Verification
"Verification" comes from Latin "verus" (true) and "facere" (to make), to verify means to make true. WordNet defines the noun verification as follows:
"S: (n) confirmation, verification, check, substantiation (additional proof that something that was believed (some fact or hypothesis or theory) is correct) "fossils provided further confirmation of the evolutionary theory"
S: (n) verification ((law) an affidavit attached to a statement confirming the truth of that statement) "
We may add a third meaning:
bibliographical verification is the identification of trustworthy basic bibliographic data of a document and a verification of the existence of a document about which certain data have been given.
Verification is a necessary process because bibliographical data are often wrong or too incomplete to obtain the document. References to documents which do not exist are termed "bibliographical ghosts". (see Dubin, 2004, for an example).
In large research libraries, for example, verification of users' request for books are verified, often by a special task group. Such verification is based on national bibliographies, catalogs from big libraries such as Library of Congress and many other kinds of bibliographical tools. Bruhns (1996) is a textbook in bibliographical verification used at the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Denmark.
Verification is also a process in research activities, including research in Library and Information Science (LIS): The verification of one's own or others' research results (cf., Schneider, 2004; Henige, 2006).
Literature:
Bruhns, S. (1996). Bibliografisk verifikation. 2nd. ed. København: Danmarks Biblioteksskole.
Dubin (2004). The Most Influential Paper Gerard Salton Never Wrote. Library Trends, 52(4), 748–764
Henige, D. (2006). Discouraging verification: Citation practices across the disciplines. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 37(2), 99-118.
Schneider, J. (2004). Verification of bibliometric methods' applicability for thesaurus construction. PhD dissertation. Aalborg. Department of Information Studies, Royal School of Library and Information Science. [pdf]
WordNet. http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
Birger Hjørland
Last edited: 08-03-2006