McGrath advocates that we need a Unified Theory of Librarianship and outlines what he considers to be “some of the traditional areas of concern to librarianship” which will have to be subsumed into such a theory.  He provides some ideas on what kinds of studies we would need to allow us to generate an overarching theory of LIS and lists some (then) recent studies that fit or demonstrate this mode.

According to McGrath, the traditional areas to be considered are: publishing, acquisitions, storage and preservation, classification and organization of knowledge, collections, and circulation.  As he admits on page 356, he completely ignores “the digital revolution” as he believes “while the production of electronic databases, the World Wide Web, and the Internet is technology, their use can be described in terms of traditional library functions.”  While this is, in fact, true it is also an extremely limiting view.  The “digital revolution” has progressed to the point where simply trying to describe it in the terms and categories of traditional librarianship is not a healthy way to move the profession forward. It is, in my opinion, the opposite.

One of my largest areas of complaint with the article is in his treatment of classification and organization of knowledge.  I find it lacking in several ways.

His initial sentences in the section CLASSIFICATION just bother me:

“The classification scheme used by the library is a major property of the collection.  The scheme reflects the librarians’ perceptions of how knowledge is organized or structured” (354).

One can certainly make both of these claims and, in a sense, they are true.  But I do not believe either of them.  The classification scheme, one or more (more in a perfect world) is applied to the collection and provides one form of order to it, but it is not an inherent property of the collection.  That is, the number of books in a collection, whether or not scholarly journals are present, whether or not some edition of  “Tom Sawyer” is present are all facts about, and in a sense properties of, the collection.  But the classification scheme can only be stated as to which is applied, or what to each specific book.  The facts about the classification scheme seem, to me, to be of a different kind and are not inherent in the collection itself. I know that wasn’t explained well but I am having a hard time expressing what I think.

As to his second statement in that quote, while at some historical point it is true that the classification “scheme reflects the librarians’ perceptions of how knowledge is organized or structured” it is also simply not the case at all. I find it hard to believe that many librarians, and especially catalogers and classification theorists, would agree that our library classifications reflect the structure of knowledge, except in some simplistic(and ultimately pragmatic) way.

Take, for instance, the libraries of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Most of the forty or so remaining libraries are organized using the Dewey Decimal System. One of the largest libraries in the world is still using a scheme that is entirely inappropriate for one of its size and complexity. Why is that? Institutional inertia and lack of funds are two of the primary reasons. Discussion of switching to LCC has arisen repeatedly over the decades. Early on it was probably doable but for whatever reasons the choice was rejected. At this point, which has been “this point” for a decade or more now, it is simply inconceivable to switch. The costs and time frame to do so are so out-of-hand that it can never happen.  What can, and may, happen is that they will start doing new acquisitions in LCC and they will end up with a divided classification system complicating life for all concerned, but especially for the users. There is really no way in which it can be said that DDC reflects the UIUC librarians’ view of the structure of knowledge.

Also in the section on CLASSIFICATION, McGrath states:

“Because society is mutable, no classification theory can ever be enduring. Nevertheless, we can still look for structure in knowledge. And even though structure many not be permanent, principles are permanent and are reason enough to look for more enduring structure” (354).

Most of that I fully agree with. But I am really beginning to wonder how permanent the principles really are. They may last longer than the classification systems which are built upon them but the world is changing so rapidly, and the amount of things needing some form of bibliographic control increasing seemingly exponentially, that it seems to me that the principles are being pushed harder and harder and that some of them are at a breaking point, if not already broken.

When I got to the Classification and Organization of Knowledge section of included studies I realized another issue I have with his plan. Earlier we got simply CLASSIFICATION, with organization of knowledge sort of subsumed under it. But that is the wrong way round. Classification is a part, a small part, of the organization of knowledge. But even in this section where they get equal billing in the heading the studies are primarily about classification and its intersection with circulation, browsability and so forth. There is no discussion of, or studies to support, any kind of issues in descriptive cataloging. This oversight would be a major roadblock to any sort of unified theory.

In fact, this is one of those areas where the “digital revolution” is seriously playing havoc with our principles and our practices. What sort of descriptive cataloging is required, or not, when a resource can “describe itself” and the system can make use of those self-describing resources in new and novel ways; ways that our users are turning to more and more. These are fundamental questions in the area of organization of knowledge.

Besides leaving out the digital he also, admittedly, does not address—”the psychology of users and librarians, attitudinal studies, organizational behavior, interaction with other disciplines, scientometrics and informetrics, individual scholarly productivity, citation analysis, LIS education, welfare and status of librarians (tenure, salaries, and prestige), and so on” (356). It seems to me that an awful lot that would be required to turn all of this into a “Unified Theory of Librarianship” is being sketched so broadly, or simply ignored for the purpose of publishable article length, that to even consider the possibility of such a unified theory is hardly thinkable. There. I’ve played my cards. I do think this is a fool’s errand.

As for the studies he included as support towards a possible unified theory, he only included those that use quantitative methods or those which could be quantified. So I guess only the quantitative can make it into a grand unified theory of librarianship. Because, you know, librarianship and information science are such a natural sciences. Well, considering that in the end the Grand Unified Theory of physics will, in my humble opinion, leave out much of what is truly important and ultimately meaningful about the world, as it will include nothing qualitative, I fail to see why we should pursue such an ugly beast.

Besides, the incredible number of studies, even if restricted to the quantifiable, that would be necessary to get us anywhere near a grand unified theory are important in their own right and should be done. And, in fact, they will have to be done first, along with the small and medium-scale theorizing that is necessary to move our field forward.

So whether or not we can, or should, pursue such a beast is currently unanswerable. We are simply too far away from the goal posts. In fact, I fear we are so far away from such an overarching theory that one might say that we aren’t even sure what sport it is we are playing, much less our being “on the field.”