ilsdissertation

The dissertation is all ready for handing over to the university for grading and feedback. Hurrah! I'll upload a finished .pdf version to these pages soon complete with the appendix and bibliography etc. But for now, here's the abstract as it appears in the preliminary pages:

ABSTRACT

Harrison (1994) suggests that landmark anniversaries within the librarianship can provide opportunity to take stock. Since 2006 sees the diamond jubilee of the teaching of library studies in Scotland, now seems like an appropriate time to examine the values of the discipline holistically.

By employing an archaeological technique in which primary texts are considered from select eras of library history, this literature review identifies a number of values inherent to the discipline of librarianship. The values identified fall loosely into two categories: those of the functional variety and those of an intellectual, moral variety. The values of the former group include (among others) material preservation, storage, mediation, organisation and accessibility. The values of the latter group include such issues as intellectual freedom, anti-censorship and the upholding of human rights. The symbolic nature of the library is discussed and a short manifesto for future librarianship is proposed in light of enduring values.

This chapter makes more interesting reading than the main chapters of findings and connects nicely with the introduction.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

This section discusses each of the values identified in the review in terms of their importance to librarianship and to librarianship of the future.( Read more... )

I've employed a page of instrumental quotes to open the dissertation. They'll be the first thing the reader sees after the title page and some legal/administrative gumph.

They all pertain to the 'golden thread' element of the project and you might also notice that I've employed quotes from famours library scholars of different eras to represent my archaeological methodology and the historical integrity of the idea. Irwin's quote even gets the ancients involved.


“[there exists] a golden thread that defines librarianship as a profession no matter where it is practiced.”
- Michael Gorman, 2003.


“Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, S. Augustine, S. Thomas Aquinas; the Lyceum, Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople, Paris, Oxford: the chain is there for all to see, both in human learning and in the books and libraries in which it is enshrined. … With such a heritage, to forget our yesterdays would be to lose the significance of today.”
- Raymond Irwin, 1964


“the vital principle of the library … has struggled through all the stages of its evolution, is common to all its different forms and will persist to be its distinguishing feature for all time to come … The vital principle – ‘the spirit of the library’ – is like the Inner Man … he cannot be cloven; he cannot be burnt; he cannot be wetted; he cannot be dried; he is eternal, all-pervading, steadfast and immovable; he is the same for ever.”
- Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan, 1931.

Here is the long-anticipated draft of the fourth chapter. I expected a chapter on the twnety-first century to be far shorter than the others yet it's at least as long as previous chapters, partly due to there being more primary sources of information available.

The more interesting final 'discussion and conclusions' section is awaiting a little feedback from my supervisor but will follow soon.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE VALUES OF THE TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY LIBRARY( Read more... )

So this is how the whole thing will be ordered. Behold my contents page. The dots have gone kinda screwy because of the way livejournal is but I assure you it looks good on the page.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page .............................................................. i
Declaration ............................................................. ii
Abstract ................................................................ iv
Table of Contents ....................................................... v

Introduction ............................................................ 1
Methodology ............................................................. 8

Chapter One: The values of the ancient library .......................... 10
Chapter Two: The values of the nineteenth-century library ............... 18
Chapter Three: The values of the twentieth-century library .............. 27
Chapter Four: The values of the twenty-first-century library ............ 38

Discussion and Conclusions .............................................. 47
Appendix: Grouped values ................................................ 56
Bibliography ............................................................ 57

Chaper Three has been complete for a while now but I refrained from postnig it here until a few imperfections were ironed out. I'm aware that some of these chapters can be difficult to read, so if you're a casual reader (i.e. not an information scientist or ILS student) or have chanced by this through a search engine, you may find these chapters a little boring. Keep in mind that chapters one to four consist of the fairly raw findings of a literature review and that the interesting, reflective stuff can be found in the introduction and in the [pending] discussion section.

CHAPTER THREE: THE VALUES OF THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY LIBRARY ( Read more... )

I've been reconsidering the title of this dissertation due to the way things eventually shaped out. I don't think this is unusual in academia.

The title originally proposed was From librarian to information professional: the changing values of the discipline.

The new one that I'm toying with going for is: The nature of librarianship: historically charting a golden thread of values.

The first draft of Chapter Two (Libraries of the Nineteenth Century) is now complete. This chapter may well end up being Chapter Three, depending upon whether or not my final wordcount allows me to include a chapter on Medieval librarianships.

I'm fairly happy with this chapter but it needs a little more work in terms of citations etc. I'm also intending on revisiting the bit about combatting censorship: while it's well reasoned, I think some harder evidence is required.

CHAPTER TWO: VALUES OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY LIBRARY( Read more... )

Reading Raymond Irwin’s 1964 book, The heritage of the English Library this afternoon, I came across a truly exciting nugget of information.

I’ve (perhaps foolishly) been putting off reading this book for a while due to the books rather specific and somewhat quaint title. Surely it'd be useful for Chapter Three of my dissertation (libraries of the nineteenth century), but not for the earlier ones. Of course, I couldn't have been more wrong. It transpires that this book begins with the libraries of classical Greece. The information I’ve found concerns Gorman’s “golden thread” – the entire crux of my dissertation being a search for this thread throughout the libraries of history. Irwin writes:

“The Acedemy at Athens maintained by its ‘golden chain’ a continuous tradition of teaching and an ‘apostolic’ succession through the long centuries from Plato and Socrates to Proclus and the Neo-Platonists: all but a thousand years. We can by a fair analogy adopt this term for the equally golden links that have handed on our tradition of scholarship and libraries from the beginnings of Western civilisation in classical Athens to the present day.”

Extraordinary! Irwin identified the existence of the ‘golden thread’ some forty years before Gorman. Not only that but he reveals that the very phrase has its roots in classical Greece – a fact that is beautifully semiotic and supportive of my hypothesis that the thread would have its origins in the ancient library.

It is wonderful news that I found this. I just wish I'd have discovered it earlier so I didn't have to revisit my Introduction and first chapter.

Chapter One of the 'Findings' section is complete. It focusses upon the values held by the libraries of antiquity. While it's a little clunky when I'm presenting evidence, I'm still quietly pleased with it. ( Read more... )

The structure quandary has been sorted out. ( Read more... )

Work on the first chapter ('The Values of Ancient Libraries') progresses nicely and soon I will have something substantial to report. In the meantime, I have rewritten my methodology section.

I decided to do this for a number of reasons but mainly those of precision and allowing for the wider use of secondary resources.

( Read more... )

Fairly happy with this completed intro.

INTRODUCTION ( Read more... )

A first draft of the 2000-word introduction has been completed and sent to my supervisor. I'm quietly pleased with it. Rather than post it all here, which I think would be unfair exposure for a first draft, here is the opening paragraph:

"Ideas and values change with time. What is blasé, undesirable or even taboo in one zeitgeist, is the height of sophistication or a product of the world’s greatest thinkers in another. One is reminded of such large-scale cultural shifts as the celebration of homosexuality in the times of classical Greece and its later prohibition; or the Christian taboo of anatomical dissection and the eventual recognition of its being vital to the progression of science. This inspires one to wonder about lasting values: whether they ontologically exist at all; whether they are ‘retranslated’ for each new generation or whether they can function as lasting and indelible cornerstones that allow individuals to arbitrate their actions."

The rest of the intro discusses what library values might consist of based upon Ranganathan's (1931) five laws of library science and Gorman's (2000) 'golden thread' of values.

The writing of the intro has, as much as anything, allowed me to get a large number of ideas in order and has left me ready to dig into the main body of this dissertation with a renewed vigour.

This week I'll spend much of my dissertation time reading literature regarding the history of libraries and librarianship in order to add to my list of core texts to review. Once these have all been decided upon, a proper plan/structure can be formed and the methodology section can be finally completed.

This is the first draft of my Methodology section. I've not run this by my supervisor yet so it's probably a little rough around the edges.

I've also omitted the titles of the actual books I'll be using as evidence, as I'm not yet 100% decided on these. In the second draft, the materials will be included in the '(a) The Chosen Literature' section.

( Read more... )

Since meeting with my supervisor last week, I have read a good deal more of the literature I picked up and written the bulk of the methodology section (sans listing the core texts I am to study - I've only decided upon two of the five I need). I'm almost ready to kick off on the introduction, waiting only some important books to arrive via ILL.

This is pretty good going. The target set at last week's meeting was for me to have a first-draft introduction prepared by the end of the month. To have that and a methodology section laid out would be outstanding.

I'm struggling to decide which of two approaches to take regarding structure of the main chapters. While this is not one of my official aims of the moment, I think it's important for me to have a good idea of the structure of the whole thing for when it comes to penning the intro.

The Quandary: I'll be reporting and commenting upon values held by the libraries of various eras. So I'm wondering whether it's best to structure it by era (e.g. A chapter on 'ancient libraries' detailing the values held by them) or by value (e.g. A chapter on 'attitudes toward freedom of information' detailing the attitudes to that issue through time).

It's a head-scratcher. If I organise it by era, I'll be able to contextualise things better but at the same time I'll need a place for explaining the defining points of the value or issue.

Aside from some light introductory reading, I don't want to embark upon this project until I can be sure that I'm going to get the go-ahead on it. I'm still waiting to recieve some grades, you see, from the second semester of the course and can only graduate to the dissertation level in the event of my being rewarded with an average grade of 60%. I don't think I'll have any major problems achieving this but I imagine that marking must be a more ruthless process at this stage of the game.

My supervisor assures me that things on the grading front are moving along swiftly:

"Yesterday's Examination Board for Information and Library Studies was able to consider marks for all the coursework which had been submitted. The Board's recommendations have been passed to Registry for final ratification by Senate and you wil be informed of the results as soon as possible."

A trip to Glasgow University Library leaves me with a pile of amazing books to read over the next few weeks. I don't think I'll be reading them in the conventional sense though (i.e. extracting facts and re-reporting them to support a hypothesis). As my dissertation is proposed as a 'cultural archaeology' and a 'literature review', these books were chosen to represent a cross section of thought and research in librarianship and information science over the past one hundred years or so, so I shall be treating each book as an artifact, as a piece of evidence to support what I will ultimately argue. I'll be looking for values and philosophies attached to the libraries of history and comparing them to each other and to the public libraries of today.

Perhaps most interesting is the stuff dating from between the late 1970s and early 1990s when the paradigm shift of the traditional library becoming 'something else' was really taking place. Some writers embrace the changes while others are fearful of them. J. H. Shera (whom I have fallen in love with so more on him soon, I'm sure) writes that "soon we will lose our profession to the engineer, to the scientist, to the information specialist, whatever you want to call him and we will be in a really critical situation."

I'm also finding a lot of excitingly critical stuff. It's surprising to see that so many writers are library traditionalists when it comes to the profession. I don't think they're oposed to progress - they like technology and streamlined library systems - but dislike the loss of skills that seems to he come with it and the overprofessionalisation. Crawford and Gorman (1995) write: "It is profoundly discouraging to read that the head of a public library system, a person who calls himself a chief executive rather than a library director, has turned all the librarians into information specialists. Every white-collar worker, professional or not, could be called an information specialist. It is a bland, meaningless term that weakens the position of the people who carry it and weakens the libraries (or should that be information centres?) in which they work."

This is the proposal and tentative title for my dissertation, as submitted to my supervisor a couple of weeks ago:

From librarian to information professional: a cultural archaeology into the changing philosophies of information science( Read more... )