If you had asked me before starting this class what a bibliography was, I would’ve said it’s a research trace of a project, but it doesn’t add any value to the project. It’s just there to insure we did thorough research, and our work is truly ours. But now I see what fully encapsulates that research trace. The Bibliographical Society of America state that “as a field of inquiry, bibliography examines the artifactual value of texts – including books, manuscripts, and digital texts – and how they reflect the people and cultures that created, acquired, and exchanged them.” By making a bibliography, you are making an imprint of your actions caused by thinking impacted by social and cultural systems. What search engine you use could come up with different results first and that engine put onto your computer could indicate what model and make you have, which you chose from the impact of cultural and economic influence. Our own bibliography tells a story of how we made the choices and thoughts from outside influences that got us to our research conclusion.

I did not consider before this class that physical objects or anything but a project or paper for school could have a bibliography. It is fascinating to me how much information about the world books hold. A book tells us about accessibility, culture, value, place, and time. A books bibliography and books as an object, is a living, breathing, history about humankind. W.W. Greg states in “Bibliography – A Retrospect” (1945), “For in the ultimate resort the object of bibliographical study is, I believe, to reconstruct for each particular book the history of its life, to make it reveal in its most intimate detail the story of its birth and adventures as the material vehicle of the living word. As an extension of this follows the investigation of the methods of production in general and of the conditions of survival.” (27) The history of a book and creating a bibliography for it crafts the intimate life and history of that book. Through bibliographers piecing together parts whether it be what material it’s bound in, where is it regionally from, is the making of it a cultural or period specific practice, are putting back a piece of history for us to be able to understand the past and people. A book is an imprint made by putting parts of different lives together and then is untangled and translated by bibliographers in the future for those lives and customs to continue on.