Falling Short of Their Profession’s Needs
In recent decades, library and information
studies have focused on the information that libraries provide, shortchanging
other key roles they play, writes Wayne A. Wiegand.
There is no holy book in which God tells us
what libraries should be. Over the centuries, the contours of library services
and collections have instead been mediated by humans, including founders,
funders, managers and -- surprise, surprise -- users. That’s the conclusion I
came to after researching and writing Part of Our
Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library.
In it, I trace the history of this ubiquitous institution, largely by listening
to the voices of those who have used libraries since the mid-19th century, to
identify reasons why it has been loved for generations.
As I analyzed the data, I was surprised at
how quickly those reasons organized into three broad categories. People have
loved their libraries for: (1) the useful information they made accessible, (2)
the transformative potential of commonplace reading they circulated and (3) the
public spaces they provided. Examples abound.
Information Access
While sitting at a Cincinnati public library
desk in 1867, Thomas Edison compiled a bibliography on electricity. “Many times Edison would
get excused from duty under pretense of being too sick to work,” a colleague
later recalled, “and invariably strike a beeline for the library, where he
would spend the entire day and evening reading … such works on electricity
as were to be had.”
In 1971, 10-year-old Barack Obama returned to
Honolulu from Jakarta. “The first place I wanted to be was in a library,” he
said years later. “One Saturday … with the help of a raspy-voiced old
librarian who appreciated my seriousness, I found a book on East Africa.” Obama
wanted information about Kenya, birthplace of his father, a Luo tribe member.
“The Luo raised cattle and lived in mud huts and ate cornmeal and yams and
something called millet,” the book noted. “Their traditional costume was a
leather thong across the crotch.” Shocked by what he read, Obama “left the book
open-faced on a table and walked out.”
The Transformative Potential of Reading
After her father died in 1963, 9-year-old
Sonia Sotomayor buried herself in reading at her Bronx library and the
apartment she shared with her mother and brother. “Nancy Drew had a powerful
hold on my imagination,” she remembered. “Every night, when I’d finished
reading and got into bed and closed my eyes, I would continue the story, with
me in Nancy’s shoes, until I fell asleep.” Her mind, she noted, “worked in ways
very similar” to Nancy’s. “I was a keen observer and listener. I picked up on
clues. I figured things out logically, and I enjoyed puzzles. I loved the
clear, focused feeling that came when I concentrated on solving a problem and
everything else faded out.”
In 1984, President Ronald Reagan wrote the
daughter-in-law of Harold Bell Wright, whose best-selling 1920s religious novel
That Printer of Udell’s
Reagan read as an adolescent in Dixon, Ill. Shortly after reading the book, he
declared himself saved and was baptized. The novel’s protagonist, Reagan wrote
Wright’s daughter-in-law 60 years later, served as a role model that shaped his
life. It’s likely the copy of That
Printer of Udell’s Reagan read came from the Dixon Public Library,
which he visited twice weekly in the early 1920s, often reading on the
library’s front steps.
Library as Place
In the 1930s at the Atlanta Public Library’s
African-American branch, one of the few public places where blacks felt safe
and welcome, 10-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. came to the library several
times weekly. Director Annie Watters later recalled their interactions. “He
would walk up to the desk and … look me straight in the eye.” “Hello,
Martin Luther,” she would say, always calling him by his first and middle
names. “What’s on your mind?” “Oh, nothing, particularly.” For Watters, that
was the cue King had learned a new “big word,” and between them they had a
conversation in which King used the word repeatedly. Another game involved
poetry. Again, King would stand by the desk, waiting. “What’s on your mind,
Martin Luther?” Watters asked. “For I dipped into the future, far as the human
eye could see,” he responded. Watters recognized the Tennyson poem, and
finished the verse: “Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would
be.”
In 2005, The
Washington Post carried an article by Eric Wee on a District of
Columbia branch library in one of Washington’s poorest neighborhoods. In it,
Wee reported that every Tuesday night a homeless man named Conrad Cheek entered
the library and set up his chessboard on a table in the children’s room. Wee
immediately noticed a transformation. “No more ignored pleas” for this homeless
man, “no averted glances. During the next hour, people will look him in the
eye. They’ll listen to his words. In this down-at-the-heels library he’s the
teacher.” Among his students was 9-year-old Ali Osman, whose mother explained
that her son’s confidence had soared after playing with Conrad, that he was now
bragging to friends about being a chess player. “We owe it all to Mr. Conrad,”
she said.
Information access, the transformative power
of commonplace reading, library as place -- all three combine to explain why
people have valued their public libraries for the past 160 years. By harnessing
the literatures on information access, commonplace reading and public spaces to
analyze the historical roles of American public libraries, Part of Our Lives shows
that from their origins they have contributed to their host communities in
multiple ways.
They have been places of performance where
users displayed moral progress and achievement. They have functioned as
centripetal forces to craft a sense of community among disparate populations
and evolve community trust among its multicultural elements. They have acted as
key players not only to increase literacy (tens of thousands of immigrants learned
English by reading printed materials from their public libraries) but also to
construct group identity through the stories and places they provided. And
public libraries have also started neighborhood conversations, welcomed the
recently arrived into their midst, and served as community anchors.
A Limited Focus
I could only come to those conclusions,
however, by tapping deeply into non-library and information studies literature
that addresses reading and place. For most of its history, LIS has focused instead
on what in the 18th century was called “useful knowledge,” in the 19th and 20th
was called “best reading,” and in the late 20th morphed into “information.”
That focused term has given particular meaning to phrases like “information
access,” “information literacy” and “information community” that not only tend
to exaggerate the role of LIS in the larger world of “information” (see, for
example, how much attention LIS gets in James W. Cortada’s All The Facts: A History of Information in the United
States Since 1870), but also dominate -- and limit -- the
profession’s thinking.
Take library education, for example. As professional
education programs evolved from “library schools” into “schools of information”
in the last 30 years, most have focused on “information” as defined by the
professional discourse they inherited, and then incorporated into that
discourse analysis of the storage and retrieval properties of developing
communications technologies. In the process, however, they decentered the
library as a subject for instruction and research. Thus, when the 17
“I-schools” (12 ALA-accredited) met for the first time in 2005, none had core
courses analyzing reading and place from the “library in the life of the user”
perspective that I took in Part
of Our Lives.
That’s unfortunate, because my historical
research suggests that not knowing more about the reading and places libraries
of all types provide greatly limits our ability to understand more deeply what
libraries actually mean to their host communities. My research has demonstrated
that generations of users have valued the public library as a place by
voluntarily visiting it again and again for multiple reasons, many of which had
nothing to do with information access.
Although I-school curricula emphasize
services leading to the kinds of information Thomas Edison and Barack Obama
found useful, they undervalue the impacts of information products that guided
the lives of Ronald Reagan and Sonia Sotomayor, and they overlook the
importance of library as place so evident in the experiences of Martin Luther
King Jr., Conrad Cheek and Ali Osman.
If Part
of Our Lives proves that reading and place have been as important
to the American public library (and other types of libraries) as information
access, then not having a core course in either at ALA-accredited programs is
the equivalent of an American Bar Association-accredited law school without a
core course on the Constitution or civil procedure. Unless organizations like
the Association for Library and Information Science Education and the American
Library Association, as well as the ALA Committee on Accreditation, insist that
reading and place are essential parts of librarianship’s “domain” that must be
taught at the core level, LIS education programs will continue to manifest
limitations.
Such limitations are also evident in
prognostications. In BiblioTech:
Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google, John
Palfrey rightfully contends that library digitization can equalize access to
education, jobs and information, but he worries that “bad nostalgia” for
services like commonplace reading and traditional library programs will
interfere with future planning. In a January 2016 Wall Street Journal article, Steve Barker
lamented that because of emerging technologies “the role for librarians and
public libraries is shrinking.” “Don’t mourn the loss of libraries,” John
McTernan argued in a March 2016 Telegraph article. “The internet has made them
obsolete.”
Ironically, unlike LIS educators and
researchers, library practitioners intuitively seem to recognize the value of
reading and place. The American library press abounds in reports of popular
programs. Kathleen de la Peña McCook devotes much attention to library as place
in her two editions (2004 and 2011) of Introduction to Public Librarianship. ALA
initiated a “Libraries Transform” campaign last year to increase awareness of
the multiple roles America’s academic, school and public libraries play in
their host communities. Then there’s the “Project Outcome” initiative ALA’s
Public Library Association (PLA) recently crafted to measure public library
impacts, the report Public
Libraries: A Vital Space for Family Engagement released in August
by the Harvard Family Research Project and the PLA that calls on libraries to
increase efforts to engage families in children’s learning, and the three-year
study entitled “Bringing Home Early Literacy: Determining the Impact of Library
Programming on Parent Behavior” that the Institute of Museum and Library
Services is funding.
And regarding “library as place,” academic
librarians especially have shown leadership in recent years by renovating
spaces rescued from print collections now digitized and accessible online into
group study areas that students use for a variety of class-related purposes.
The sociability that reading has fostered for generations among students is
much in evidence in these places. Many college and university libraries also
installed coffee bars. The collective effect of these actions (sometimes
referred to as the “information commons” movement) is obvious at my home
institution, Florida State University, where students now call the main Robert
M. Strozier Library “Club Stroz.” In recent years, turnstile counts have
spiked.
For all of those efforts, however,
researchers outside the
profession and already overworked library practitioners have taken the
initiative. Where is the LIS research community? Why aren’t members of that
community conducting longitudinal studies evaluating library activities like
the impact of summer reading programs on student reading levels as they move
from one grade to another? Where’s the LIS research that identifies the
community effects of programs like film festivals, book clubs, children’s story
hours, English as a second language classes, literacy tutoring, art exhibits
and musical presentations that thousands of public libraries have routinely
been hosting for generations? Where are the LIS researchers to perform similar
evaluation studies on the multiple community effects of library reading and
library as place in all types of libraries across the country and over time
that take into account demographic variables like race, age, gender, sexual
orientation, class, etc.?
Data generated by such research would not
only benefit librarians struggling to define mission statements and justify
budgets to city managers, council members and school and college administrators
(many of whom are convinced the internet has made libraries “obsolete”), it
would also help librarians identify which programs and services are providing
greatest benefit to their communities and thus deserve additional resources.
Part of Our Lives shows
that, over the generations, library users learned many things in multiple ways
through the useful information libraries made accessible, the commonplace
reading materials they circulated and the public spaces they provided. But
until LIS educators teach library reading and library as place in their
professional programs at the core level, and until LIS researchers ask
questions about what users learn from their interaction with libraries and
determine how that learning fits into their everyday lives, both are addressing
only a fraction of what libraries actually do for their patrons. And both are
falling short of their profession’s needs.
Bio
Wayne A. Wiegand is
F. William Summers Professor Emeritus of Library and Information Studies
at Florida State University and author of Part of Our Lives: A
People’s History of the American Public Library (Oxford University Press, 2015). Between January and May
2017, he will be Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress’s
John W. Kluge Center.
Source | https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/10/17/how-library-and-information-studies-research-shortchanging-libraries-essay
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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