Blatant Berry: More Than “Information”

Information is only one of many things found in a library. While many people view and use the public library as an information agency, its original mandate, many more now come to it to learn, to interact, to explore, and, of course, to be entertained. Yes, they come to the library to have fun. Reading Bill Crowley's “Lifecycle Librarianship” (LJ, 4/1/08, p. 46-48) made me realize how broad the mission of the modern public library has become. At the insistence of its users, the public library, indeed libraries of every type, provide an array of services and items that go far beyond “information” as it is usually defined.

Reading Crowley, I too was shocked by the narrowness of the definition of library and information studies he quoted from the Standards for Accreditation of Master's Programs in Library and Information Studies adopted by the American Library Association (ALA) in 1992. Such a narrow statement of the field's mandate would lead to the current conventional wisdom that something called “information” is the quintessential substance of librarianship, the embodiment of the profession. This is not only inadequate, it is inaccurate. Our professional outlook, our vision, is trapped in the 1992 Standards. (A recent minor revision did not address this issue.)

The quintessence of librarianship has to be to facilitate “the pursuit of Happiness,” as an early American president once put it, to foment our revolution. So even Crowley isn't quite broad enough. True librarianship, broadened by being both a discipline for research and study and a practice, embodies far more than information, lifelong learning, and even research. It encompasses all of human endeavor. It is far more than simply “concerned with recordable information and knowledge and the services and technologies to facilitate their management and use” as those inadequate ALA Standards put it, so lacking in eloquence and so narrow in vision.

People come to the library to do much more than that. Many are, of course, studying, searching, reading, seeking, and finding the recorded stuff. But many more are there enjoying, interacting, exploring, and, as old Jesse Shera once put it, engaging in “the quiet stir of thought” unrecorded, unmanaged, uncaptured.

This is no simple semantic game. It is an urgently needed effort to open up our professional vision and that of our academic colleagues who educate the new members of our profession. They must learn to educate for a full, liberated view of our field, a view that goes far beyond information.

Librarianship is not limited to “recordable information,” despite the recent assertion by a growing chorus of “librarians” who lean toward a specialization in something called “information science.” We are not simply “information professionals,” as some leaders currently label us. Librarianship subsumes both information and the language that makes that information “recordable.” When practiced within both the actual and virtual libraries of today, librarianship facilitates freedom, a full life, including much that we call entertainment, communication, and human relations.

This is vitally important to our understanding of the immense scope of our professional practice, and to our need to reform the vision that guides the graduate education programs that shape our newest professionals. Limited to the information-bound definitions of the 1992 Standards, these new graduates will be narrow informationists, unprepared by their education to serve those who come to the library for fun, for exposure to the dance of human life in its incredible miscellany. To fulfill that broad mandate from our users we must define a librarianship that includes information, but goes far beyond that narrow concept to something closer to what Thomas Jefferson told us we were all about: “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”