DESCRIPTION

Enumerative bibliographies are based around some unifying principle, which may be subject or topic, date or period, creator identity, or some other selected characteristic. The enumerative bibliography is one of five categories of bibliography defined by Bowers (1952), including analytical, historical, descriptive, critical and enumerative, with enumerative regarded as the 'poor stepsister' of the others, which 'refers to the compilation of those ordered and, hopefully, comprehensive lists of texts' around a particular defining subject or collection of characteristics (Pionke, 2013). Krummel (1988) described a chosen scope as 'defined qualitatively or ideologically', with the 'the dividing line between the two [...] always necessarily ambiguous'.

Digital bibliography can blur the divisions between enumerative, descriptive, and analytical classifications (Sharren et al. 2021). While enumerative bibliography is usually described and defined by its limitations, digital capabilities provide flexibility via enhanced storage capacities and interactivity, and 'it becomes possible [...] to reimagine bibliography as a research practice that can amalgamate and even extend elements of the three branches of bibliographical description' (Sharren et al., 2021, 892). These flexibilities allow for more detail to be included than the material restrictions of print may allow, relating to the 'objects (titles) and entities (persons and firms), and the connections between them', as well as simply a higher number of records, producing 'an enlarged temporal, generic and/or regional scope' (Sharren et al., 2021, 897).

An open, digital enumerative bibliography is located online, usually in the form of a type of database, and is accessible by anyone with an internet connection. As a practice within the context of this catalogue, it sits on the blurry edge between digital humanities, information sciences, historiography, and various cultural and social histories, positioned within the larger field of bibliography, which itself, according to Pionke, awkwardly straddles 'English, library science, book arts, and history of the book programs' (Pionke, 2013, 6). While not a solely dedicated arts and humanities practice, enumerative bibliography's importance is firmly seated within arts and humanities disciplinary and epistemological contexts and the interdisciplinary opportunities between them.

Coker and Ozment (2019), for example, pursued the digital enumerative bibliography format for their Women in Book History Bibliography project (WBHB) using linked open data in order to 'create a dynamic and adaptive version' of what is normally a static list. By using a relational database, the authors were able to incorporate more information than is typically included in an enumerative bibliography, such as publication format. Integrating more and different data alongside the basic purpose of providing 'sources for further reading', the digital enumerative bibliography 'facilitates new kinds of research' by way of data extraction choices 'as they meet changing criteria based on users' interests' (Coker and Ozment, 2019, 9). Additionally, the flexibility of data queries means 'data visualization and mapping can capture lost histories and combat the forces of erasure that leave important histories behind,' as well as 'uncover important trends about how scholarship on marginal figures slips in and out of our value systems' (ibid.).

An emerging importance of digital enumerative bibliography is further understanding of how certain populations within society have become marginalised in the worlds of writing, publishing, bookmaking, and print, and remained so due to embedded biases. As Hjørland reminds us, 'a subject bibliography is a kind of map of a subject domain, and as is the case with other maps, it cannot be a neutral mapping' (Hjørland, 2024, 706). Coker and Ozment determined that a further benefit analysis their database permits is the opportunity to identify how certain subjects became marginalised.

Erickson (2022) considers the 'inherent biases' in the way bibliography has been created 'in terms of the regions, chronologies, and cultures that were chosen at the expense of those that were simply left out of the picture' (Erickson, 2022, 16). In Erickson's discussion surrounding intersections of bibliography and Black Print Cultural Studies, he recognises the 'epistemological bias toward empiricism and causality' still prevalent at the time he entered field of bibliography, which contributed to 'the field's ability to acknowledge the patriarchal and Eurocentric exclusivity of its paradigmatic subjectivities' (Erickson, 2022, 23). Ozment observes similarly that, '[a]t some point, the 'truth' that '"the little world of the book" has been a male domain' (Howsam, 1998, 1) became such through repetition, rather than through documentary evidence, and despite the discursive histories feminist scholars have written to the contrary' (Ozment, 2025, 41).

Historically, enumerative bibliographies have contributed to the formation of disciplines, including Dorothy B. Porter's work in the mid 1940s, using bibliography to lay a foundation for African-American literary studies (Coker and Ozment, 2019). Digital enumerative bibliography has the potential to address other subjects that have been considered marginal or 'between categories', and 'fill gaps and silences' in ways that parallel techniques in the archives to 'reconstruct lost voices' (ibid.). Enzer (2022) considers the efforts of Barbara Grier in forging a document of lesbian identity via enumerative bibliography as an 'unauthorised' scholar of LGBTQ+ studies between 1957 and 1991. Though this example is prior to the existence of digital functionality, and therefore suffered from the limitations of print discussed elsewhere, Grier's work in enumerative bibliography evidenced lesbianism as 'an ordinary element of human experience countering other prevailing ideas' and served as a 'tool to inscribe lesbian identity' (Enzer, 2022, 401).

As Craig (2023, 1) reminds us, exhaustive enumerative bibliographies are often used to inform the reference lists of individuals, so the choices made within them 'can reverberate through an entire academic field'. Nishiwaka recognises that the 'surfacing and recovery' of marginalised contributors is 'just one facet of what it takes to change [...] institutional resistance to non-heteronormative ways of being' (Nishikawa, Ozment & Fernández, 2024). Yet Sharren, Ozment and Levy (2021) acknowledge that enumerative bibliography 'opens up the possibility of a far more comprehensive reconstruction of cultural history' (891).

The practice of open, digital enumerative bibliography, like many under-recognised open research practices, is threatened by precarity amongst academics and is not directly supported in the same ways as traditional outputs. Coker and Ozment had to resort to selling themed merchandise to support WBHB beyond the initial creation of the site. Additionally, while this practice is heavily linked to many humanities disciplines, the practice is not widely included in pedagogy. Ives (2006, 118) warns that bibliography had faded from English literature pedagogy at the detriment of students in the discipline, and that reintroduction of the skills and knowledge would be necessary to 'equip our students for the "digital future"'. Pionke (2013) advocates for 'a pedagogy that includes an at least partially web-based enumerative bibliographical component' as this could provide student-citizens the necessary '"critical capacities, modes of literacies, knowledge, and skills that enable them to both read the world critically and participate in governing it"' (Giroux & Giroux, 2004, p. 7, cited in Pionke 2013).

References

Coker, C. and Ozment, K. (2019) 'Building the Women in Book History Bibliography, or Digital Enumerative Bibliography as Preservation of Feminist Labor.' https://www.proquest.com/docview/2555196999?pq-origsite=primo&searchKeywords=%22digital%20enumerative%20bibliography%22&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals [accessed 1 October 2025]

Craig, H., Estill, L. and May, K.L. (2023) 'A Rationale of Trans-inclusive Bibliography', Textual Cultures, 16(2), 1–28

Enszer, J.R. (2022) 'Barbara Grier's Enumerative Bibliographies: Iterating Communal Lesbian Identities', Criticism, 64(3), 397–412

Erickson, J.R. (2022) 'Discursive Perpendicularity: Intersections of Black Print Culture Studies and Bibliography', RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 23(1), 13. https://doi.org/10.5860/rbm.23.1.13

Hjørland, B. (2024) 'Bibliography (Field of Study)', Knowledge Organization, 51(8), 700–711. https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2024-8-700

Ives, M. (2006) 'Integrating "Bibliography" with "Literary Research": A Comprehensive Approach', in Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism and Book History. Routledge

Krummel, D.W. (1988) 'The Dialectics of Enumerative Bibliography: Observations on the Historical Study of the Practices of Citation and Compilation', The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, 58(3), 238–257

Nishikawa, K., Ozment, K. and Fernández, D. (2024) 'Towards Intersectional Queer Bibliography: Three Perspectives from a Roundtable Discussion', The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 118(2), 271–282. https://doi.org/10.1086/730473

Ozment, K. (2025) 'Digital Bibliography in the Age of Linked Data', Journal of Early Modern Studies, 14, 33–45. https://doi.org/10.36253/jems-2279-7149-16517

Pionke, A.D. (2013) 'A Pedagogical Experiment in Crowdsourcing and Enumerative Bibliography', Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 24(1). https://celt.miamioh.edu/index.php/JECT/article/view/508 [accessed: 7 November 2025]

Sharren, K., Ozment, K. and Levy, M. (2021) 'Gendering Digital Bibliography with the Women's Print History Project', Eighteenth-Century Studies, 54(4), 887–908.