The Words of the Library, in Memory of Pouri Soltani

Pourandokht Soltani, known to everyone as Pouri, was born in 1931 and died in Tehran on November 7, 2015. Iranians call her the mother of modern librarianship in Iran, and the title is earned. She graduated in Persian literature from Tehran University in 1952 and married the poet and journalist Morteza Keyvan in 1954; three months later he was arrested and executed, and she spent the rest of her life alone with his memory. She turned to library work, trained in the new science of librarianship, helped found the Iranian Documentation Center in 1968, and over fifty years of continuous work shaped the technical foundations of the National Library of Iran. Among the tools she left behind are the Persian Subject Headings, the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, and the reference works that every Iranian librarian still trains on. The Iranian Library and Information Science Association gave her its Science Promotion Prize.

One part of that legacy is less visible: the words themselves. Soltani was a member of the library and information science terminology group at the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, the body that coins and approves Persian equivalents for foreign technical terms. The Academy's Cheshm-o-Cheragh channel recently marked her birthday by republishing a handful of the approved terms in her field. We reproduce them here as the Academy published them, with its definitions.

gozarman = annotation. A short note, usually placed beneath a work, describing its content, its structure, or both.
ketab-negari = bibliography (1). The process of describing books and other sources with particular attention to their authorship, publication, and physical structure.
ketab-negasht = bibliography (2). A list of bibliographic information about books and other sources, arranged in a particular order.
fehrestgan = union catalogue, union list. A shared catalogue of all or part of the collections of several libraries, giving the location of each item.
jaynameh = gazetteer. A book containing a list of place names with descriptive, geographic, historical, and statistical information.
taranevisi = transcription (the act). Recording speech in written form.
taranevesht = transcription (the product). The written form of recorded speech.
barchin = excerpt. A section, passage, or piece taken from a longer work such as a book, film, piece of music, or document, without any alteration.
ettela'at-e sakhtmand = structured information. Analyzed information whose parts and sections themselves contain smaller parts and sections.

Members of the Academy's library and information science terminology group over the years have included the late Pourandokht Soltani Shirazi, Ebrahim Afshar, Fariba Afkari, Nahid Bani-Eghbal, Shirin Taavoni, the late Abbas Horri, Firouzan Zahadi, the late Kamran Fani, Nourollah Moradi, and Narges Neshat.

Why does this matter to us? Because Owrang keeps a library. Ganjineh, our online catalog, describes each work with an annotation, lists its editions and translations, and points the reader to where a copy is held. Those are exactly the things these words name: gozarman, ketab-negasht, fehrestgan. Ganjineh works to use the Academy's approved terms on its Persian pages. It is a small way of saying that a library built by Iranians abroad still speaks the language of the woman who taught Iran how to catalog its books.

Source: Cheshm-o-Cheragh, the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (@cheshmocheragh)

Translation assisted by AI

@cheshmocheragh