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On the History of Library Literature


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 Are they no longer applicable to today’s world?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.

This entry was posted by Steven Chabot on March 13, 2008 at 7:35am. It is filed under Books, History, Librarianship, Library, Reading, School. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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Comments for “On the History of Library Literature”

  1. # March 13th, 2008 at 1:24 pm

    Mark Said:

    Ah Steven,

    I sure wish I had any part of an answer for you. As much as I would like one myself, alas, I do not.

    I am glad, though, to see that you have been touched by these works and opened to these questions. Much of this literature has important things to say to us today but most are not reading it.

    I will not venture an answer as to why many LIS educators ignore this literature but I can perhaps offer some insight into why most students are not finding it.

    1. If it isn’t assigned it isn’t going to get read.
    2. If it is assigned it might be skimmed.
    3. The smallest percentage of students is ever going to track down sources used in their readings [see 1 & 2 above]
    4. Many of our students think (and are repeatedly told) that the world has changed drastically and that they live in a vastly different time than their immediate predecessors.
    5. Most of those students in 4 are simply too young or too poorly (narrowly) educated to realize the absurdity of 4.
    6. Much of this stuff is not on the Internet and therefore does not exist in many minds.
    7. Everyone knows that LIS literature sucks and is all about “how we did it good.” Thus, what in the heck are you talking about?

    I have no doubt that I could come up with a few more but will stop. I, too, once thought that most of our literature was crap. And, honestly, a lot of it is. But one only has to keep trying and reading a few things on their own. Trace a footnote or two to those things that repeatedly keep showing up in reference lists, e.g., Wilson’s Two kinds of power essay.

    Welcome to that (almost) secret part of my world that I sure wish I could make widely known, both in our field and out of it. There is so much of importance and relevance to today’s issues in our literature that so many know so little about.

  2. # March 15th, 2008 at 9:52 pm

    Graham Said:

    Hi Steven,

    It’s great to come across a fellow male blogger from a Canadian library school - we’re a rare breed! I couldn’t agree with you more about the classic literature that library programs ignore. Keep up the great writing - I’ll be following your feed.

    Cheers, Graham

  3. # March 17th, 2008 at 8:32 am

    Steven Chabot Said:

    Mark:

    I think the beauty of this pre-1960’s literature is its humanist focus or tone. While I do appreciate the empirical studies which have that JASIS tone, it is trying sometimes to deal with books written in this highly structured style, breaking the searching process down into highly subdivided steps and creating more “models”.

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