2. Librarians and other information professionals, such as records managers, archivists and museum curators, have long been taken for granted as the almost invisible, but nonetheless omnipresent and indispensable, guardians of the record of human thought, creation, discovery and invention.
3. WHY do we think this is good? In other words, why do we do this work at all??????
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16. Action guided by habitus has the appearance of rationality but is based not so much on reason as on socially-constituted dispositions. Van House and Sutton, 1996
24. Donald McKay: this theory “ enables us to speak precisely and quantitatively. It provides objective substitutes for intuitive criteria and subjective prejudices” (McKay, 1969, cited by Borgmann, 1999, p. 132). Without the – appropriated and unintentional – conceptualisation of engineers, information professionals literally ‘cannot speak’ – since to do so is to risk relegation to non-scientific categories of subjectivity, intuition, and prejudice. Introducing a formula that appears to be able to measure information, this theory “at long last did for this crucial force of nature and culture what the sciences had done for matter, energy and organisms” (Borgmann, 1999, p. 132). The four basic entities of the proposed model are data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. They are the four entities of information theory and can be constructed collectively as a basic entity set, denoted by S’. The mathematical representation is s’ = ( (S, = 1 to 4) ) = W,I,K, W>), (1) where Sr = D = data, Sz = Z = information, S3 = K = knowledge, and S4 = W = wisdom are the elements of the set.
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59. IF IPs DO NOT REJUVENATE THEIR THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK, THEIR PRAXIS AND THEIR SOCIAL PURPOSE they are doomed.
Data, information and knowledge are thus collocated at the heart of a collection of complex interrelationships which are ideologically instituted, through selectivity within discourse. This study has shown from within the core of IP literature that they are articulated within ideologies which already pose a challenge to their putative role in society. Within the literature, these concepts have been reduced to such an extent that they do not appear to be complex or robust enough undertake the tasks with which they have been charged: can simple data be processed sufficiently to bring economic prosperity and freedom from disease? This reductionism and simplification is evident in the research done in the field, as well as in the definitions. Furthermore, there appears to be no recognition of the bias that this simplification implies, particularly when it is uncritically attached to technologies, which are then seen as the transforming agents, rather than the information itself. A computer cannot create knowledge
Exactly what the information professional’s role is in these processes cannot be described, although the implications of this rationalist, empiricist discourse are demonstrated in information work. One example is the classification and categorisation of documents according to content or subject matter. The classification systems commonly used (Dewey Decimal System, Library of Congress Classification) are not based on any principles of division that might be considered in a philosophical approach, but instead emulate those principles of Aristotelian categorisation which provided the basis for the division of universities into faculties, with the addition of taxonomies devised by Enlightenment scholars, such as Linnaeus. Such definitive and seemingly stable boundaries reflect both the rationalist and the hegemonic nature of science discourse. Available to IPs for the purposes of content classification are such theorisations as Shera’s social epistemology, which discusses the creation and maintenance of the body of socially constructed and validated knowledge (1965, 1972, 1976). Library classification and arrangement are understood to reflect and correspond to the structure of social knowledge – and yet its classification systems still operate as if established within science discourse – often reinforced for instance by mathematical formulae, such as those deployed in A81:
This is also related to our ideas of information needs and users. Sometimes librarians think that having access to the catalogue, or the metadata it contains, is enough to satisfy an information need (never mind access to the materials themselves) Sometimes, librarians (and others) think that access to computers – particularly those connected to the internet) will achieve our professional goals.
Information is a key component of what Giddens calls ‘structuration’, an emergent process in which neither structure nor individual action predominates. but (in other words, if it can be made meaningful). It must be related to what is already known and understood; but it must also have an element of novelty and so inspire creativity. Durkheim for instance rejected the idea that education could be the force to transform society (Simon and Pezone, 2003, p.1), because education teaches what and how other people thought, and does not encourage individual knowledge creation.
Frohmann comments: If, as Andrew Ross claims, ‘a code of intellectual activism which is not grounded in the vernacular of information technology and the discourses and images of popular, commercial culture, will have as much leverage over the new nomination of modern social movements as the spells of medieval witches or consultations of the I Ching’ (Ross, 1989, pp. 212-213), then the question of what intellectual activism in information science would look like cannot avoid confronting postmodernist debates about the relationship between the new communication and information technologies and human subjectivity (Frohmann, 2000, online). i.e. Information professionals need to engage in the current debates, in their terms. Information professionals are notorious for talking only to each other.
Rather than considering the information professions/disciplines in terms of documents (more or less ignoring their information content) and the places in which they are kept (libraries), it is therefore preferable to consider them as social institutions. ‘Institution’ here does not refer though to an organisation, but is understood in broader, sociological terms, to indicate the social, cultural or political structures that are a feature of a society, and which govern or pattern behaviour in some way, becoming as it were, customary. Institutions develop in order to serve some useful purpose, and function in ways that go beyond the conscious intentions of the individuals involved. Institutions have objective and subjective, formal and informal aspects. One example is education, which includes schools, the practice of teaching, teachers, pupils and learning materials, as well as curricula and standards. Institutions might in turn construct other customs and expected behaviours; they are intrinsically embedded in time, culture and society; and while they are sometimes considered to be extensions of human nature (e.g. patriarchy), they are always the outcome of social and cultural decisions. What is of particular interest to this work is what is called the ‘new institutionalism’ – the ways in which institutions, as defined above, are now seen to interact, develop out of and in turn impact upon society – in other words, their constructivist role.
