The Indexical Bibliography: A historic-bibliographic paradigm for Knowledge Organization

The article suggests that the historic paradigm could be considered as source of inspiration and complement to other foundational paradigms for Knowledge Organization. The new paradigm refers to Indexical Bibliography, a cataloging and indexical dimension of Bibliography as a discipline, which boasts a tradition of at least four centuries and in its diachronic evolution provides several models of tools to organize the knowledge. Through the examination of the secular history of the Indexical Bibliography offered by the eleven volumes of the work by Alfredo Serrai, Storia della Bibliografia, a few examples are presented: Conrad Gesner and the use of loci communes as tools of semantic indexing, Francois Grudé, Georg Draud, and Johann Michael Francke, who provides an example of deep cataloging.