"[T]he interpreted statement may contain absurdity." -- Ernest Gellner.

For years, there has been a page on this site which contained some general musings about the nature of library and information studies. It was based on the old Shannon and Weaver definition of information as "the range of freedom in selecting meanings", and suggested that librarians and archivists are about the business of turning data into information, and finally into knowledge. It also cautioned, echoing Norbert Wiener, that every communications technology was a control technology. In selecting meanings, we inevitably introduce limits to freedom, even perhaps to the point of exercising social control. Ranganathan's five laws of library science also figured highly in the thought behind the old version of this page.

The old page also noted that the sorts of data and information with which LIS practitioners dealt were usually constructed by humans in the first place. So, there was some meaning already inherent in the symbols with which we dealt. Unlike the natural science data, which are arguably more or less neutral until operated upon by an observing intellect, the letters of the alphabet and the sounds of human speech were invented to convey meaning.

The old article also recommended McKerrow's definition of bibliography, embellished upon by Gaskell, as "the science of the transmission of literary documents". Their idea of a study of 'anything which exists in variant editions' looked promising with respect to Web pages and other volatile digital artifacts. With the Web, the Internet has moved beyond text, in the strictest sense, and has become much more visual. Thus, the methods used in the study of the visual arts, hermeneutics, iconography, the notion of  Weltanschauung, and the concepts of provenance and rescension, would appear to have increasing relevance for LIS. 

Because librarians deal not only with recorded information, but also with people, human communication theory must figure into LIS too. Personally, I am attracted to Jurgen Habermas' notion of pragmatics - a sort of dialectical discourse analysis that takes in not just the explicit words of speakers, but also the affective or hortatory aspects of speech acts. For librarians must not only classify and categorize existing knowledge according to internationally recognized standards which they themselves develop, but also, during reference interviews and search query formulations, determine the true intentions of patrons, express them as concepts, and map those concepts onto the literature. This demands as well an understanding of the ways in which information is produced and disseminated, including the political and economic environments of production, and a feel for what McLuhan and Innis discovered about media. 

Practically speaking, some sort of systems view of the process is also needed, and I have a personal fondness for Peter Checkland's soft systems approach. Checkland talks about "purposive human activity systems" or "holons", in which inputs are transformed into outputs, within the context of a Weltanschauung, or 'world-picture'. His work derives ultimately from Ludwig von Bertalanffy's general system theory. Why should GST matter? Its principles can help answer the question of why a 'collection', whether local or distributed, is necessary at all. Von Bertalanffy and his followers noticed that as systems became more complex, they began to demonstrate higher order or "emergent"  properties which could be ascribed to the whole, but not to the component parts. For instance, you can write a paper with your fingers, but fingers alone never wrote a jot.

The act of organizing a collection sets up new relationships among its elements, and can of itself be a generator of meaning. Anyone who has ever watched a library's online catalogue grow will understand how new connections among ideas emerge as the database gets bigger and more complex. The organization of a library carries with it a certain responsibility - but then, so would the arrangement of a garden, or of a child's nursery. Large collections of information have profound social impact too, if the means to use them are so complicated or costly that disadvantaged groups or developing nations have trouble accessing them reliably.

Increasingly, I have been wondering just what Jesse Shera had in mind when he called librarianship "social epistemology".  Libraries, whether of print materials, or pixels, or sound clips, preserve ideas of the past and provide the basis for generating new knowledge, allowing people to share ideas across space and time. A library also provides a nexus in which this activity might happen. I think Shera might have intended something like 'the analysis of the ways in which information can be generated, categorized, accessed, made into knowledge, and used, within a specific society and at a given historical moment, and the application of subsequent understanding toward the solution of real problems'.  I rather like that as the basis for a broad definition of LIS.

St. Stephen’s Day, 2003.
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Looking back at these paragraphs, written in 2003, I would make some additions. For one, there is no mention of Thomas Kuhn in the above. But his notions of “normal science”, of “paradigm shifts”, of “scientific revolutions”, and of the need for science (or scholarship in general) to be seen as legitimate by the public, are also key, I think, to the study of libraries and media in the digital age.

Someone else is missing too - Aristotle. It was he who first invented the “Categories”, which survive in the journalistic questions “who, what, when, where, and why?” His additional questions, “by what means, and to what end?” are central to the Soft Systems approach mentioned above, and all can be applied both to surrogation and to information retrieval and reference.

As well, Hegel’s ghost lurks in the passages above. Perhaps, as much as it is a type of “social epistemology”, librarianship is also a sort of “phenomenology of information”.

  Christopher Brown-Syed St. Stephen's Day, 2003, and 1 August 2007. All rights reserved. Disclaimers.