Relevance, Works and Context Engineering

Relevance is regarded as centrally important in documentation and information science but has resisted satisfactory definition. The literature presents vague, subjective descriptions and/or operational definitions based on untenable theoretical assumptions. The “work” is a similarly central and poorly defined concept in bibliographic theory and cataloguing. This short essay summarizes previous scholarship that reformulates concepts of relevance in information science as functions of use and works in bibliographic theory as useful sets of objects. Conceptual utility in both cataloging theory and information science is sought by developing descriptive models that attend to the positionality and temporality of “works” and “relevance” as they have been reformulated by de Fremery and Buckland (2023, 2024). Importantly, the descriptive models suggests the importance of context in formulations of relevance as a function of use and works as useful sets of objects. It concludes by suggesting that bibliographies, library catalogs, search engines and retrieval systems can be considered context engineering systems, thereby productively reorienting the discourse about these documentary technologies to suggest the important role these systems play in formulating contexts in addition to existing in or describing contexts.Relevance is regarded as centrally important in documentation and information science but has resisted satisfactory definition. The literature presents vague, subjective descriptions and/or operational definitions based on untenable theoretical assumptions. The “work” is a similarly central and poorly defined concept in bibliographic theory and cataloguing. This short essay summarizes previous scholarship that reformulates concepts of relevance in information science as functions of use and works in bibliographic theory as useful sets of objects. Conceptual utility in both cataloging theory and information science is sought by developing descriptive models that attend to the positionality and temporality of “works” and “relevance” as they have been reformulated by de Fremery and Buckland (2023, 2024). Importantly, the descriptive models suggests the importance of context in formulations of relevance as a function of use and works as useful sets of objects. It concludes by suggesting that bibliographies, library catalogs, search engines and retrieval systems can be considered context engineering systems, thereby productively reorienting the discourse about these documentary technologies to suggest the important role these systems play in formulating contexts in addition to existing in or describing contexts.