliography? What are its types? Explain how Bibliography can be prepared on a given topic.

Ans. The bibliography is the systematic study and description of books, The field acquired special importance in the 20th century because of the need for effective organization of the records of human communication in the face of the gargantuan growth of publishing activity and the need, especially in undeveloped countries, for informed access to the world’s scientific and technical information. It has been said that without a bibliography, the records of civilization would be unexplored chaos of miscellaneous contributions to knowledge, unorganized and inapplicable to human needs.

The word bibliography, in its literal sense, derived from the Greek bibliographia means the writing of books, and it was so defined in the 17th century. Since the 18th century, it has been used to denote the
systematic description and history of books. It is now commonly used in two widely divergent, though basically connected senses :

(1) the listing of books, arranged according to some system (in this sense it is called enumerative, systematic, or descriptive bibliography); and

(2) the study of books as material objects; i.e., the study of the material of which books are made and the manner in which they are put together (in this sense commonly called critical bibliography). It is the function of bibliography to provide useful information for the student, in the one case supplying him with information about material for study, in the other, helping him to establish the place of a book (or a piece of writing) in an author’s production and its superiority and genuineness as a text for study.

Descriptive Bibliography

The tasks of the compiler of the bibliography are

(1) to find out what books on a particular subject exist;

(2) to describe their item-by-item; and

(3) to assemble the resulting entries into useful arrangements for reference and study. The need for lists of this kind arises as soon as the number of books in any subject is too great to be easily remembered.

First Bibliography

In 1545 a German-Swiss writer and naturalist, Conrad Gesner, who has been known as the father of bibliography, published his Bibliotheca Universalis (Universal Bibliography) of all Latin, Greek, and Hebrew writers, living and dead; this was followed three years later by a second volume, Pandectarum sive Partitionum universalism Libri XXI (“Twenty-one Books of Encyclopedia or Universal Divisions [of
Knowledge]”), in which the entries, arranged alphabetically in the earlier volume are rearranged under 21 subject headings. Although Gesner was not the earliest descriptive bibliographer, his attempts at universality and classification earns him his fame.

Bibliography and its World

The Institute International de Bibliographic, founded in 1895 in Brussels by Henry Lafontaine and Paul Otlet with the object of creating a universal bibliography of books and articles in periodicals, arranged
according to a specially designed system of classification, the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), has assembled a card catalog of many millions of entries; but because of the immense bulk of the material and the growing cost of compilation, it is unlikely that it will ever reach the goal set by its founders. The hopes for universal bibliographies have been largely replaced by the published catalogs of such great comprehensive libraries as the British Museum (1961-67), the Bibliotheque Nationale
(beginning in 1897), the Library of Congress, and most promising of all, the United States National Union Catalogue maintained in the Library of Congress and, in the early 1970s, in course of being printed in an estimated 625 volumes. Investigations were (the early 1970s) being made into the problems involved in programming and computerizing such catalogs, and if the complexities of programming multilanguage material can be solved, if the necessary financing can be found, if world cooperation in the production and standardization of catalog entries can be assured, it seems possible that the ideals of the Brussels Institute may yet to some extent be realized.

Types of Descriptive Bibliographies

Most countries now have national bibliographies, in a majority of cases published officially by the national library and based on copies of national publications deposited in accordance with provisions of copyright acts. Some notable exceptions are the United States and the Netherlands, whose national bibliographies are published commercially, and the United Kingdom, whose British National Bibliography is published by a council representing libraries, publishers, and booksellers.’ These national
bibliographies aim at and attain, a high degree of completeness and promptitude. The British National Bibliography (beginning in 1950), for example, is published weekly and cumulated quarterly and annually; it is arranged in a classified order according to the decimal classification of the American librarian Melvil Dewey, with an alphabetical index of authors, titles, and subjects. The Bibliographie de la France (beginning in 1811), published weekly, is arranged in a classified order with an annual index of authors, titles, and subjects. The German Deutsche Bibliographie (beginning in 1947) is published weekly and provides both an author and catchword index.

The bibliography is of Great Help to the Students

Bibliographies of books published in particular countries are of great value to students. Outstanding examples of such bibliographies are Charles Evans, American Bibliography (1903-34), covering the period 1639-1799; A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475-1640, compiled by A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave (1926; revised and enlarged 2nd ed., 1976), and its continuation by D.G. Wing, Short-Title Catalogue… 1641-1700 (1945-51; revised 2nd ed., 2 vol., 1972-82).

Personal Bibliography

Personal bibliographies may consist of no more than a simple list of an author’s works, as, for example, those attached to articles in the Dictionary of National Biography. However, they may be more elaborate; take, for instance, F.W. Ebisch and L.L. Schucking, A Shakespeare Bibliography (1931; supplement 1937); Michael Sadleir, Trollope: A Bibliography (1928); Bertha Coolidge Slade, Maria Edgeworth (1937). Personal bibliographies are sometimes based on private collections, as exemplified by A Stevenson Library (1951-64), based on the collection of Edwin J. Beinecke; T; J. Wise’s bibliographies, based on his own collections, of Tennyson, Swinburne, and others. A modification of personal bibliography consists of a narrative setting out an author’s works with a wide-ranging account of the circumstances surrounding the composition and publication of each work. An example of such a
the bibliography is J.E. Norton, A Bibliography of the Works of Edward Gibbon (1940).

Compiling a Working Bibliography

As you find out information and opinions on your subject, you should keep track of sources that you may use for your paper. Documentation of such sources is called working bibliography. Your preliminary understanding provides the first title for the list. Other titles will come out when you consult reference works and the library central catalog and when you explore the Internet. If you read with awareness through the bibliography and notes of each more often than not you will discover additional important sources. Your working bibliography will repeatedly change during your research as you add new titles and eradicate those which are not useful and as you look into and emphasize some aspects of your subject in preference to others. The working bibliography will ultimately develop into the list of works cited that appears at the end of the research papers.

When you add sources to your working bibliographies, be sure to enter all the publication information needed for the work-cited list. The information to be recorded depends on the kind of source used. Following are typical examples of citations for a book, an article in a source. The sources your encounter might require more information. Some of the sources can be cited like :

(I) From a Book :
(1) Author’s full name (last name first)
(2) Full title (including any subtitle)
(3) Edition (if the book is second or later edition)
(4) Number of Volumes and the total Number of Volumes (if the book is multivolume work)
(5) City of Publication
(6) Shortened form of the Publisher’s name
(7) Year of publication
For Example :
Vadra, Robert, The Fast movers. Rev. ed. (4) vols. Chaitnya: Chennai, 2005

(II) Article in a scholarly journal
(1) Author’s name
(2) Title of the article
(3) Title of the journal
(4) Volume number
(5) Year of Publication
(6) Inclusive page numbers of the articles (i.e., the number of the page on which the article begins, a hyphen, the number of the page on which the article ends).
For Example :
Kanpur, Roshan, “Myth of Good Dancers”. Journal on Dancers 78 (2005) 72-94

(III) Newspaper or Magazine Article
For a newspaper or a magazine we need few appropriate things,
which are as under:
(1) Authors name
(2) Title of the article
(3) Title of the periodical
(4) Date of publication
(5) Inclusive page numbers of the article

For Example :

Lynd, Roberto, “The Break-Even Point”. Structure of Excellence in Language 17 Feb. 2004: B42-46