reclaiming the heartland: librarianship and the system of professions
DESCRIPTION
A discussion of our professional jurisdiction--what's central, what's not, and how this relates to change in the profession.TRANSCRIPT
Reclaiming the Heartland“Age of Discovery” Conference
Association of Southeastern Research Libraries July, 2007
K.G. Schneider
http://freerangelibrarian.com
Warning to Andrew*:
There will be a cat picture
* Pace, not Abbott
Obligatory Usability Observations
• LII subject radio-button test
• LII Usability study 2005 and help screens
• LII web log analysis and search behavior
• LII web log analysis and search success
• …results repeated and confirmed in other environments…
Yet…
• Users like to browse as well as search (our findings repeat Andrew’s findings)
• Users do benefit and enjoy value-added information
The System of Professions
Every profession aims for a heartland of work over which it
has complete, legally established control.
Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions
Jurisdiction
The “cultural machinery of jurisdiction”
• Diagnosis• Treatment• Inference• Academic work
Jurisdictional control
• Established by culture• Established by law• Protected by the
profession• Relies on a body of
knowledge that is abstract—but not too abstract
Jurisdictional control “should shape, indeed, the very public
idea of the tasks that the
profession does.”
Subordinate jurisdiction
Threats to Jurisdiction
• Technology• Extreme abstraction• Too little abstraction• Hostile takeovers• Internal organizational
change
A profession that defines itself by its tasks is a jurisdiction
highly vulnerable to dissolution through technological change.
A Cautionary Tale
Our Jurisdiction
A historical perspective through the Five Laws*
*chronologically remixed
Every reader his book
The library is a living organism
Every book his reader
Books are for use
Save the time of the reader
So where is our heartland?
Memory work
travail de memoire
“Memory work is a process of engaging with the past which has both an ethical and historical dimension.”
Library jurisdiction in Memory Work
• Defending the right to read• Fighting erosion of privacy• Preserving the written (recorded)
record• Defending and improving access
to information• Paying attention to the concept of
the public collection
Challenges to the heartland
External claims to expertise
Failure to make aggressive inroads in emerging jurisdictions
Task-based jurisdictional claims
Isolating ourselves from “the river”(Or, “nobody uses our data”)
UNimportant Jurisdiction Issues(As long as you’re in charge)
• Whether you or a machine modify a record
• Whether we have a bazillion separate catalogs or One True Database
• Whether we use Dewey, LC, SuDOC, BISAC, or Pick-up-sticks
• Whether you buy metadata or supervise its creation
• What formats we’re collecting
User-centric views
This is key…To reassert jurisdictional control, we
must let formal evidence-driven knowledge drive our decisions
Jurisdictional Heroes
• The “Endeca” libraries• The theorists fighting to build RDA so it puts
us back in the river• Danbury PL and Librarything for Libraries• Maricopa County and Phoenix Public• Various solo “embeds” extending our
jurisdictional claims• The anthropological studies being done of
faculty and IR use
Reinserting ourselves into the marketplace of ideas about
information organization
Maricopa
Things Badly Needed
• Librarian embeds across key professions• Redirecting efforts toward activities such as
automating classification and aggregating our silo-based efforts
• Bold theft of others’ ideas• Clear statements of jurisdiction (not task
knowledge)• Support for the think tanks and incubators
that will produce the next Dewey/Cutter/Sharp/Ranganathan/Lubetsky
More Unfinished Business
• Liberating ourselves from format autism
• Finding our way back to our users
• Reimbedding user-driven perspectives into our organizational theories
Our heritage, our future
This Space For Rent
Questions?