I finally got around to reading the last two articles in the Fall 1996 Library Trends issue on “Navigating Among the Disciplines: The Library and Interdisciplinary Inquiry” over the last couple of days.
Searing, Susan E. “Meeting the Information Needs of Interdisciplinary Scholars: Issues for Administrators of Large University Libraries.” Library Trends 45, no. 2 (1996): 315-42.
Winter, Michael F. “Specialization, Territoriality, and Jurisdiction: Librarianship and the Political Economy of Knowledge.” Library Trends 45, no. 2 (1996): 343-63.
I will leave the Winter article for another post and concentrate on the Searing article here.
Sue, and yes, I do call her that, was still at UW-Madison when she wrote this article, but she is our LIS Librarian and the Faculty Advisor to our ACRL student chapter, ACRL@UIUC [Man, I have to get busy updating the site for this year.].
ABSTRACT
Her article is exactly what the title purports it to be. “Although this article focuses on describing the challenges posed by interdisciplinarity rather than recommending solutions, examples of innovative approaches are noted” (315).
INTRODUCTION
She uses the metaphor of the “frog-in-the-soup-pot” to describe the position of librarians, and particularly library administrators, in higher education. They are literally simmering to death as the water temperature slowly raises around them (316).
Challenges for Library Administrators
She maintains that a tension between generalization and specialization is revealed in the way most librarians “conceptualize their responsibilities in terms of major library functions:
- the selection, acquisition, and managment of information resources, still dubbed “collection development” although the stress on local ownership is fading;
- the organization of information, encompassing cataloging, classification, and their variants in the electronic environment;
- direct services to users, including reference and its younger sibling, library instruction” (316).
INFORMATION RESOURCES
This section describes some of the various challenges and managerial issues, and some creative solutions to these, that arise in trying to collect interdisciplinary resources.
CATALOGING AND CLASSIFICATION
Discusses how cooperative cataloging and the standards that are required for such a system to work leads to issues particular to indisciplinary researchers.
The two biggest gatekeeping hurdles are subject headings, in particular LCSH, and LC classification. The typical reasons these are constraining influences are further exacerbated in an interdisciplinary environment. A few possible solutions are addressed.
DIRECT SERVICES TO LIBRARY USERS
The core question addressed here is, “Do information seekers in interdisciplinary fields need different kinds of services than scholars in tradtional fields” (322)?
Library User Education
Discusses how an “integrative approach to library instruction encourages information seekers to conceptualize their queries not as topics in particular disciplines, but as questions that may be answered from numerous perspectives” (323)[.]
In one of my favorite paragraphs in anything discussing library instruction, she writes:
[O]ne way to comprehend the parameters of a discipline is through an understanding of its bibliographic conventions and structures. Yet students in interdisciplinary courses may benefit the most from library instruction, since emerging fields usually lack the bibliographic apparatus of a mature discipline. Bibliographic instruction creates classroom opportunities to explore “scholarly and institutional inclusion and exclusion,” to interrogate the division between “academic” and “popular” sources, and to present reference works as “cultural artifacts” (Broidy, 1987, p. 93). Librarians are also positioned to teach how biases can influence every stage of information processing, including what gets written, published, acquired by libraries, preserved for posterity, covered in bibliographic tools, and selected by the reseracher (Fink, 1989) (Searing, 323).
Reference Services
“Unfortunately, there has been no research to show what model of reference service responds most effectively to interdisciplinary needs” (324).
An inadequate or absent secondary literature complicate the provision of reference services to this group (325).
The Impact of Information Technology
LIBRARY ORGANIZATION AT LARGE RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES
Large research universities with “distributed library environments and services” face particular challenges from interdisciplinarity (328).
Discipline-based branch libraries discourage interdisciplinary reading.
Politics determines the fate of the branch library concept, not philosophical discussions of the nature of information.
THE CAMPUS CONTEXT: TEACHING, RESEARCH, OUTREACH
The curriculum will determine the “library’s role in supporting interdisciplinary inquiry” (330)[.]
Interdisciplinary research centers take many forms and require varied responses from librarians.
OTHER CONTEXTUAL ISSUES
Institutional downsizing – abandoned research programs and lack of staff cause issues
New managerial theories and practices
Changes in scholarly communications
THE POLITICS OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY
The tired image of the ivory tower and the vaunted notion of scholarly objectivity are targets of some interdisciplinary scholars, especially in fields that derive their intellectual vigor from focusing on problems and inequities in contemporary society. Such fields have, in turn, come under attack from other scholars who seek to preserve traditional knowledge bases and a core curriculum grounded in Western culture and values (333).
…
In this conflictive, often hostile, environment, librarians must chart a course that recognizes the special information and service needs of evolving fields without slighting scholars in traditional fields (335)
CONCLUSION
“Why has interdisciplinarity evoked so little attention from library leaders” (336)?
Remember our frog in the soup?
Traditional disciplines have not been weakened, and in some case have been strengthened, by interdisciplinarity.
Much of the work of interdisciplinary scholarship takes place “within the familiar supportive structures of the disciplines” (336-7).
“Academic libraries that ignore the rise of interdisciplinarity risk becoming irrelevant to a growing portion of students and faculty” (338).
She says much more than what I have eluded to here. I only commented on a few of the things I found interesting, and you might well find other things of interest than I did. Highly recommended, for librarians in any size academic library.