Bibliographic Metaparatexts and the Author Function of Librarians

ABSTRACT: Through subject heading analysis of a popular culture franchise’s bibliographic records across its transmedia, library catalogers as well as metadata librarians are shown as authors of impactful metaparatext. In terms of reception studies, metaparatext intervenes in readers’ receptions of sought narratives. In this study, the Hellraiser franchise is chosen for rich subject analysis, providing one narrative mediated in books, VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, and graphic novels temporally across decades and assigned descriptive metadata, such as subject headings, by librarians. The subject analysis produces an accumulated narrative of metaparatext authored by cataloging and metadata librarians that attempts to describe the “aboutness” of the narrative text from the satellite positionality of bibliographic records—outside of the text, a paratext of aboutness. When it is acknowledged that librarians’ bibliographic services fulfill a paratextual author function in the process of text-to-reader reception, value is added to the field of bibliographic librarianship, and its impact on theories of reception and narratology is established. In this study, the analysis of Hellraiser ’s accumulated narrative produces a three-narrative structure, that of the patron’s narrative, the cataloger’s narrative, and the popularity and audience narrative. These three narratives mirror the messaging and reception process exhibited in the rhetorical triangle, producing the context for reader, author, and historicity or “the where” of reception. In situating bibliographic metadata as impactful metaparatext that intervenes in a reader’s reception of a narrative, this paper extends the research of library experts Jack Andersen, Rachel Sagner Buurma, Jon Shaw, and Roswitha Skare in its inclusion of reception studies and subject analysis lens of accumulated narrativity.