Nervous change or strong stability - what do research legitimize in public libraries?

Yesterday I sneaked in at the end of a lecture held by my colleague and friend from the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Copenhagen, Dr. Jack Andersen. He was invited to my department to speak to our students about theory and theory building in library research. Just as he reached the conclusion he pointed out a few disturbing things that are important to notice in contemporary library research. I was glad to hear it, as I have noticed them before, and I will here expand a little on them here:

There is no doubt that library research is problematic, as there is no doubt that (public) librarianship is. The fact that the two are constantly legitimizing each other with the help of abstract democratic arguments and a strive to find ways to construct new user needs (as is the fact with the use of social media I libraries) that can be “met” or analyzed. Public libraries’ manic urge to be innovative is met by a legitimacy of library research painting a picture of a society changing in a way that need to take libraries in new directions. Back-scratching is intense.

What is extremely rare in library discussions and, indeed, in library research is the analysis of the fact that public libraries are extremely stable organizations. This stability shines through wherever we look – not least in user behavior. There are no signs that the fundamental behavior or needs of public library users have changed in any major way during the last fifty years or so. People go to libraries to do what they always have done, and from the user point of view we see no signs that this is regarded as any form of “crisis behavior” or whatever. Stability is what gives libraries their authority. Stability is what makes people come. Stability in library organizations and user relations is n-o-t a problem. Nervous change is.

I have been touching upon these issues on several occasions earlier, both when I have been out and about speaking to librarians all over Sweden, and in my various writings. Dr Andersen mentioned it briefly in his lecture, but it reminded me of the most pressing problem of perhaps all in contemporary librarianship - the lack of argument for the frantic changes pushed through both in terms of organizational thinking (often with help of trivial management models), and in user relations (making up new "needs").

Public libraries do not need to reach everyone in society, but should be open to all, and well aware about which groups in society are so under-privileged or dysfunctional in relation to the mainstream norm, that they need to be subjected well developed (and financed) out-reach activities.

We know what people do when they go to libraries. Basically they do what they always have done - that is a good thing. By developing a library research that do not buy the nervous rhetoric of libraries and just legitimize it, but instead critically examine it by looking at what is actually happening and what libraries really represent, there may still be hope for development of future libraries – a sound development based on stability and self-confidence.

Thanks for the inspiration, Jack.

Public libraries and social exclusion - needs for a new kind of research

Public library research is often both legitimizing and apologetic in relation to the mission of public libraries. On many occasions, this comes from the fact that research is performed in tight collaboration with libraries studied. An obvious risk of too tight relation between the researcher and the research is a mix up of knowledge interests. Although quite a lot research is being done, the truisms of library work are seldom seen put under scrutiny. Nowhere does this become clearer then when questions like social integration and/or exclusion is in focus.
This does of course not mean that all library research is “bad” research. On the contrary; during the last decade several projects and research programmes have been successfully completed displaying not only interesting results but good and creative research designs as well. As tend to be the case in most library and information science research, however, questions are dealt with one at the time. In Scandinavian public library research, as indeed in the libraries themselves, the issue of the library as a “meeting place” has been in focus now for quite a number of years. Much fine research has been done, most prominently perhaps by the Norwegian PLACE project, but many questions are still unanswered. The very concept of “meeting place” is still vague, at least if we get outside the strictly academic discussions, and it has triggered discussions about the concept blurring both the core values of, and the meaning of specific activities in, libraries.
It is, however, useless and uninteresting to ignore problems. Public library research needs not only to be cautious in empirical studies, but is often coloured by an almost romantic point of departure. Public libraries are talked about in arcaic terms, and the meaning of research is seen as helping libraries to maintain an identity which is hard to obtain in times of political ignorance. Political ignorance? Yes, I choose to use this hard term for the situation in Sweden and Europe today. Insecurity has now for long been a constant in Swedish public libraries and it basically stems from an anachronistic view of what public libraries can, might, and must achieve in society. The present government in Sweden is deliberately turning society back into a full fledged class society, enthusiastically supported by the ruling mechanisms of the European Union. It is very clear that an enlightened, strong population is not prioritized – the systematic deterioration of the school system is an example of this. It is also something which leaves public libraries in a political vacuum – the political prerequisites for its traditional mission is no longer there in the way they used to be. On the other hand, it is a situation which should (in the best of worlds) trigger the will to political activism and independence among librarians. Unfortunately this does not seem to be the case, as it is always more comfortable to keep quiet.
This situation is unique in Sweden. For the first time in a century, public libraries are not seen as means to increase the well being of citizens and the kind of individually based Bildung ideal that libraries have represented during the 20th century is not there any more. Still public libraries prefer to see themselves in the light of the 1970’s – a time which today seem more distant than ever. Of course, most librarians or library representatives would never admit this as they plunge themselves into new technologies and social media as an entertainment-stained substitute for the constructive combination of lust and seriousness that libraries used to represent. But it is a thin disguise. Most of it is basically nonsense to please political power, both locally and nationally – all dressed up as “user needs”.
What should the role of research be in this development? Well, most importantly, it is necessary to see that the knowledge interests of the library sector and the library research are not the same. Libraries need knowledge to develop new ways of working to secure the love of politicians (and users). The interest of research is analytical and critical, with the potential to expose the mechanisms of change in the relation between libraries and their societies. These two do sometimes collide.
It has been said many times that the social conditions of Sweden is so special that they can’t really compare to those of other countries with well developed library sectors, such as the UK. This is no longer true (if it ever was). With a political system effectively deconstructing the welfare state model built during the twentieth century, we should start looking more to the west than at ourselves to find inspiration for new research.
British library research has for a long time had a tradition of critically studying the library sector of the country, and its relation to both political power and local society. The results are sometimes both hard and invigorating. The perhaps most famous example of this is the Open to all? project carried out by Dave Muddiman and colleagues in the late 1990’s - final reports were published in 2000. The results of the studies in this project raise a fundamental, but quite annoying, question: do public libraries work against social exclusion, or do they indeed pander it? It is shown that librarians tend to focus on the wealthy middle class users that so much look and behave like themselves – even though the purpose of so many activities is the opposite. Now, to simplify the results from this large study in this manner is of course on the brink of the criminal, but still it is something that goes through it all in one way or another.
Recently a book on the issue of social exclusion came out in the UK: Public libraries and Social Justice, by John Pateman and John Vincent. It takes its departure in the Open to all? studies, and revisits the issue of whether libraries do actually work to meet those who most of all need the library. Once again, the result is that there is a will to do so, but librarians only rarely go there themselves. Conclusions are pervasive. The well educated middle class comes to libraries. We do not have to worry about them. It is the others; those who do not come, or dare to come, that should be in focus of the libraries’ interest – no matter the will of ignorant politicians. Still, the needs of the former are met and those of the latter are not. The book is a good example of when researchers see a different version of the truth than librarians. There is no reason to believe that Swedish, or Scandinavian, librarians behave differently. With few exceptions we can assume that the more “librarian-like” a user is the better service he or she gets – but we do not know, because no one has dared to ask.
We need research like this in Sweden, and in the other Nordic countries. We need to thoroughly question the “happy” national library statistics, we need to put a critical eye to the self proclaimed successes of the increasing numbers of integration projects in the library sector, and we need to make a deep investigation into the attitudes and prejudices of the librarians themselves. Not until this is done can we create a basis for understanding the complex relation between public libraries and the political mechanisms that drive them in one direction or another. Not until then can libraries be seen as they really are in contemporary society - political weathervanes or independent institutions that put the good of citizens first.





The results of the Open to all? project has been summarized in the following article:

Muddiman et al. (2001) "Open to all? The public library and social exclusion: executive summary". New Library World, Vol. 102(1163/1164), pp. 154-157.



Pateman & Vincent's book is the following:

Pateman, J. & Vincent, J. (2010) Public libraries and social justice. Farnham: Ashgate.

Document Studies - an alternative "paradigm" in Library and Information Science?

Do we see a shift in focus in Library and Information Science today? Is it possible to speak of the emergence of a new “documentation movement”? Should we speak of Library, Information and documentation studies? Are there “neo-documentalists” within the discipline, changing its pace into something new and exciting? Well, some think so.

Labeling research “movements” is of course difficult, and perhaps not even necessary, but more and more scholars today feel the need to define what is seen as a new kind of research that has emerged during the last six or seven years, and that either explicitly or implicitly is visible as something other than the information behavior centered mainstream of LIS that has dominated research for so long now. What is the perhaps most common denominator in this research is that it puts the “document” in focus of problem statements rather than “information”.

“Information” and “Document” are two of the most fundamental concepts that LIS is building upon, and the study of information/document use is at the core of the discipline together with the organization of information/documents. At first glance it might seem that the two concepts are synonymous, but they are not. It does matter which one is in focus.

To organize documents is quite a different practice from organizing information, and to use documents is something very different from using information. LIS has been so fixed by the “information” concept that it (the concept) has lost most of its meaning and thus become more and more uninteresting to work with; the widespread term “information behaviour” is on the verge of becoming nonsense. In this situation, document research comes in with a fundamentally material foundation for research which gives a whole different set of prerequisites for the formulation of problem statements.

What about the “neo-documentalists”, then? Well, I actually picked this term up from a conversation I overheard at the latest DOCAM conference in Denton, Texas in March 2010. The “neo” in neo-documentalist refers back to late 19^th century when Paul Otlet started his bibliographical project. His pivotal Traité de Documentation from 1934, together with for example Susanne Briet’s Qu’est-ce que la documentation? from 1951 formed the basis of the European documentation movement, working with the materiality of the document, trying to solve problems that we since the late 1970’s have been trying to solve with “information” research. The assumed new documentation movement build upon the works of these people, taking it far into the documentary environment of today.

At the beginning of the new century several happenings and publications occurred that would mark not only dissatisfaction with the state of LIS, but also openings of new perspectives that might take us a few steps further in our understanding of our discipline by defining new research problems. One such occurrence was the founding of DOCAM, The Document Academy, in 2003. A central publication was an article, “The social life of documents”, by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid published in First Monday in 1996. Another was the publication of Bernd Frohmann’s important book Deflating Information - from Science Studies to Documentation in 2004. There can of course be more titles mentioned, but I hold with these.

DOCAM has now become institutionalized with its annual conferences. Its reputation has grown slowly, and it is today considered to be one of the most original and vital arenas in LIS, with its open doors not only to academia, but also to the arts. Frohmann’s book was perhaps not the first to question the dominating mainstream research in LIS, but it managed to formulate a frustration felt by many in the field over the dominance of a research on information needs seeking and use that rapidly was turning increasingly redundant, but still claiming paradigmatic hegemony. Parallel to this, leading scholarly journal Library Trends published in 2004 a theme issue focusing on “Information and its philosophy” tying the problematic information concept to the fact that LIS is basically a material science building upon documents rather that the abstract “Information”.

What themes then dominate document research today? Well, some of them are

- document use (in daily settings)

- bibliography

- the role of documents in research and scholarly communication

- document architecture

- studies of document based institutions such as libraries, archives and museums

- document genre theory

There are more, but these are all examples of areas where the number of empirical studies are now growing. None of these areas are new, but taken together, they gain a kind of collective significance that they have not yet been acknowledged with. However, if one is to argue for a new line of research, or a new “paradigm”, one has to show where this research takes place and not least important, who does it. This is not always easy, as there is no program, no manifesto, no connecting conferences - DOCAM could perhaps be it, but in order to gain real significance it has to establish a routine for publication of the conference contributions. One way of finding “neo-documentalism” or documentation studies or document studies is of course to go through the literature. No major literature review has yet been made, but there should now be enough works out there to be able to formulate this research as a movement away from the traditional mainstream of LIS. This is not the forum for such a review, but I might well call for one.

It is important to recognize the amount of work that is being done within a “document paradigm”, as we must be able to present it to our students in a comprehensive manner, both on graduate and under graduate levels. It is indeed asked for.

A few interesting references and web pages:

"Document, documentation and the Document Academy", by Niels W. Lund and Michael Buckland, founders of DOCAM, in Archival Science 2009.

Interesting article on Susanne Briet and her contibution to the French documentation movement by UCLA researcher Mary Niles Maak.

French web page on Paul Otlet's Traité de documentation.

Pictures are of Susanne Briet and Paul Otlet

Dewey vs. The Public Libraries of Sweden - comments on a new report

In 2008 the National Library of Sweden decided to change its classification system into the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and soon thereafter Swedish Library Association made a statement urging all parts the Swedish library sector to adapt and use the same system. The initiative basically came from a few academic libraries already using the DDC, but as the question came up more and more institutions and individuals felt that this might be an appropriate time to make such a change which in both size and scope is of major historical significance. However, one part of the sector has remained skeptical all through the process – the public libraries. In most parts of the world, DDC is a classification system for public libraries. Academic libraries use the Library of Congress Classification or the Universal Decimal Classification. There are many reasons for this, not least from a theoretical point of view – DDC is simple and rigid compared to both LCC and UDC. In Sweden, academic libraries obviously see DDC as the best option available, while the public libraries mostly seem to have been left behind in the discussions preceding the decision of the National Library – until now.

Just a few days ago an eagerly awaited report that finally deals with the DDC and public libraries was published by the Swedish Library Association. The title of the report is En svensk övergång till DDK – vad innbär det för folk- och skolbibliotek? [A Swedish transition to DDC – what will it mean to public and school libraries?] and hopes where that arguments for why at all public libraries should bother to take part in the transition to DDC would be presented in a convincing manner. If indeed that was expected, the report is a major disappointment. No argument whatsoever is provided that may convince public librarians why they should take on the complex task of leaving the current nationally well established SAB-system. I’m not surprised. During the last few years that the issue of DDC has been up for discussion the public libraries have been a major concern.

The report makes one thing clear: we are not dealing with a pedagogical problem getting public librarians to “understand” the point of it all.

The perhaps major argument for the whole transition is the development of the international bibliographical environment and the increased ability to make bibliographic exchange on the international market. This is indeed a strong argument for academic libraries. To most local public libraries, however, this is of limited interest. Instead we are treated with a number of relevant issues and activities in local librarianship that need to be changed in order to make DDC work.

Conclusion: we will now implement a classification system that is inferior to the one now in use and in order to make it work at all, we need to change the way we work.

Librarians are expected to do a lot of additional work leading to most uncertain results. Why and how this is to be done is not mentioned - probably because no one knows.

The lack of constructive conclusions in the report is excellent as it can make a good basis for a serious discussion that sooner or later has to come. It is not the skeptical public libraries that are the problem – without doubt do they have reason to be careful here. Nor is it the National library. Instead, the most problematic agent in this situation is the Swedish Library Association itself, having so strongly advocated the shift to Dewey for all kinds of libraries. Advocating bibliographic systems and routines that are clearly inferior to those presently used in public library may put its credibility at risk. That would be serious as the library sector needs a strong organization to support its societal claims.

All this said, my own position in relation to this matter is relatively neutral. All bibliographic systems have their weaknesses, and therefore changing from one to another is, most likely, a case of exchanging one set of problems for another. The arguments for changing systems in academic libraries and in the national library hold. Concerning public libraries, the problems and obstacles pointed at in the report are all well known to anyone working with classification and thus easily foreseeable. The question now is how to handle them. Maybe this is an issue where strive for unity among all libraries should not be seen as an overall goal.

I hope this important report will trigger discussion and debate among librarians of all kinds.

The report En svensk övergång till DDK - vad innebär det för folk- och skolbibliotek? is available at the the website of Swedish Library Association.

The issue of introducing DDC in Swedish libraries was up for discussion 90 years ago as well – the situation was surprisingly similar. I wrote about this in an article “Why Public Libraries in Sweden did not Choose Dewey” in Knowledge Organization, Vol. 24(3), 1997, pp 145-153.

Digital libraries - why not?

What is a digital library? The issue of definition has been more or less dead now for several years. Not since Howard Besser published his definitional essay in First Monday eight years ago has there been a real serious discussion on how actually to define - and thus make visible – the most novel and innovative library type that we have seen since the emergence of public libraries. Somehow digital libraries are just “there”. But what are they? The library at my university is today approaching a 80 % acquisition rate of digital documents. Only about 20% of what is bought today are printed books and periodicals. Still we hesitate to call this a "digital library". If the same numbers would concern the buying of manuscript, we would most likely talk of a “manuscript library”; if 80% of the acquisition would consist of periodicals, we would talk of a “periodicals library”. Libraries are defined by the character – not just the content – of the documents of which they consist.

When have a library crossed the line between the “traditional” and the digital? Is it even possible to talk of established libraries as digital libraries – or are they something substantially different, and if so, of what does these differences consist?

These questions may seem simple. The answers waiting to be found are intriguingly complex.