Bibliography as an interdisciplinary information service - Navigating Among the Disciplines: The Library and Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Materials having a functional relationship are those which contribute information or insight. They may be intellectual tools, theories, evidence, or examples, "or may simply stimulate ... thinking by offering ideas, questions, hypotheses to explore" (Wilson, 1992, p. 241). These materials may or may not be about the subject in question, since topical relevance is not the primary concern.

Interdisciplinary Work

Interdisciplinary work is a good example of an inquiry which may use functionally related materials. Such an inquiry can take many forms (Klein, 1990). For example, Hartmann and Messer-Davidow (1991) forcus on the variables of agency, perspective, values, and selection to analyze the influence of sex-gender categories on such disciplines as biology, social studies, and literary studies. Dogan and Pahre (1990) give multiple examples of research areas in the social sciences which have arisen in the "margins" of disciplinary specializations. These new "hybrids" may emerge from the adoption and recasting of concepts from another specialization, from borrowing in methods, or from exchanging theories. Characteristically, interdisciplinary, integrative, or hybrid work is complex rather than complicated (Newell & Klein, 1996). Simple and complicated systems are both hierarchical in nature and operate based on a single system of rules. In contrast, complex systems are nonhierarchical, nonlinear, and based on multiple, even contradictory, systems of rules. "To understand them at the larger integrated level, reductionist thinking must be replaced by nonlinear thinking, pattern recognition, and analogy" (p. 6). Such complexity explains the difficulty in searching for relevant materials.

Finding relevant literature - i.e., developing bibliographie - for complex work which crosses disciplinary boundaries is often a search for functionally related materials. It may start by stumbling across an approach or perspective outside ones home discipline that generated the question but which seems to throw light on the inquiry at hand. From there, it involves searching for more information in the other specialty. Colleagues in the other disciplines are helpful in suggesting key resources, and a researcher may need to learn enough of other specialties to be fluent in the language of concepts, theories, or methods and be able to recognize important and relevant patterns or analogies. Typically, a simple bibliographic search to identify literature from other disciplines related to an inquiry is of limited use, since topically related bibliographic access tools are not organized for easy access to functional relations.

Play and Leisure

The following discussion illustrates the problems and issues in bibliographic searching for an interdisciplinary question. The problems encountered suggest that published bibliographies are valuable for interdisciplinary or hybrid areas. The case that will be discussed is a comparison of two bibliographies of the subject "play" one produced unsystematically, the other in a more structured way using current bibliographic tools. The case does not list the materials found in each bibliography; instead, it examines the activity in developing each one. The subject of the bibliographies is play and leisure. This section will briefly examine the definitions of play and leisure in order to indicate key concepts related to each. These concepts will then be used in the search for relevant materials.