Library Services in Theory and Context

Chapter 18: Change

Introduction

So far the various aspects of the provision and use of library services have been analyzed. Relationships between the parts and between parts and the wider environment have been noted. These relationships have been seen as defining library services in any given situation. The motivations of the users, the pattern of their inquiries, and the levels of demand are the basis of the usage of the library's services. The allocation of resources to and within the library defines the intended pattern of provision. What sorts of services can be offered depends on the techniques and technologies available to the librarian. It was implicit in the preceding chapters that a change in any part could be expected to have some effect upon the whole: additional resources; changes in the social values of those allocating resources; changes in the motivations of those seeking to use libraries; changes in the environment which offer more (or less) by way of alternative sources of information; changes in technology; and so forth. Each of these can be expected to result in an altered situation.

In this chapter we take the opportunity to consider change in library services, not in terms of the minor, short term changes in equilibrium of the sorts just noted above, but in the longer term. There has been continuing concern about the future of libraries. Given the extent to which the provision and use of libraries are influenced by the social environment, and given possibilities for the use of new information technology, it would be unreasonable to expect libraries to remain static. But, if not, then what will be the nature of the change? The issue is not whether there will be change but what will be the nature of the change. If we are to make any claim to understand the nature of library services then surely we ought to have notions, some forecasts, about how library services might change. ¹

A book by J. C. R. Licklider entitled Libraries of the Future ² appeared in 1966 and provides a convenient point of departure. Licklider described how the digital computer and associated technology could be used to provide sophisticated access to recorded knowledge. He outlined an online catalog enriched with additional indexing, access to full text, and a good deal of what would now be called "expert systems." The library user and the system engage in dialogue, negotiating heuristically answers that are a compromise between what the user wants and what the system can supply.

Licklider described what he called a "procognitive system", that might now be described as a "smart" retrieval system. A library user is envisaged as sitting at a console using a typewriter and typing in a request for information on the topic "computer comprehension of semantic relations."

It is not that this vision is not plausible. It was and it still is, within limits. But what are the likely limits? What can be said of the completeness or potential distortion that this vision represents? Exploring the answers illustrates some of the difficulties inherent in such forecasting.

1. How complete is the forecast in its own terms?

The extent to which the "procognitive system" could work depends on the effectiveness of descriptions or "representations" of recorded knowledge. Consistent, unambiguous representation (e.g. indexing and abstracting) is more feasible in some fields of discourse than in others, in the "hard sciences" than in the "soft sciences," in descriptions of the physical world than of intellectual and social worlds. The problem does not appear to be a matter of inexpert indexing or abstracting. The linguistic ambiguities of, for example, some social sciences literature, appear to be symptoms rather than causes, which seem to lie in the nature of the knowledge itself. ³ Even though the system would be able to draw inferences and to make suggestions, the feasibility of Licklider's vision would vary by subject area, as he himself recognized. In this regard the vision appears to be applicable to a part rather than to the whole of recorded knowledge.

2. Is the forecast complete, covering only one aspect of the area being forecasted?

Essentially Licklider was concerned with techniques of retrieval. The vision in Libraries of the Future is incomplete—or the title is too broad. In projecting what may happen an author will tend to focus, consciously or otherwise, on an aspect of librarianship that has interesting possibilities and to extrapolate its development. Changing one aspect while keeping others more or less stable is a standard technique in science fiction writing. ⁴ It can be used in reverse, to project anachronisms into the past for humorous effect, as in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. In this case, projecting backwards into the past, the incongruity is obvious. With projections into the future, selective and uneven extrapolation can be difficult to detect.

3. How complete is the extrapolation in terms of its effect?

In Licklider's case the computer and its associated technologies were seen as a means of easing the problem of access to recorded knowledge through the creation of a smart information retrieval system. With hindsight we can now see that the computer and its associated technologies are also exacerbating the problems that Licklider's procognitive system was intended to relieve, since, in other contexts, computers enable a great increase in the quantity of recorded knowledge through word processing, teleconferencing, and the recording and accumulation of vast stores of data. In other words, they aggravate the problem as well as offering a remedy. This discussion of Licklider's book is not intended as a criticism of his work but as a means of stressing the problem of completeness in forecasting.

Some Assumptions

At this point it may be convenient to review some assumptions:

1. The most that we should attempt is to make some forecasts of what seems likely, not to make specific predictions.
2. A major concern (here as elsewhere) is to view the field as a whole and, therefore, to seek to avoid creating visions based upon the uneven extrapolation of one aspect or another.
3. Although it would be desirable to depict the future as it seems likely to be, such prediction is rash and a probable source of embarrassment if, in later years, anyone bothers to review the foolhardy predictions that have been made. There is, however, an additional motivation relating to the purpose of this book as a whole: the best basis for a good prediction would be a deeper understanding of the nature of things—and if we can understand better the nature of things then we can hope to be more effective in the present and near future regardless of the merits of long-range forecasts.
4. Not all options are considered here. A nuclear holocaust, for example, could change things a great deal. For present purposes we concentrate on the development of what we take to be long term trends.

Some examples of stability

A basic question is: what could change? The introduction of computer technology into library practice is good evidence that there has been and is likely to continue to be some change, but how extensive will that change be? It seems unrealistic to expect to know how extensive change will be, but it is possible to derive some insight by looking back and seeing how changeable different aspects of librarianship have been.

Consider, for example, the following topics: copyright; public access to government documents; education for librarianship; preservation and conservation; reduction of catalog costs through cooperative cataloging arrangements; and improved subject access. These are thoroughly contemporary issues, yet each of them is discussed in the Library Journal for 1886, where there is also discussion of women in librarianship and the lack of comparable pay—and a plea that the emphasis on library technology needs to be complemented by more bibliographical instruction. It is clear that not everything has changed in a century and, on that basis, there is an initial presumption of only moderate change in the next century. Perhaps this list of topics should be noted as a prediction of the contents of the Library Journal a hundred years hence.

Consider the following comments on the importance of having a collection development policy that includes selection of works by dissident writers who challenge the establishment:

Moreover, all those who have written most successfully against any science, or those who have opposed with most learning and force ... the books of some of the most famous and renowned authors [should be included] ... Neither may all those who have introduced or modified anything in the sciences be omitted, for it is merely flattering the bondage of man's feeble wit if the scanty knowledge that we possess of these authors is buried under the disdain to which they are inescapably subject for having set themselves up against the ancients and having learnedly examined what others were accustomed to accept by tradition. For this reason, since of late more than thirty or forty authors of reputation have declared themselves against Aristotle; since Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, have quite altered astronomy; Paracelsus, Severinus the Dane, Duchesne, and Crallius, medicine; and since many others have introduced strange and unheard-of reasoning, such as had never been foreseen, I affirm that all these authors are requisite to a library ...

The examples are, of course, dated and the wording sounds quaint, but the argument is still relevant and cogent in terms of the Western liberal tradition of librarianship. With the substitution of more contemporary examples, this text could still be used in a policy statement or course on collection development. The quotation is from Gabriel Naudé's Advice on Establishing a Library, first published in 1627, not one mere century ago but three and a half. ⁵ This represents a element of stability in librarianship that contrasts markedly with the rapid change that Licklider sketched.

Three Sorts of Change

The stark contrast in degrees of change in the two examples—Naudé on collection development and Licklider on retrieval—suggests new questions: How far are various aspects of librarianship capable of change? How far are different aspects of librarianship differentially prone to change? If we had some sense of how different aspects for library services appear to be susceptible to change, then we might hope to consider them separately and then aggregate the results. The rates of change in the past century should provide some basis for assessing the probable rates of change in the future.

Contrasts and similarities between librarianship in the 1880s and in the 1980s suggest that, as a first approximation, aspects of library services can be sorted into three categories with respect to change: (1) library values; (2) library technology; and (3) library science.

Library values

Library values include social values as they influence library policy and professional issues, as discussed in chapters 11 and 12 above. These library values determine the mission of the library service, the librarians' attitude toward readers, and the role of the librarian.

It should be stressed that the concern here is with values which underlie day-to-day priorities and decisions. We are not concerned here with the practical techniques used to implement those decisions. One might well commend Naudé's principles of books selection today, but not all of his advice on book procurement. His recommendation that one rummage around bookshops looking for printed sheets not yet folded and bound is no longer sound practical advice. ⁶

In general, library values appear to have changed rather little since the 1880s, at least in mainstream librarianship in the United States. There are variations in, for example, the relative emphasis on outreach from time to time.

Consideration of selection and censorship (both book burning and book burying) helps clarify the issues. The specific titles that a librarian is willing or allowed to include clearly change with time. Where the line is drawn between acceptable and unacceptable—to the librarian or to the community—will vary with respect to individual titles and categories of material as society's standards and social, political, and religious values change. Yet there will always be a line drawn somewhere and the arguments concerning where the line should be appear to vary little over time. In other words, a good discussion of selection and censorship in the 1880s is likely also to be a good and valid discussion in the 1980s and, probably in the 2080s—even though the specific titles and examples can be expected to change. ⁷

This is not to imply that library-related values are universal or unchanging. They are not. What would be acceptable in San Francisco today may not be acceptable in Teheran or Beijing. What is acceptable in Massachusetts now might not have been acceptable in colonial times—and vice versa. Although there can be change over time in a given place, such changes are based on cultural forces rather than time.

Library Technology

"Library technology" as used here means technology available for use in library services. Further, technology is concerned with the handling of physical things: paper, cardboard, microform, and magnetic, optical, or other recording media.

Technology is of particular significance for library services because libraries are concerned with recorded knowledge. Librarians and library users are concerned with ideas and assertions represented in texts and images, but can only do so through text-bearing and image-bearing objects, such as books made of paper, sound recordings on magnetic tape, numbers on cathode ray screens, and so on. These are the principal text-bearing objects.

Carbon paper, microfilm, and typewriter were all available a century ago. The telephone, teletype, punch cards, and electronic computers have added to the options available. Currently there is interest in optical digital disks to record texts and in radio waves to carry them.

While it cannot be known what technology will be available a hundred years from now the trend is clear: additional media for bearing text; more powerful technologies for handling text; and, unlike value-related aspects of librarianship, a clear line of progress with time. In this case we can be very confident that the technological tools available for library service will be very much improved in the future.

Library science

There is, however, a third category of aspects of librarianship that is distinguishable from library values and from library technology. This third category has to do with our understanding of library services and so is different in kind from either of the others. (This book is intended to be about the understanding of library services, rather than library technology or library values.) We use the term "library science" to designate this third category, but in doing so we are using the term in a narrower, stricter sense than is customary in, for example, the phrases `School of Library Science' or `Master of Library Science' where the term library science is used to denote the entire field.

Our narrower approach would in general, exclude library automation as being more properly included in library technology, but it would include the following:

1. Information retrieval theory, including the broad areas of the description and representation of the contents of pieces of recorded knowledge: indexing, cataloging, classification, abstracting.
2. Information gathering behavior: user studies, bibliometrics, social epistemology, and the utilization of knowledge.
3. Historical studies of books and of communication.
4. Analysis and description of bibliographical control in general.
5. The understanding of the nature and workings of libraries and related information services. ⁸

Of these parts of librarianship it can be said that there has been some progress in the past century but not very much. Because the central issues—that is, information retrieval theory and information gathering behavior—are, or should be, rooted in truly obscure aspects of human behavior, progress will be slow and difficult. Scholarly explanation will tend to lag behind the intuitive understanding of those intimately involved in the activities. Unlike library technology we cannot claim that there has been much progress, or that there is likely to be much in the foreseeable future. Much of the progress of the past century in these areas has been the refinement of earlier progress (e.g., cataloging principles) or concerned with relatively superficial symptoms of deeper phenomena (e.g., bibliometrics and citation analysis).

Assistance may come from related disciplines such as cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. Librarians have voiced hopes for the interdisciplinary insights available from sociology, psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, but, over the past century, the contributions of these disciplines to the understanding of librarianship have been modest and more relevant to context and background than to central concerns. One might wish that the intellectual history of librarianship and of library schools—the effects of different disciplines and strands of thought—had some of the attention devoted to the institutional history of libraries and library schools.

A critical assumption here is that the contribution of artificial intelligence will be modest and/or concentrated on the simpler problems of library service. What we might expect would be different if one were to assume that artificial intelligence will have a massive effect or that it will solve the more intractable problems of indexing, interpreting, and explaining.

The extent and academic context of librarianship

In recent years there has been a broadening of the scope and extent of librarianship, often using an expanded name, such as "library and information studies" or "library and information management." The contexts of "library and information management" are clearly very extensive: libraries of many kinds, obviously, but also online retrieval services, archives, databases, records management, and documentation of many kinds in engineering, litigation and bureaucracies. Whether or not the activity is labeled librarianship is hardly relevant. Library service can sensibly be viewed as one member of a family of retrieval-based information services and schools of librarianship could and probably will become, by merger or by expansion, colleges of broader scope—with the Master of Library Science (MLS) degree an important specialty within a range of programs. There is currently some movement in that direction, largely fueled by practical considerations of enrollment and placement.

There are plausible theoretical arguments why this trend could be expected with the gradual maturing of the academic side of librarianship and the evolution of library schools as academic departments. Although library schools are ordinarily viewed in relation to libraries, they also need to be viewed in their own right—as academic departments in an academic setting. ⁹

A more conceptual academic perspective is possible. For example, one can take the view that information science has to do with representations of knowledge both in the abstract sense ("texts") and the physical manifestations of these representations ("text-bearing objects"). Within that broad area, a plausible conceptual definition—as contrasted with an institutional definition (i.e. library schools) of the scope of schools of "library-and-information-studies" as they mature would be that they specialize in the analysis, description, storage, arrangement, retrieval, and use of representations of knowledge. The arrangement, description, and retrieval imply representations of the texts and images. The library card catalog, composed of brief descriptions of books and journals, is a familiar example of the representation of representations of knowledge. ¹⁰

Information retrieval may be regarded as central because it includes principles of indexing, cataloging, classification, content analysis and description, techniques of storage, strategies for retrieval, and similar sorts of activity. Yet retrieval, though central, cannot be the only concern. In order to see retrieval in context, information studies in the broader sense need to be examined. Such studies concern representation of knowledge, knowledge itself, and, indeed, people and their needs insofar as their needs are related—through knowledge and representations of knowledge—to retrieval.

Pragmatic and theoretical views that argue for more broadly based schools are reinforced by considerations both of economies of scope and economies of scale. Hence the forecast is that the presently prevailing pattern of "library school" with the primary or sole mission of awarding a "library degree" will soon survive only in isolated cases of arrested development.

Curriculum

Any given curricular content can be packaged many different ways, and any particular forecast of the future curriculum is as likely to be criticized for the way it is packaged as well as for its contents. The content of the Master of Library Science degree and its successor program is likely to resemble current programs in broad outline. If the mission of library programs is to bring information to people, then that mission itself will be unaffected by changes in the media used to bring information and people together. Therefore, the curriculum of the future can reasonably be expected to continue to contain a few basic overlapping elements:

1. The role of information and of library services in society.
2. The needs, information-gathering behavior and institutional contexts of groups to be served—e.g., students, researchers, children, the aged, and so on.
3. The theory and practice of information retrieval—cataloging, classification, indexing, bibliography, etc.
4. The managerial, political, and technological means most likely to be useful in developing and providing good library service.

The least amount of change can be expected in those parts of the curriculum that deal with library values. It is not that these values cannot change, but rather that, in the United States at least, there is no obvious reason to expect the major cultural and political changes that would move us from the Western liberal tradition of library services. Librarians may well seek to resist such changes.

Librarians can hope for, expect, and should actively seek to effect improvements in their understanding of the provision and use of library services in library science, as narrowly used in this chapter. It is not clear that substantial progress should be forecast, however. Forecasters can confidently predict dramatic changes in information technology, changes that will offer capabilities that are currently unavailable.

The prospect of having catalogs, bibliographies, and texts all online is already beginning to overcome some of the major barriers to good service imposed by the constraints inherent in the technology of cardboard and of paper. One such barrier is the historic separation between catalogs and bibliographies; ¹¹ another is the physical separation of the catalog from the text; a third is the need for the user to travel to the library or for "hard copy" to be transported to the user in order for the human eye to see the text. Information technology is beginning to remove these three familiar physical impediments to good service. Currently there is a fundamental move from providing library services in libraries to providing library services to wherever people happen to be. Online catalogs, online reference, and telephone service from reference desks are steps in that direction.

Librarians and their schools are likely to be preoccupied with the excitement of changing technology, at least for the next few decades. Yet paradoxically, if the technological change is so great it may in some sense be trivial. If storage problems diminish, problems of access become dominant. Yet what information technology contributes best is physical storage and physical access. There remain the problems of deciding what should be retrieved, of language barriers, of comprehension, and of the politics of access to information. The control of access to any resource is properly viewed as a political matter.

The excitement of library technology provides a line of rapid change; one may hope for library science—the understanding of library service—to change too; and one may hope for library values to change but little.

Go to Chapter 19

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¹ This chapter is based on M. K. Buckland, "Education for Librarianship in the Next Century," Library Trends 34, no. 4 (Spring 1986): 777-87. The advice of John Ober is gratefully acknowledged.

² J. C. R. Licklider, Libraries of the Future (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965).

³ M. Bunge, Scientific Research I: The Search for System (Berlin: Springer, 1967), pp. 97-8. See also above, chap 8.

⁴"The science fiction writer's task is both more crucial and more difficult because he is extrapolating, speculating. The historical novelist has a solid and readily accessible framework of known fact to fall back on; the man who speculates about the future has only his knowledge and his reason to guide him." R. A. Heinlein, "Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults, and Virtues," in B. Davenport et al., The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism (Chicago: Advent Publishers, 1959), pp. 17- 43.

⁵ G. Naudé, Advice on Establishing a Library (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), pp. 23-4. Originally published as Avis pour dresser une bibliotheque in 1627.

⁶Naudé, Advice, p. 54.

⁷ "Basically, the issues involved in censorship cases do not change. All that changes is what society considers acceptable and unacceptable." A. Curley and D. Broderick, Building Library Collections, 6th ed. (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985), p. 145.

⁸ This outline draws on that of P. Wilson, "Bibliographical R & D," in The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages, ed. by F. Machlup and U. Mansfield (New York: Wiley, 1983), pp. 389-97.

⁹For further discussion of the maturing of library schools as academic departments see M. K. Buckland, "The School, Its Faculty and Students." In Changing Technology and Education for Librarianship and Information Science, ed by B. Stuart-Stubbs. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1985, 117-27.

¹⁰Arguably the emphasis on text and text-bearing objects is too narrow and "signal," "signal-bearing object," or even "information" and "informative objects" would provide definitions that are more complete. Probably so, but for present purposes we use "text" and "text- bearing objects" without wishing to imply that we exclude anything other than written language.

¹¹R. C. Swank, "Subject Catalogs, Classifications, or Bibliographies? A Review of Critical Discussions, 1876-1942," Library Quarterly 14, no. 4 (October 1944): 316-32. Reprinted in A Unifying Influence: Essays. (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981), pp. 1-27.

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