For the first time in this degree I really took a dive on an assignment.
It hit my about half way through this semester: I have stopped caring about being in school. I am exhausted by the number of minor time-filling assignments, and I really want to get out to work and just start helping people.
If there is only one thing I did learn, it is how to find enough sources to actually teach yourself about an area, and to do so under time constraints. All of the insights I have had about this career, and all the things I am passionately interested in mostly come from reading on my own, beyond the readings for class. Except maybe for Information Literacy, which was a random class which changed my thoughts about librarianship and education.
I just have to continually tell myself there is less than a month left, and then I can take a long break. But I really do miss reading my own books and developing my own thoughts. My thoughts are going off in new directions, but the rest of my body is stuck coming to class every day.
Why is it that so often in my courses we completely ignore the history of library literature when learning about the issues which are so important to both professional practice and theoretical discussions of libraries?
I ask this questions as I read a great book by Patrick Wilson, Second-Hand Knowledge: An Inquiry Into Cognitive Authority (1983). It examines in detail the process by which we come to recognized others’ ideas as correct ones. It follows another really great little book by Wilson called Two kinds of power: An Essay on Bibliographical Control (1968) which has a really great section on how it is that we decide on the subject of a work. Both of these are highly relevant, and both of them I discovered for myself.
Or the theoretical works of Henry Evelyn Bliss, particularly The Organization of Knowledge and the System of the Sciences (1929). Difficult, yes. Dense, yes. Interesting, thought-provoking, yes. Another great book–this one was suggested for a class, but by a teacher which explicitly goes against the current–is Living with books: The Art of Book Selection (2nd ed. 1950) by Helen Haines. What a wonderful book of bibliographic love! Is basically a manual on how to look at books, how to evaluate them, how to weigh other’s evaluations of them.
So I question why things like there are ignored. I am sure there are more of them, but I don’t know them all. Why are important abstract works of this nature ignored? I am sure that the concrete nature of the profession has changed, but are we not qualified to evaluate the foundations of that work? Are they no longer applicable to today’s world? I would argue no.
To tell you the secret, it is my plan to glean ideas from these old works to inform my future writing. Not only will I seem well read (because I will cite them), but in reality all of these new ideas people pass around have foundations in older works.
