If you’re not familiar with the thought of Jesse Shera, you should be, and an easy place to begin that familiarity is Jesse Shera, Librarianship, and Information Science by H. Curtis Wright. This was originally published as Occasional Research Paper no. 5 by the School of Library and Information Science, Brigham Young University in 1988, and is now reprinted with a new introduction and index by the Library Juice Press.* Since the library school at BYU has been closed for 20 years, I’m assuming this has been out of print for a long time. Welcome back.

Some might call it a biography, and a review of the first edition in 1988 criticized it as a “run in attempt” at a biography. However, biography is the wrong word to describe the book. Yes, we find out a little bit about Shera’s childhood history and early manhood and a little bit more about his early career in libraries. However, the bulk of the study isn’t about Shera’s life, but his thought, specifically his intellectual journey from believing information science provided the theoretical foundation of librarianship to his belief that “symbolic interactionism” instead provides that foundation. This is combined with an extensive, possibly exhaustive, bibliography of Shera’s 57 years of publications. Of the 120-or-so page book, roughly half is the lengthy essay on Shera’s thought and half the bibliography. The combination makes this an indispensable volume to begin a serious study of Shera.

Early exposure to librarianship in the 1920s convinced Shera that librarianship as it had traditionally been practiced was a cramped and overly practical affair, and he spent the rest of his career trying to reform the profession, at first from the inside, later as a professor of library science at Chicago, and finally as the Dean of the library school at Case Western Reserve. During the 1940s and 1950s, Shera came to believe that the theoretical salvation lay with information science and technology. He was a cofounder of the reorganized American Documentation Institute, and cheered on the impressive gains of information science during the period. Eventually he changed his mind, saying much later that “twenty years ago, I thought of what is now called information science as providing the intellectual and theoretical foundations of librarianship, but I am now convinced that I was wrong” (41).

He changed his mind because he came to believe that librarianship is a humanistic affair involved with human communication, knowledge, and ideas. Information science is no such thing. While information science can provide useful tools and improve processes, it can never be the theoretical foundation of a field primarily involved with humans communicating ideas. “Information science . . . deals with only a part of what the librarian does” (45). Regardless of the prevalence of information science and technology useful to librarians, Shera believed that “the social purpose of the library remains unchanged–to bring the human mind and the graphic record together in a fruitful relation” (44). Thus, while librarianship might make use of science, it isn’t itself a science, and it has little to do with the information in information science.

At this point in the argument it might be useful to define terms for those unfamiliar with the debate. Most librarians believe we’re in the information business. We even have desks that say “information” on them, so that everyone knows what we do. And, in a sense, we are in the information business. However, the “information” in information science isn’t the same thing as the “information” that librarians trade in. (For a lengthy discussion of what “information” means to information scientists, I recommend James Gleick’s The Information. For a totally unrelated adventure story about a woman who trades in information in the sense librarians deal with, you might try Taylor Stevens’ The Informationist.) Here’s a key paragraph from Wright:

It was librarians, Shera reminds us, who “eagerly seized information science as potential supports to their . . . professionalism.” But information science, he says, has “misinterpreted [Claude] Shannon and [Warren] Weaver’s specialized use of the noun information and assumed that it related to the communication of knowledge rather than the transmission of signals.” This has created a genuine problem for libraianship, because Shannon was interested solely in creating a theory of pyhysical signals for describing “the message-carrying capacity of a symbol, a telephone wire, or any other medium or channel of communication.” (47)

Information science is concerned, according to Shera, purely with the transmission of signals, while librarianship is founded in human interactions and is concerned with ideas and knowledge as well as information. While the efficient transmission of signals or the storage of information in the IS sense is a necessary part of librarianship, it’s not as sufficient part.

Shera’s finally believed that “symbolic interactionism” should provide the theoretical foundation of librarianship. Symbolic interactionism is a theory borrowed from George Herbert Mead. Supposedly, unlike information science or systems theory, symbolic interactionism “investigates the psychophysical interaction of the empirical order and the ideative order in human beings by studying the relationship between the physical symbol and its symbolic referent” (55). While I accept the humanistic nature of librarianship, I wasn’t convinced that symbolic interactionism as such provides a theoretical foundation of the profession, and there wasn’t sufficient argument in the book to persuade me. It is perhaps the one flaw in the book that Wright, a friend and former student, provides little critical distance from Shera, because precisely at this point I would have preferred a little critical analysis in addition to the clear explanation of Shera’s thought.

However, that wasn’t the purpose of the book. There was enough to explain what Shera believed and to some extent why, and ample resources in the bibliography to follow Shera further if I cared to argue with him. So, overall, a satisfying volume, a quick read, and a passionate introduction to Shera’s thinking. Anyone concerned with what librarianship is or should be would profit from reading the book.

*[Disclosure: Library Juice Press published my book Libraries and the Enlightenment.]

Back from a long vacation, caught up with work that piled up while I was gone, and ready to catch up on my library lit reading. So I started reading, backwards from this to this to this to this. I can say one thing for Rick Anderson, he knows how to get a debate going.

The debate concerns an Ithaka “issue brief” by Anderson called Can’t Buy Us Love. The basic thesis, as I understand it, is that research libraries should devote more resources to digitizing their special collections and making them discoverable. I don’t think anyone disagrees with that claim, which is probably why there’s not much discussion of it. This increased emphasis on special collections will require a shift of resources away from something, and for Anderson that something is “commodity documents,” by which he means documents easily available cheaply elsewhere, especially “trade books that are produced in large print runs.” The recurring example is a 1975 printing of East of Eden. If I’m reading it right, he’s saying that research libraries should maybe buy fewer popular books published in America, devote fewer resources to housing them indefinitely, and devote more of that money to special collections processing and digitization. That seems to me a plausible interpretation of the basic argument, which isn’t especially provocative even if one disagrees with it.

The controversy seems to be about two issues: the question of what constitutes commodity documents and their relationship to the mission of research libraries, and the claim that focusing on special collections and moving away from “commodity documents” somehow opts out of the so-called scholarly communications wars, because digitizing our own special collections “is neither undermining the existing scholarly communication system (except to the extent that it pulls collections money away from commercial purchases) nor supporting it.”

Anderson claims that, “With the advent of such internet-based outlets as Amazon Marketplace and Bookfinder.com, however, every home with an internet connection has direct access to the holdings of thousands and thousands of bookstores around the world, and the likelihood of finding a remaindered or used copy—often at a price of literally pennies, plus a few dollars in shipping—is very high.” It seems to me that the scope of “commodity documents” is pretty small compared to the breadth of research library collections. Anderson already eliminates the budget busting scholarly journals. University press publications aren’t nearly as cheap and readily available as old bestselling novels. Foreign publications aren’t so accessible after a while. Trade books in large print runs aren’t a huge percentage of a lot of research libraries’ expenditures, but possibly buying fewer of them, or perhaps keeping fewer of them as they get older and less used, would provide some savings that could be devoted to special collections. So what if it might be true, as Anderson claims, that “the library’s role as a broker, curator, and organizer of commodity documents is fading,” if commodity documents as such are a relatively small part of research library collections, which I believe to be the case. On this one, I could agree with his basic claim without thinking it particularly radical or controversial.

The other controversy about “opting out” of the scholarly communications wars could be puzzling, because as it’s framed the proposal has nothing to do with the scholarly communication wars. Whatever wars there are concern commercial scholarly journals, almost all STEM titles, and these are deliberately left out of the scope of discussion. That claim is simply irrelevant to the main argument about special collections versus commodity documents.  Reread Anderson’s article without the “Opting out of the scholarly communications wars” section, and see if that harms the piece at all. The key, though, is that the argument is framed to avoid problems in scholarly communications, except that can’t really be done.

Instead of being an unnecessary diversion, the section about scholarly communications wars is more a sleight of hand. It’s pulling a rabbit out of a hat while ignoring the elephant in the room, if I can mix my cliches. The basic claim is that libraries should digitize and make available more of their unique content, which, of course, lots of libraries are already doing. The resources to do more of that have to come from somewhere. Libraries could buy even fewer popular books than they already do. Or, maybe, they could opt into the scholarly communication wars, do their best to promote green OA, and reduce the stranglehold of commercial STEM publishers, because that’s where most of the money goes. When it comes to discussing where resources go within libraries, nothing escapes the scholarly communications wars. You can simply refuse to talk about it. You can claim that librarians doing so are putting politics above patrons. You can pretend that budgets for books and other resources just gut themselves. But you can’t have an honest discussion about where scarce resources in libraries should go without talking about problems in scholarly communication, whichever side of the issue you’re on.