The Road Less Traveled:
A Public Library Perspective

Bob Watson

Ellen Altman, the Feature Editor of Public Libraries, recently noted¹ that library school course titles prove how firmly library education is tied to a bibliographic core. We librarians are trained to evaluate collections rather than consumer needs.

This wasn't always the case, though one has to go "pre-Dewey" to clarify the issue.

When I speak to Rotary Clubs I reach back to ancient Egypt and ask the membership to imagine themselves in Pharaoh's palace as he poses a "reference" question to his library staff. Perhaps he'd like to know how many soldiers he can put into the field. The club members agree that the library staff is likely to bring back an answer—rather than a citation—if they wish to keep their heads.

They also agree that finding such an answer implies understanding the ramifications of the question prior to pulling a scroll out of a jar. One needs to know population figures, the going definition of "soldier," the percent of population eligible for the draft, the length of the campaign season, the availability of training, and a number of similar factors.

This may not have been fair to the librarians but, hey, it was Pharaoh's library.

The point is simply that early libraries, and librarians, owed their existence to a patron and that patron could demand subject knowledge from the librarians which went beyond book titles and descriptions. This was true, in the great majority of libraries, through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. Many a scholar served out his retirement as a wealthy book collector's pet librarian. As we all learned from library history, Casanova became one.

In an age before elaborate organization schemes existed, detailed subject access was largely—often solely—through the librarian's mind. The patron considered this access part of the librarian's duties.

Today, of course, the public library patron is the local taxpayer.

That the "scholar librarian" disappeared is due to the factors which eventually led to large, and eventually enormous, libraries: universal literacy, cheap high-speed printing, and the growth of knowledge.

This high level of literacy is readily apparent in the letters common American Civil War soldiers wrote home. The resulting large market would put a premium on lowering the cost of printing. Somewhat earlier, Goethe's passing in 1832 had marked the end of the universal scholar and the beginning of specialization.

The stage for radical change in library practice was thus set in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One might say that the first stage of the "information age" began when librarians could no longer. keep up with either the growing complexity of their collections or the knowledge needed to connect the user to the proper material.

The two related problems called for two solutions. The knowledge issue was first addressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1870(?) essay "Books."² He understood that Harvard librarians did not have the time to introduce undergraduates to appropriate subject literature and proposed that a "Professor of Books" be appointed to do so. Melvil Dewey seconded this encyclopedic approach to collection subject knowledge in his unsuccessful 1883 Columbia proposal for a broad based professional library training program.³

The collection issue was narrowly, and specifically, addressed by Dewey's 1887 Columbia proposal. This was for a technical school to be established to teach the skills (library economy) needed to maintain an ordered library collection.⁴ The school's focus was, understandably, placed on bibliographies.

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Dewey's second proposal succeeded for two reasons. First, the greatest need of the time was for catalogers. University libraries had already ceased to concern themselves with user needs since such needs could not begin to be satisfied if the collections were not current.

Second, his proposal for a technical school met the definitions of "technology" current in the late 19th century. Columbia approved a narrow curriculum which did not impinge on what was already being taught. Dewey's prior proposal, as Emerson's, trespassed upon many other disciplines. It transcended categories in an age where education was driven by specialization.

The teaching of library economy became the chosen road. It was an understandable and eminently practical approach to the problem of maintaining libraries. It met a well defined need and had the virtue of offering respectable employment to countless librarians.

It was obvious, however, that library economy did not encompass all of the roles implicit in operating a library.

Samuel Green had insisted on the importance of reference work as early as 1876.⁵ Reference work, children's work, and reader's advisory work would eventually be accepted as valuable aspects of librarianship.

Yet, to be sure, over a very few years the ranks of the American Library Association filled with librarians trained in, and defined by, the narrow discipline of library economy. The association, though eventually recognizing the need for libraries to provide user guidance, restrained library graduate education and kept it focused on bibliographies.

Where it has been for over 100 years.

Yet the road less chosen, the one first described by Emerson, continued to be debated within the profession. Many individuals noted that it is one thing to maintain a library and quite another to help people use it. Knowledge about books and about what books contain are two very different things.

As Arthur Bostwick noted in 1920,

"A library distributes books. So does a bookseller. The functions of these two distributors, however, should differ somewhat as do those of the two producers of books—the author and the publisher. The author creates the soul of the book and the publisher gives it a body. The former produces the immaterial, possibly the eternal part, and the latter merely the material part. Likewise, in our distribution we librarians should lay stress upon what is in the book, upon the production of the author rather than that of the publisher, though we may not neglect the latter. We are, however, eminently distributors of ideas rather than of mere merchandise, and in so far as we may lay stress on the material side of the book—important as this is—and neglect what is in it, we are but traders in books and not librarians."⁶

Bostwick's point, that books have a content that we librarians cannot afford to ignore echoed and reechoed in the works of Ranganathan⁷ and Jesse Shera,⁸ with the latter proposing what he called "Social Epistemology" (the knowledge of what is worth knowing) to be the core of librarianship.

In the course of reading, I've collected citations supporting this point from writers as diverse as Jacques Barzun, D. J. Foskett, Ching-chih Chen, Charles D'Aniello, E. D. HirschJr., Bernard Vavrek, Archibald MacLeish, Mortimer Adier and John C. Swan. Among others.

The debate, and perhaps one should title it the Great Debate, as to what is a librarian continued between theorists and practitioners, with the practitioners always successful in ignoring the critique. They, we, have always been too busy doing what we had to do—build collections—to bother examining our own practices and assumptions.

As Louis Shores once noted, this essential pragmatism is very much a weakness of librarianship.⁹

In our concentration on technique we have lost our history and, as a result, are very much in danger of losing the future as our technique rapidly becomes a subset of database management. I suggest that if we attack two of our assumptions we, and our libraries, will be much better off for it.

The first assumption is that librarianship is what is defined in library schools. Nonsense. I suggest that librarianship is what libraries find themselves needing to do. If what is taught is not what we need to have done, then we must find individuals who are properly trained.

I am not arguing that the MLS is not essential to libraries. We still have collections, though it may be that copy cataloging will eventually replace the in-house cataloger—and this is surely not news. Even databases, and I want to say especially databases, need order and rigor and accessibility if they are to be searchable by persons with ordinary skill and merely passable subject knowledge.

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I am arguing that other degrees, perhaps a Masters in "Social Epistemology" or, to use a more modern phrase, "Cultural Literacy," are needed. These would give us the subject depth that so many writers have found lacking in our front-line staff. This was the problem Samuel Green found so vexing in the book-bound libraries of 1876; I lack the wit to adequately describe the problem in the digitally girded world of 1994.

Would these non-MLS individuals be librarians? I don't know and really don't care. I expect the public, which views our circulation staff as librarians as often as not, will think so.

The second attack is more daring. I suggest that librarians reverse the current argument and define database management as a subset of librarianship.

This may not change anything, but it gets the historical relationship right.

End Notes

1. Ellen Altman, "Close to the Customer," in Public Libraries, November/December 1993, p. 303.

2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Books," in Culture, Behavior, Beauty, Books, Art, Eloquence, Power, Wealth, Illusions (Boston:Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1870[?]), p. 8.

3. Carl M. White, The Origins of the American Library School (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1961), p. 79.

4. Ibid., p. 40ff.

5. Samuel S. Green, "Personal Relations between Librarians and Readers," in Library Journal, June 15, 1993, p. S4 (originally published in Library Journal October 1, 1876).

6. Arthur E. Bostwick, A Librarian's Open Shelf: Essays on Various Subjects (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, Inc., 1920, 1967), p. 67.

7. S. R. Ranganathan, Reference Service, 2nd edition, (London: Asia Publishing House, 1961), p. 53.

8. Jesse H. Shera, Sociological Foundations of Librarianship (New York: Asia Publishing House, 1970), pp. 84-85.

9. Louis Shores, "Our Quiet Force: The Changing Role of the Librarian," in Catholic Library World, May/June 1967, p. 589.

*Bob Watson, Executive Director, Franklin Park Public Library District.

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