Intellectual Foundations of Modern Librarianship
Topic #6: Every field of study defines for itself its intellectual content, its theory and practice, and its value to society. If a discipline is to remain viable, it must continually redefine itself in response to social and technological change. Librarianship is no exception. Discuss the intellectual foundations of librarianship and trace its evolution as a field of study since 1870. Be sure to explore the discipline's lineage of names: professorship of books, library economy, library science, and library and information science. Is "cybrarian" or "information management" the next incarnation?Introduction
The history of library and information science has been marked by varying conceptions of its nature, manifesting themselves in varying ideas about library education and research that have been in competition with one another. These competing ideas have been related to differences in the perceived needs of the profession at different times among different parties. (I will refer to librarianship as a profession despite the uncertainty about whether it is one, not to mention the existing unclarity about the boundaries of the concept of librarianship within the discipline. These issues will be dealt with as they arise.) While we often think of our own time as a time of rapid change within the discipline, I have found in my reading that it has always been a time of rapid change within the discipline, starting from the information explosion of the late nineteenth century. A theme presents itself from the literature: "the more things change, the more they stay the same." Similar conflicts and uncertainties have been constant throughout the modern library era. There has been a continuing interest in developing a research-based theoretical foundation, through which to systematically improve practice and ensure librarianship's professional status. Competing with this interest has been the necessity of training librarians in the skills sufficient for the practice of librarianship. While these skills have changed, they are often still related to somewhat routine and clerical tasks that do not depend on any theoretical knowledge.The desire to develop librarianship consciously through a body of theoretical knowledge generated by research into its fundamental questions has never been fulfilled, but remains a vague promise (with occasional helpful results). Practical training has been the overriding concern in library education. Contrastingly, during the same period, the promises and necessities presented by technological change and the expansion of publishing have been an irresistible force throughout the history of modern librarianship. The incorporation of technology into the practice and intellectual underpinnings of librarianship has been a defining feature of the development of the field. The constants here have been the tension between the practical and the theoretical, the need to respond to an exponentially growing body of information, and a transition to an industrialized and post-industrialized, utilitarian, machine-based orientation to the cultural record, as opposed to a humanistic, meaning-based one. A related trend has been a trend of increasing neutrality toward content, that is, neutrality toward ideas. This has been the result of a both a focus on increasingly efficient processes and the modern library's ideology of intellectual freedom, which stems from the modern library's roots in a belief in democracy. An examination of the chronological development of library and information science, primarily in the United States, will show these constants and trends and explain them further.
1870 - Emerson's idea of a "Professorship of Books"
In 1870, Ralph Waldo Emerson published an essay, "Books," in which he spoke of the need for a "professorship of books" as a way of handling the unprecedented growth of publishing. (Emerson 1870) Modern librarianship, and librarianship as a profession, did not exist yet, although the need for it had begun, due to the information explosion of the industrial age and the new interest in the democratization and mass education of society. (McCrimmon 1994) What Emerson felt was most needed was a scholar of books, who would be able to connect readers with the literature that they needed by using his knowledge of the contents of the books in his library. One wonders, what is the difference between this professor of books and the librarians working at the time? If a professor of books could be presumed to record some indication of the contents of the books in this library and organize these records to facilitate access, then his work could be considered to include bibliography, which Jesse Shera says was synonymous with librarianship for hundreds of years. (Shera 1972) A librarian of Emerson's time already kept the books in a library organized so that he could find them, and kept bibliographic records, if non-standardized, that could be used as finding tools. But Emerson also wanted in a professor of books someone who could be relied upon to recommend good reading to the library user, or to name those "rare books" that are truly valuable. (Emerson 1870) It may be that then, as now, the librarian was underappreciated and unrecognized, or it may be that the profession of librarianship could stand to be developed into something that it was not. Emerson was calling for a university education for librarianship, which would have the effect of preparing librarians for service to readers, as well as producing them in greater numbers, which would be needed. The number of libraries in the United States was already increasing sharply. (Jackson 1974) By 1870, social forces were already changing the job of the librarian. The increase in information entering libraries and the increase in their use created a new breed, who was less a scholar and more of a "man skilled in the business of running a library." (Shera 1972) Although this wasn't exactly what Emerson wanted in a librarian, it is what librarians would increasingly be, through social demand as well as the influence of the educational process. The need for someone trained to sift through the myriad publications entering libraries to provide users with relevant reading would continue.
Late 19th and early 20th Centuries
The last decades of the 19th century were a time of explosive development in American libraries. The year 1876 seems especially to have been crowded with major developments. In that year, the U.S. Department of Education published Public libraries in the US: their history, condition and management, providing the first official survey of American libraries and first reader in librarianship for the modern era. (Rubin 1998) The American Library Association was formed, holding its first meeting in Philadelphia. Melvil Dewey was there and began to make his influence felt, declaring that librarianship was already profession, despite its not being considered one before that. (McCrimmon 1994) (This is something of a surprise, since Dewey's efforts might not ultimately have advanced the professional status of librarianship, although the existence of a professional association did.) Dewey also published the Classification and subject index for cataloging and arranging books in a library in that year, as did Cutter his Rules for a dictionary catalog, demonstrating the growing energy in the project of standardizing and systematizing methods of bibliographic control for maximum efficiency. (Smith 1968) The year 1876 also saw the beginning of the popular journal American Libraries. Clearly, the modern library movement was under way.In terms of library education, the major development of this overall period was the opening of Dewey's "School of Library Economy" at Columbia University. (Smith 1968) In the field of education in general, the classical English and apprenticeship models had begun to be superseded in America by the model of technical education, as the industrial revolution reshaped society. Andrew Carnegie's philanthropy and the growth of libraries in general created unprecedented demand for librarians. In originally proposing his idea for a library school to President Barnard at Columbia college, Dewey claimed an upcoming demand for 5,000 librarians as a direct result of Carnegie's library projects. (Houser and Schrader 1978) Dewey taught his students how to run a library; the meaning of library economy was simply library management, following the commonplace use of the word "economy" of the time. (Houser and Schrader 1978) Dewey's philosophy of library education was purely practical, and became the standard for library education in the early period. There was interest among dissenters in a more theoretical curriculum in the late 19th century, notably John Burgess and Ernest Richardson, but they were largely ignored by educators. (Ostler, Dahlin et al. 1995) It was the pattern in U.S. Higher Education at the time to become more utilitarian and vocational than in the past, as well as to serve more people. This and the proliferation of libraries and their service orientation led to a decline of the "scholar-librarian" known to Emerson and history. It also led to a decline in the more intellectual aspects of librarianship having to do with bibliographic control. (Shera 1972)
The work of librarians such as Dewey and Cutter towards the development of standards in cataloging and classification created a means by which the organization of a library could be done systematically. One result of standardized methods is that once a standard is accepted it doesn't have to be rethought, and the time of the librarian is saved for administrative tasks. At the same time, the practical orientation of American library schools created a vacuum in the area of bibliographic study. According to W. Boyd Rayward, in the early period of modern librarianship in America, it became clear that librarianship was leaving bibliographic work outside of its goals. (Rayward 1983) This seems to have been a result of the pressing need for "library economists" in the new library era, but also seems related to the technical education movement, which as we will see, ran counter to the development of a theoretical foundation for a library science, of which bibliography was a major part. Outside of the modern library movement, the same challenges that the social developments of the industrial revolution posed to librarianship were taken up by bibliographic scholars, most strongly in Europe. In 1892 they formed the British Bibliographic Society and in 1899 the less strong American Bibliographic Society. In 1895 in Belgium, Paul Otlet and his colleagues founded the International Institute of Bibliography, and began to approach traditional problems of bibliography in a new way, with the expanded concept of "documentation." The dream was of bibliographic control not only of books and literature, but of the whole range of information products that came flooding forth from the industrial revolution: journal articles, technical communications, industrial communications, government records of all kinds, photographs, postcards, newspapers, patents - the bulk of it not considered to belong in libraries at the time. Otlet wanted to expand the concept of the library so that it would be a place where a person could access any kind of information, based not on knowing what the document is, but on what it should contain. (Rayward 1983) This movement was not to have much influence on librarianship in America until it had developed practical tools which could be applied to existing library processes and systems. The elaborated modification of the Dewey's classification system which Paul Otlet and Henri LaFontain created, the Universal Decimal Classification, was considered too complicated for use in America's libraries, and has been used mainly in scholarly institutions in Europe.
The time period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was also characterized by a revolution in management methods. The "efficiency movement" in general was an underpinning of all Dewey's innovations, from his classification system and interest in standardizing library procedures to his simplified spelling. Justin Winsor expressed misgivings about Dewey's methods, fearing that they might remove the intellectual content from library work. (Rosenberg 1994) There is some irony in this, because Justin Winsor himself can be taken to represent the new century's revolution in library management. A born administrator, his original career was as a scholar and a rather pedantic literary figure in Boston. When he became head librarian of the Boston Public Library, he used a scientific management approach, making extensive use of statistics, to make the library run like a well-tuned steam locomotive. He may have qualified for the designation "scholar-librarian," but he was purely of a new breed, the "administrator-librarian," the prototype of the librarian that graduate schools would aim to produce some years later. (Cutler and Harris 1980)
The Williamson Report
According to Patricia Reeling, library education as we know it has its origins in the 1923 Williamson report, the study of library schools commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation. (Reeling 1993) The Carnegie Corporation was concerned about the effectiveness of service in the libraries it had been creating in small towns. In 1915 a Carnegie sponsored study of libraries by Alvin Saunders Johnson had revealed inadequacies in training among librarians, especially at Carnegie libraries, and especially with respect to intellectual preparedness for librarianship as Johnson understood it. (Houser and Schrader 1978) The report by Charles Williamson in 1921 (published in 1923) was commissioned with the intention of addressing the perceived problem. Williamson was chosen for the study by James Bertram, who was secretary of the Carnegie Corporation at the time. Their views on libraries were preestablished; a community's lack of interest in its library should be considered the responsibility of the librarians, and a sign of ineffective service. (Vann 1971) The reports reflected certain other views that Williamson held prior to the study, such as his belief in university-based graduate education as the only sound basis for professionalization. He was interested in creating a regulatory framework for librarianship, based on rigorous professional education, leading to the certification of librarians. (Houser and Schrader 1978)The most influential recommendation of the Williamson report was that education for librarianship should be at the graduate level. Specific recommendations to schools already receiving financial support from the Carnegie Corporation and other recommendations have also had an influence over time. Some examples of these are his advocacy of county library systems to bring better service to small communities, his advocacy of national standards for accreditation of library schools, the requirement of a college education for entrance into library school, and that library schools should be associated with universities and should endeavor to be as much a part of the intellectual life of the university as possible. The influence of the Williamson report is attributable to the resulting conditions the Carnegie Corporation placed on its contributions to library education. (Vann 1971) One other recommendation of Williamson was that the library school curriculum should be reshaped according to a scientific analysis of the needs of library work, including preparation for leadership, rather than being based on the immediate demands of employers. This attitude put Williamson and the Carnegie Corporation somewhat at odds with the American Library Association and its Board of Education for Librarianship, which was more attuned to the immediate needs of libraries according to the status quo.
The Graduate Library School of Chicago University
Also in 1923, the Chicago Library Club approached the Carnegie Corporation with an idea for a graduate library school. The school should be a regular unit of a university, with studies in the "cultural, literary, bibliographical, and sociological aspects of librarianship as a learned profession" like any other learned profession. The idea was for a graduate research institution that would do for librarianship what Johns Hopkins was doing for medicine - truly advancing the profession by generating useful research, a full body of theoretical knowledge as a foundation for the profession, that could be used in programs that trained practitioners. (Churchwell 1975) In 1926 the Carnegie Corporation granted $1 million to found the Graduate Library School, with the promise of more money to support it on an annual basis. It reflects an interesting development in the conception of library education - and the concept of library science that was being created with the GLS - that the first faculty were, for the most part, social scientists first and students of libraries second.One of these faculty members, Pierce Butler, wrote a book to explain the aims of this new "science." (It should be noted that at that time, a science was any body of knowledge attained rationally and methodically, and usually for definite ends; something much different from the pursuit of a body of theoretical, highly general knowledge, as we think of science today). In An Introduction to Library Science Butler defined librarianship as "transmission of the accumulated experience of society through the instrumentality of the book." (Butler 1933) In his examples of the types of problems that would be studied at the new school he consistently addresses questions about library users' information needs, suggesting sociological, psychological, and historical investigations into readers and reading. The results of such research would not be tools to help librarians achieve their goals, but perspectives for setting those goals and directing libraries to their most useful ends. Butler and the other faculty of the GLS saw such research as a necessary step toward truly professionalizing librarianship. Librarianship professionalized would be, in Butler's words, "administration of the public trust (rather than) the correct supervision of a routine procedure." (Butler 1933)
The original faculty of the GLS did work along these lines for one year, under outright protestations of the American Library Association, which wanted only practitioners who would be able to run a library, and against the hostility of most librarians, who reacted to it with an anti-intellectual rejection of research in general. Librarians faced practical problems in the rapid expansion of the cultural record, and these were the problems that they wanted addressed. The original dean of the GLS, George Works, resigned at the end of his first year, and was followed by a succession of temporary deans who did not provide leadership, but only kept the school functioning (a little fundamental research included) in the midst of this conflict. Then, Louis Round Wilson, an insider of the ALA's Bureau of Education for Librarianship, became dean, and brought the GLS into the fold of the other graduate library schools which were by then operating. Under his leadership, the GLS became another library school geared toward training for the administration of libraries, offering many courses relating to various aspects of library management. After eight years as dean, he restated the original goal of a decade of research towards a theory of library science; but that ten years had still yet to commence. He tacitly acknowledged that there had been no progress toward that end, and his own publications during his entire tenure as dean included no research. This put him at odds, to a degree, with University administration, which wanted "researchers who knew something about libraries, rather than Wilson's librarians who knew something about libraries but nothing about research." (Houser and Schrader 1978)
The conception of a library school that would do for librarianship what Johns Hopkins had done for medicine had been put aside. "Wilson and the Board viewed library science as library economy expanded to include library management and administration." (Houser and Schrader 1978) The change did not go without criticism, and the most prominent criticism was associated with the Carnegie Corporation. It commissioned a report by Ralph Munn on Conditions and Trends in Education for Librarians, published in 1936 and accompanied by memoranda written by other figures, including Frederick Keppel, the author of the Carnegie Corporation's Ten Year Program in Library Service, which originally established funding for library education. The Carnegie Corporation also imported a Scandinavian scholar, Wilhelm Munthe, to evaluate the situation, and his appraisal was "devastating." (Houser and Schrader 1978) The GLS at Chicago was no longer dependent on the Carnegie Corporation for support at this point, so the criticisms went largely unheeded, although individual researchers have continued to take an interest in fundamental questions about the library as a social system, and Library Quarterly, originally founded at the GLS, has continued to publish literature that tends in this direction.
Mid-Century Developments
During WWII and after, the value of intellectual freedom became central to American librarianship. The profession began to be seen by its practitioners as a way of providing full freedom of choice for readers, and the library an institution that provided the necessary conditions of democracy through this freedom of choice in reading. Librarians were in full retreat from their classical role as protectors of culture and promoters of the finest literature. A. Broadfield gave expression to this in his writings about library philosophy, and it was repeatedly confirmed by the American Library Association's official statements and support services in defense of intellectual freedom.(McCrimmon 1994; Robbins 1996) The doctrine of intellectual freedom which came to the fore at this time can be seen as having two basic components, which are in principle separate. The first is the idea that the library should make all types of materials available to all patrons, regardless of content. This is clearly an extension and a fulfillment of the democratic spirit that was the origin of the modern library movement. The second component is that the librarian should remain neutral about library materials and merely facilitate the patrons in finding the information they seek, especially in reference service. I believe that this doctrine is, in some of its potential applications, more closely related to the quest for efficiency and a lack of confidence in the intellectual role of the librarian in society than in a faith in intellectual freedom out of respect for democratic values. The sacrifice of research and teaching about the needs of readers for research and teaching about library management and technical advancement would seem to support this view.In the post-war and cold war era, however, the most noticeable developments in the library profession were technological developments and responses to the changing information needs of society. During World War two, the Library of Congress (LC) had a severe backlog in cataloging of the technical documents that were needed for the war effort. The traditional method of verifying the names of the corporate bodies responsible for the research was too slow. Mortimer Taube, who was made chief of LC's Science and Technology Project to solve this problem, decided to completely forego verification of the names of the corporate bodies producing them. For those types of materials this worked well. In 1950, after Taube's resignation from LC, he published what eventually became the COSATI standard - the code for the cataloging of technical information published by the Committee on Scientific and Technical Information. This standard works without the verification of any main entry, and so is called a "main entry free environment." It works efficiently for these more or less standardized forms of documents. The Library of Congress was opposed to Taube's view, as applied to cataloging in general, and in 1951 Seymour Lubetsky, writing in Library Quarterly, defended the necessity of establishing the form of a name by a source other than the object being cataloged. LC's view calls for a process that is musty and library-like, and results in more accurate cataloging, while Taube's view and the COSATI standard are more efficient and well-suited to scientific and technical information. (Carpenter 1994)
In related developments, in 1937 Watson Davis created American Documentation Institute, choosing the name out of enthusiasm for Otlet's work. In 1950 they became a force with publication of American Documentation. (Rayward 1983) In 1945 ASLIB - the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux founded the Journal of Documentation. (Hayes 1994) The post-war economy was accelerating, and society was experiencing another information explosion, as the production of information, along with the rest of the economy, moved into a higher gear. In 1948, Samuel Bradford published a text that became a classic, Documentation. In it he said he considered documentation just one aspect of the larger art of librarianship. The type of material (by then, in documentation, technical documents) defined the distinction, but the greater difference was in documentation's emphasis on speedy and efficient information flow. (Vakkari 1994) This new development had not begun to change librarianship, but some could see that it would. Also in 1948, at the conference on education for librarianship at the GLS in Chicago, Clarence Faust warned against the dangers of overemphasizing technology. (Shera 1983) The postwar decades saw great changes: an explosion of literature in science and the technologies, the development of techniques for processing and transmitting information by machine, and government research into information technology. Documentalists took up these developments and, still partially self-identified by their roots in librarianship, began to place library-related problems within the context of scientific communication. (Rayward 1983)
Some of the background to this work was in Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver's experiments in signal transmission at Bell Labs in the late 1940's, which led to "information theory." Their work was part of the beginning of information technology as we know it. We call it information technology because they chose to use the word "information" to describe the electronic signals they were studying, which could be used to transmit data. These experiments were simultaneous to a change in documentation studies. Documentalists had been losing interest in microphotography as these new computer technologies became available. They began to adopt the term "information," along with Shannon and Weaver's use of it to denote electronic signals, ultimately renaming the American Documentation Institute the American Society for Information Science. Before this time period, documentalists were a different breed of librarians; during it, Shera says, "the line of demarcation between documentalists and librarians was. . . beginning to be drawn." Information scientists were increasingly involved in mathematics and computers. (Shera 1983)
In 1963, Don Swanson, a physicist turned information scientist, became the dean of the GLS at the University of Chicago. His interest was in converging the two fields and in taking what was useful in information science for use in libraries. He wrote that he was not concerned about whether information science was a part of library science or vice versa, but that both must be "adequately taken into account" in library education. His vagueness and acknowledgement of the differences between the two fields suggested a hope for a productive, interdisciplinary, cross-fertilizing tension. Jesse Shera, who had been a student of the documentalists, saw the institutional separateness of the two movements as unnecessary. In the 1950's as a faculty member of the library school at Western Reserve, where he later became dean, he tried to reconcile and synthesize the disciplines intellectually, based on the roots of information science in bibliography. He encouraged the school to combine the two disciplines into one program for library education, paving the way for future attempts at what is known as "library and information science." (Rayward 1983)
"Library and Information Science"
Pertti Vakkari is an information scientist who begins his analysis of the foundations of the overall field, "Library and information science: its content and scope," by wiping librarianship clear out of the picture, with a seemingly incredible arrogance: "From now on I shall use the term 'information science' for our field of study. The word library is excluded, because, as will be shown later, it is not conceptually economic to use a linguistic expression that does not have a content." (Vakkari 1994) Later he refers to Gernot Wersig's argument that library science cannot exist, because specific kinds of organizations are not a sound basis for a scientific or academic discipline. This seems to be saying something like this: "'Rocket science' is a phrase that really refers to a kind of engineering, since rocket scientists do not go on expeditions to discover rockets, and then dissect them to develop theories about their structure and function." In fact, Vakkari cites Wersig making the rhetorical comparison to hospital science or jailhouse science, which of course do not exist. (Vakkari 1994) "Hospital science," however, reminds us that Johns Hopkins, our original comparison, pioneered medical science - admittedly dependent on biology, chemistry, and perhaps other sciences, but still acceptable as a discipline, and as some kind of applied science. For Wersig, apparently, a library is simply a kind of building. For the founders of the GLS at Chicago, the word "library" stood not for a building but for a social process, involving professionals who practice librarianship. (It should be noted that "librarianship" has no adjectival form - as "medicine" has "medical" - that could be used to construct a name for the intellectual foundation of librarianship as a science, to grammatically correspond with "medical science.")Vakkari is interested in establishing an independent discipline with a clear subject area for its research, to ultimately result in a body of highly general theoretical knowledge. Such an aim is inherent in the modern conception of science, which is different from that of the 1920's and 1930's, when the word simply referred to a body of knowledge - probably directed towards specific applications - that is arrived at rationally and methodically. This could be sufficient to exclude the concept of "library science," and limit his inquiry to information science, since library science is, if anything, a discipline related primarily to a practice. Instead, he remains concerned about library science and takes other analyses into account, although his primary interest is in establishing the foundations for a science of information. Most significant in terms of gaining an understanding of the overall field is B. Ford's concept of the library institution as the paradigmatic model for the whole discipline of library and information science, regarded in its expansion beyond the original library context. (This seems to accept without analysis the "shrinkage" of the library concept to something less that its original scope as the custodianship of the cultural record. As Shera puts it, "The flight from library goes on, leaving the old and respected name to typify, in the main, public library service." And public library service, too, is not all that it could potentially be.) (Shera 1983) Library science is, by this analysis, a library centered version of information science. Vakkari might call this a meaningless distinction; "What is in a name?" He lets F. Miksa answer: the library paradigm is influential because it is particularly attuned to the practice of librarianship, and recognizes that librarianship means service through the social institution of libraries, which serve a social function, often conceived to be in the public interest. This is in contrast to the paradigm based on the study of information flow in the abstract, with its beginnings in mathematical theory and more direct applicability to technologies of information storage and retrieval in a value-neutral sense, especially where efficiency is the primary consideration. So we have a library science paradigm and an information science paradigm for library and information science, each with implications for practice.
Vakkari states that the second paradigm implies a "much wider conception of the domain of library and information science than the first," because of its more general subject of inquiry. This is the perspective of an information scientist; a librarian is likely to see the issue differently. Jesse Shera, who worked to incorporate information science into library education for many years, and was originally a student of documentation, at first conceived of information science as providing the theoretical foundation for librarianship, which could in turn be seen as simply an application of information science. Years of thought on the subject caused him to change his mind. He wrote, "Because librarianship is so much more than the mechanized access to data banks or networks that provides efficient access to institutional borrowing, we must look to other disciplines for its interdisciplinary relations and the core of its theory." Indeed, the kind of research that Butler and the faculty of the GLS originally conceived of as defining library science - social research into the needs of readers - would have been outside the scope of information science by any definition. Shera ultimately had a similar view of the disciplinary range of librarianship. He postulated three components in the concept of a library: acquisitions, or the "sphere of optimum content"; organization, or "the operational or mechanistic sphere" (the subject of information science); and interpretation and service, or "the sphere of maximum context." Shera, in the end, did not feel that a "science" was needed to provide a theoretical foundation for librarianship, and felt that pretensions to science, or an "overlay of scientific operations" like automation systems, networked cataloging, and scientific management, do not constitute professionalism. (Shera 1983)
Others have even stronger sentiments. Michael Gorman objects to any incorporation of information science into library education. He does not believe it is a science, because the word "information" has no clear meaning. He believes that information scientists in library education are hostile to librarians and librarianship. Most importantly, he believes the study of information science or information technology is taking time away from solid education in librarianship. (Gorman 1990) Gorman writes in a style that suggests he comes from another era, from a time before "information" had been conceived of, and there were only books, and he is nostalgic for that time. His appearance as a relic further creates the impression that the librarianship he wants to defend is dead or is dying, taken over by information science in the post-industrial era, with its great fulfillment of Otlet's dream in the global information superhighway. Is this true? At a conference called by Don Swanson of the GLS at Chicago in 1964 to work on the foundations of library education, information scientists Vladimir Slamecka and Mortimer Taube read a paper in which they unwittingly illustrated something of the difference between librarianship and information science. They began, "Let us concur that the raison d'etre of librarianship is service." Service, it seems, there will always be a place for. They continued, "Leaving aside the less appealing servile meanings of the word..." and went on to explain their premise. (Slamecka and Taube 1964) Unappealing, servile meanings of the word service? The statement is revealing, and underlines a humorous observation reported by Gorman: "Information science is librarianship practiced by men." Librarianship in the modern library era has been primarily women's work, and has also been more service-oriented than it had been in the classical age. It may be simply that, due to whatever social forces, women are more drawn to service work than men. In any case, the service aspect of librarianship both does and does not seem threatened by information science. Since information science is not a service or a practice, as librarianship is, it works in a different domain, and for better or worse only provides tools for librarians to utilize. These tools present ever greater opportunities for efficiency. However, that efficiency of information flow is not all that is required in good library service, with its spheres of optimum content and maximum context. Shera put the problem this way: "librarians have become so concerned with process that they have confused substance with instrumentation. Processing data can be performed by machine. Only the human mind can process knowledge or even information." (Shera 1983) Many of the current issues in librarianship revolve around this problem, which has its roots in the trend towards efficiency promoted by Dewey, and the roots of many librarians' reactions to this "efficiency movement" in such misgivings about it as Justin Winsor's. (Rosenberg 1994)
Some Current Issues in the Field and Possible Futures
With online access to materials over the internet beginning to replace local, physical collections, it is undeniable that advances in technology have created a new era in librarianship. To what extent we are in a new social era - the post-industrial or information age - may be an unimportant question. Whether new information technologies, the rise of a possible new class of information workers, and the increasing status of information as a commodity represent a new social framework or merely an advanced stage in a process that has been continuous makes little difference to the picture we must form of our time. In either case, it may be that the steady increase of information flow in society, in terms of both speed and volume, have finally begun to challenge the ability of people to organize and process information according to traditional principles. The "information age" may simply be the age in which information problems have come to the fore.With regard to libraries, I believe there is a pair of first considerations in thinking about the information age. The first of these is that libraries are a relatively minor player in the "information sector" of the economy. Studies by Machlup in 1962, Porat in 1970, and Martin in 1998 included careers ranging from scientist to lawyer to therapist to entertainer to bank teller to sign painter in their analyses of information sector jobs and their relative proportions in the labor force. (Martin 1998) Self-described "information professionals," too, are likely to have their background outside of library and information science, often with an education in management, information systems, computer science, or business. (Cronin, Stiffler et al. 1993) The second, related point to remember is that librarianship's loss of "market share" in the information age is not in itself an indication that librarianship is in decline, merely that management of information has become the most prominent feature in many fields of work. Library science, and library science education programs, seem torn between fearing that librarianship is a dying study supporting a dying profession, and ambitiously hoping to capitalize on its familiarity with information problems by supplying job markets outside its traditional areas of practice. It is an age of both anxiety and excitement for the discipline.
How library and information science conceives of its career domain depends on ones paradigmatic orientation within it. Those who view the field with reference to libraries are interested in the future of libraries and how best to shape it, as well as how to shape the future of library education to serve the future of librarianship. Information science-oriented members of the discipline are likely to look at the whole of the information sector as its domain of applicability.
I believe that schools of library and information science have been wise to see themselves at a turning point, and occasionally unwise to continue primarily training librarians after excising the "L-word" from their names, giving a false appearance of being bona fide information science programs and possibly giving insufficient support, both intellectual and skills-based, for librarianship. The apparent schizophrenia of being a library and information studies program is resolvable by developing a clearer focus, and either training students for librarianship - even particular types of librarianship - or for "information work" in general (or possibly information science in an academic sense). A program in librarianship could continue to borrow happily from information science. ( I believe that San Jose State's program has been fairly successful in its navigation of this transition period.)
Such a clarification of direction would leave the other dilemma of library schools - that of theory versus practice - unresolved. Linda Main calls it a schizophrenia, and recommends that programs be devoted to developing the practical skills needed within libraries now, most importantly such non-traditional library skills as setting up computer networks and serving access to a database over the world wide web. (Main 1990) The problems with this strategy are that it sacrifices even the attempt to supply the basis for professionalization and puts the status of the departments of library and information at serious risk in their university settings. Nevertheless, this has been the general direction of the schools. As a result, they have succeeded in filling jobs, many of them outside the job market for librarians. But hey have not succeeded in affecting the perception of those jobs as less than professional, or in generating a corresponding rise in pay for librarians, or in influencing the development of libraries, leaving a public service institution at the mercy of market forces. These would admittedly be a tall order, especially without tremendous support of a philanthropic organization like the Carnegie Corporation. But there are some who see the practical orientation of library education as unproductive to begin with. Robert Hauptman believes that librarianship, if we are honest about it, is 90% clerical work, and the image of it as a profession is based on mystification. He believes that the actual tasks involved in librarianship can be learned relatively quickly on the job, and that a solid foundation in the liberal arts, including possibly graduate work in a real discipline, is the basic foundation for the professional fulfillment of the job. (Hauptman 1987) Hauptman seems to be saying what many people within the field do not have the courage to; understandable if a demystification of library work would strip librarianship of its professional livery. Shera's perspective is different from both of these. Although he would admit that much of the work of a librarian is of a routine nature, he was opposed to basing education for professional librarianship on a training program for these routine tasks. Also, he did believe that there was a distinct intellectual subject area, if an interdisciplinary one, for research and teaching in library science, and that it was the proper foundation for professionalization of the career. He noted Williamson's position that library work can be separated into clerical and professional jobs, and gave limited support to the idea. (Shera 1972) It is somewhat unclear, however, whether the more clerical tasks can be separated from the more professional duties of a librarian, which involve reasoned judgments and knowledge of materials.
The role of support staff in libraries is expanding. Jane Robbins foresees many of the basic functions of libraries being taken over by support staff, including the functions of cataloging and classification, acquisition, and basic reference. Some of these functions, notably cataloging and to a degree, acquisitions too, have been partially automated by the processes of efficiency developed by information science and scientific management (downloading bibliographic records from OCLC, "selecting" books based on pre-approval plans from book distributors). The professional functions, as she sees it, will be the functions of "role definition, selection of service, and management." She believes that undergraduate programs in library science need to be developed to educate people for the support functions, with admission to the masters programs conditional on completion of the undergraduate major. (Robbins 1993) Such a system would reduce the depth of the liberal arts background among professional librarians, but seems to be the wave of the future. The problem could be mitigated by a strong liberal arts component to the undergraduate program. In Robbins' vision such programs would be part of a multi-departmental College of Information Studies, with faculty from the fields of cognitive science, communication studies, artificial intelligence, and economics, as well as professionally-oriented information studies faculty and practitioners. C. D. Hurt believes that adding undergraduate programs in library science is necessary and would solve a number of current problems. Library science programs are politically weak due to their anomalous situation as Masters' only programs and their questioned legitimacy. (The lack of a definite theoretical base contributes to this.) In the current shift of emphasis in academia toward undergraduate education library science programs seem odd. Academics wonder how there can be a legitimate master's degree without requiring an undergraduate education in the subject. (Hurt 1992) The creation of bachelor's degree programs in library studies or information studies would solve this problem, supply preparation for the new "support services" of basic reference and at least the more clerical aspects acquisitions and cataloging. It would also lay the foundation for graduate programs that were productive in terms of research towards theory in some form of library and information science, which still seems desirable.
It must be kept in mind, as these programs are created, that libraries, and the jobs of librarians, are bound to change in unpredictable ways, just as they did a century ago. Social and economic trends that are effecting libraries include steady increases in the capabilities of information technology, the increasing commodification of information creating pressure to charge fees for service, competition with other types of information services (including the internet as well as private businesses). (Robbins 1993) Cultural trends which librarians will have to take into account include demographic changes, equity demands, increasing social isolation, "cocooning" at home, and alienation and anomie, which can counter-alienate the library as an "establishment institution." (Holt 1993) Glen Holt sees the future librarian as an "Access Manager," who will have an educational background in management, computer information technology, research, and first amendment issues. The Access Manager would be a librarian who plans and implements strategies (is a manager), is focused on the service aims of the library, balances books and online materials, oversees marketing projects, and finds ways of providing service to people who won't come to the library. (Holt 1993) (Another approach would be to try to change the atmosphere of the library, for example by serving food, in order to bring in patrons who normally stay at home or use bookstores.) The Access Manager is essentially the manager of an ultra-modern library, and probably not engaged in direct service to patrons. Robbins believes that the primary focus of library education should become "access to information." This implies patron contact and therefore training in the communications and service dimension of the profession. She believes in de-emphasizing education in the areas of acquisition, classification, and maintenance of of physical collections. (Robbins 1993)
Shera's division of librarianship into the spheres of collection development or "optimum content"; organization, or "the operational or mechanistic sphere"; and interpretation and service, or "the sphere of maximum context," still seems applicable in the age of electronic information. In the realm of acquisitions, there will continue to be decisions to make on the basis of the cost of information, particularly considering the likely subscription basis of many services. It seems to me that the area of interpretation and service is particularly important, and somewhat neglected in library education. This may be because it is so unclear how this aspect of a librarian's role will be performed in the future, and also because it can require specific subject knowledge. Despite work towards "intelligent" interfaces that will allow people more sophisticated direct access to electronic information, I believe that the demand for information intermediaries, who could be called "information counselors," or consultants, or guides, will only increase as people reach and over-reach their limits to handle the information flow that their lives seem to require. There is no reason that some part of this kind of information function could not be taken over by librarians, with the library reemerging as a community space as people rediscover their social needs. It is unclear, however, how one would work towards the realization of this kind of a vision. Librarians much more frequently feel pressure to adapt to changes over which they have no control. More realistic is the individual librarian or "information professional's" ability to seek and find the particular job (or particular kind of library, as libraries continue to increase in variety) that is right for them, by whatever name. The key for library and information science education, then, seems to be a diversification of programs, particularly at the master's level, that parallels that of libraries and information sector employment, rather than attempting to cover the whole range of information careers with one great blanket per school.
Conclusion
In the century-long history of the modern library, competing conceptions developed over what its intellectual foundations should be. The bibliographic scholarship that had been a part of librarianship for centuries was at least partially left out of the century's new, service oriented, high-volume librarianship. The bibliographic tradition continued somewhat separately, and became intertwined with technological studies that were applied to emerging problems of bibliographic control of scientific information, leading ultimately to "information science." Meanwhile a minority movement in librarianship attempted to develop a "library science" that would provide the basis for a secure professionalization of librarianship. This movement flowered in 1930 with the creation of the first graduate school for library education, the Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago. It briefly pursued the development of a library science based on a social science-oriented study of the needs of readers but changed its focus to education for management under pressure from practitioners. Nevertheless, interest in research into the foundations of librarianship as a social system has continued, and competed with a more practical, vocational philosophy of library education. Added to this tension was a convergence of library science (whatever that means in the contemporary period) and information science. This was due largely to the usefulness in libraries of bibliographic access tools developed by the more technical disciplines and a widespread sense of the growing importance of information technology.Throughout the century the amount of information that libraries have had to accommodate has increased dramatically, and this expansion in publishing and other information production has paralleled the modern library movement and has been a part of its democratic roots. An emerging difficulty, from the point of view of those who believe in the educational and public service functions of libraries, are the various compromises that have been forced upon libraries by the measures taken to increase the efficiency of information management, both in response to real information problems and the innate force of social and economic trends. Such issues have only increased in importance in recent years with the development of the internet. The future of librarianship is uncertain and will probably involve further conceptual change regarding the function of libraries, new disciplinary variations, and the continuation of old oppositions. The century's end seems a natural time for leaving behind many of the certainties of the modern library era, but what will replace them remains unknown. All that seems certain is the human need for collect, store, and distribute knowledge, and the truism that "the more things change, the more they stay the same."
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