Descriptive Bibliography

Fredson Bowers described and formulated a standardized practice of descriptive bibliography in his Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949). Scholars to this day treat Bowers' scholarly guide as authoritative. In this classic text, Bowers describes the basic function of bibliography as, "[providing] sufficient data so that a reader may identify the book described, understand the printing, and recognize the precise contents" (124).
Descriptive Bibliographies as Scholarly Product

Descriptive bibliographies as a scholarly product usually include information on the following aspect of a given book as a material object:

Format and Collation/Pagination Statement - a conventional, symbolic formula that describes the book block in terms of sheets, folds, quires, signatures, and pages

According to Bowers (193), the format of a book is usually abbreviated in the collation formula:

Broadsheet: I° or b.s. or bs. Folio: 2° or fol. Quarto: 4° or 4to or Q° or Q Octavo: 8° or 8vo Duodecimo: 12° or 12mo Sexto-decimo: 16° or 16mo Tricesimo-secundo: 32° or 32mo Sexagesimo-quarto: 64° or 64mo

The collation, which follows the format, is the statement of the order and size of the gatherings.

For example, a quarto that consists of the signed gatherings:

2 leaves signed A, 4 leaves signed B, 4 leaves signed C, and 2 leaves signed D

would be represented in the collation formula:

4°: A2B-C4D2

Binding - a description of the binding techniques (generally for books printed after 1800) Title Page Transcription - a transcription of the title page, including rule lines and ornaments Contents - a listing of the contents (by section) in the book Paper - a description of the physical properties of the paper, including production process, an account of chain-line measurements, and a description of watermarks (if present) Illustrations - a description of the illustrations found in the book, including printing process (e.g. woodblock, intaglio, etc.), measurements, and locations in the text Presswork - miscellaneous details gleaned from the text about its production Copies Examined - an enumeration of the copies examined, including those copies' location (i.e. belonging to which library or collector)

Analytical bibliography

This branch of the bibliographic discipline examines the material features of a textual artifact – such as type, ink, paper, imposition, format, impressions and states of a book – to essentially recreate the conditions of its production. Analytical bibliography often uses collateral evidence – such as general printing practices, trends in format, responses and non-responses to design, etc. – to scrutinize the historical conventions and influences underlying the physical appearance of a text. The bibliographer utilizes knowledge gained from the investigation of physical evidence in the form of a descriptive bibliography or textual bibliography.[9] Descriptive bibliography is the close examination and cataloging of a text as a physical object, recording its size, format, binding, and so on, while textual bibliography (or textual criticism) identifies variations – and the aetiology of variations – in a text with a view to determining "the establishment of the most correct form of [a] text (Bowers 498[1]).
Non-book material

Systematic lists of media other than books can be referred to with terms formed analogously to bibliography:

Discography – recorded music Filmography – films Webography (or webliography) – websites (the first use of the word "webliography" recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from June 1995)

Arachniography is a term coined by NASA research historian Andrew J. Butrica, which means a reference list of URLs about a particular subject. It is equivalent to a bibliography in a book. The name derives from arachne in reference to a spider and its web.[10]

[11]
Bibliography as a field of study

Bibliography is a specialized aspect of library science (or library and information science, LIS) and documentation science. The founder of documentation, Paul Otlet wrote about "the science of bibliography".[12][13] However, there have recently been voices claiming that "the bibliographical paradigm" is obsolete, and it is not today common in LIS. A defense of the bibliographical paradigm was provided by Hjørland (2007).[14] The quantitative study of bibliographies is known as bibliometrics, which is today an influential subfield in LIS. [15] [16]
See also

Bibliographic database Bibliographic index Citation Citation creator History of the book Ibid. / Op cit Indexing and abstracting service List of bibliographies (in Wikipedia) Metabibliography (bibliography of bibliographies) Reference table Legal bibliography