If essentialism is defined as "the idea that everything is defined by clear and knowledgable traits that make it what it into what it is." (Weinberger, p 116), then an essentialist librarian would be one who thinks in black and white; "a place for everything, and everything in its place" type of person. They would catalogue based on measurable facts - object size, print font, number of pages, author, title, etc. No "personality" category for them. This would be, to me, a librarian who followed the traditional hierarchical classification system, such as the DDC or LCSH.
Accidentalism, on the other hand, is defined by Weinberger as a person who "doesn't even have confidence that there is an inarguable way to divide the world into types of things." (p 117) An accidentalist librarian would think more in terms of the data's relationships to other data; more like the RDA model that is being implemented. This kind of librarian would see information, and its categorization, more in shades of gray.
I believe that as Weinberger points out, as knowledge becomes more and more accessible and communicable, it becomes more difficult to definitely classify it. There is no "perfect" classification scheme for anything, because people see things differently. The same fact - ie a day of the week - can be interpreted many ways by different individuals. Stephen Covey talks about this when he discusses the "lens" through which we see life in his books; as Weinberger points out, Thomas Jefferson said "creation is of individuals" (p 117), meaning that individuals create their own classes of data based on their own experiences. So, as sites that allow users to classify information in their own way (for example, by tagging), the dividing line between categories becomes blurrier and blurrier, because we are experiencing everyone's "lens", and not just our own.
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