Patching the system

Finally, I want to return briefly to the classificatory function of genre to show how liberature may be of use. Swales claims that the classificatory value of genre “lies in [genre's] use as a research tool for categorizing and filing individual texts, that is, as an effective storage and retrieval system” (1990: 34). It is an aspect evident to librarians and information managers who treat classification as a complex analytical operation (which incidentally again suggests that genre is also a tool for interpretation). In order to be classified, a text must first be analysed with a view to identifying the features that are responsible for its specificity, and consequently for its generic setup. If it does not quite fit with any already existing category, two options are available: the category that comes closest can be modified so as to account for the outlying work, or a new category can be postulated that modifies or fills a gap in the existing classification system. Once the adjusted or new category is accepted by a community of users, it facilitates the retrieval of specific data involved in a given class of texts. It is worth mentioning that since 2007 the Library of Congress has been developing a system of genre/form headings motivated precisely by the important analytical potential of this type of metadata, especially with regard to computerised data mining and user interfaces (Young 2009). As Janis Young, a senior cataloging specialist at the Library of Congress, explains, subject headings tend to conflate the distinction between “what the item is about,” and how its content is expressed. In other words, a book about poems is not the same as a book of poems, but both types of publication would be catalogued under the same subject heading. Hence, genre seems to be a handy category which would let cataloguers and database users distinguish between such publications, that is between their content and form, and thus enable more efficient searches (Young 2009). So again it becomes evident that generic classification does not only serve to pigeonhole for pigeonholing's sake, but that it is helpful for a nuanced analysis of the complex of information encoded in a text.