This article presents bibliography as a field of study. It consists of several traditions, of which enumerative (or “systematic”) bibliography is considered most important in relation to information science, but at the same time tends to be rejected as a scientific or scholarly field by other bibliographical traditions. It is about making, using and evaluating bibliographies, which list all kinds of publications. Analytic, descriptive and textual bibliography are other subfields, which are important for establishing the identity of a given document (is the Hamlet that scholar A is reading the same Hamlet that scholar B is reading?) and for providing critical editions of important works. Historical bibliography (with the sociology of text and book history) is yet another subfield, a very broad one that lacks coherence, but which provides important perspectives on the functions of different kinds of publications. In the UNISIST model, bibliographies are considered secondary kinds of publications (based on primary literature and a prerequisite for tertiary literature). From the Library of Alexandria (c. 285- BC) to Google (and Google Scholar) it has been a utopian dream to establish universal bibliographical control, to make all publications relevant for those needing any special set of them. To optimize visibility and retrievability of documents is an important task for information science, related to the goal of bibliographical control, and to literature- and information searching in bibliographic and full-text databases. A theoretical view on (enumerative) bibliography was suggested by Margaret Egan and Jesse Shera in 1952, in which a new field called “social epistemology” was seen as a “parent” discipline for the study of bibliography. This view is critically examined in this article, and it is suggested that Shera’s 1951 characterization of social epistemology represents a better foundation for bibliography.