The Australian Library Journal

The academic library: a post-modern Lazarus?

Peter Pierre

Manuscript received August 2004

This is a refereed article

The wealth and well-being of any culture is dependent on the knowledge it possesses and produces. It is through knowledge that the culture defines itself and improves the lives of its subjects. Foucault realised when he set out on The Archeology of Knowledge that although he was to be the first to set down on paper a complete and philosophical history of knowledge, he knew that he was himself wandering in an historical space, collecting pieces of knowledge from time past to re-assemble and create new history, or 'a history of ideas.'(Foucault, 1969) When Foucault set out to map this evolution of ideas, where would his first stop have been? When he decided to embark on writing this archeology of knowledge, what institution would he immerse himself in? Where would Foucault have spent most of his time, researching, thinking and writing one of the most influential and important philosophical works of the 20th century?

To Foucault, the library was not merely inert or non-affective storage, but a place where the texts themselves were actively re-interpreted. Librarians make decisions every day which influence these re-interpretations of the texts. They catalogue, shelve and disseminate information according to a predetermined, precise and universal structure so as to make information easily accessible. The library is a poster child for positivists. Foucault argued that libraries are not merely voids where information is held, but are also places where new knowledge is born. The very arrangement of material in the library becomes a source of new knowledge, where:

[...] fantasies are carefully deployed in the hushed library, with its columns of books, with its titles aligned on shelves to form a tight enclosure, but within confines that also liberate impossible worlds. The imaginary now resides between the book and the lamp (Foucault, 1977).

It is clear that Foucault believed that without the library, knowledge and by extension literature, would not exist, or at least would not be able to progress. As Radford writes: 'The library becomes an instrument of possibility rather than a place where possibility seems exhausted.' (1992). The library was a place of immense importance in culture, where there were people who could help in the search for knowledge and who had knowledge themselves. These people, the librarians, were the conduit between the culture and its warehouse.

I use the past tense here because the library is no longer what it used to be, and its librarians have also evolved. 'Change is good. Change is inevitable'. As professionals, we hear such mantras every day: some days we might even espouse them ourselves. Would Foucault have recognised today's academic library? Great open spaces, where banks of computer monitors glow constantly, where indescribable amounts of information can be viewed on screens like photographic light-boxes, where information is filtered through search engines and metadata, rather than modulated by knowledgeable librarians, who have now been reduced to functioning as a help desk for search engines. Now it is the norm, rather than the exception, to hear a librarian show someone how to conduct a database search and help the searcher on their way. No guidance on how to interpret the knowledge they are about to unearth is offered; in many university libraries there is an explicit policy to not offer any interpretative assistance. Librarians are neutral and intellectually neutered keepers of information who do not offer any suggestions, interpretations or observations on the knowledge that is unearthed by their users. This occupational version of Switzerland is clearly a mirage, but when a professional group loses part of its identity, the instinct is to hold on to whatever can be held. The notion of neutrality is one thing that is not under threat; rather the opposite is true because it furthers the aim of the postmodern library project so that the keepers of knowledge will resist searching for truth or meaning.

'Truth does not exist unless it is known.' Foucault would have endorsed this and it is likely, when considering his view as expressed in Fantasia of the library, that he wouldn't have considered librarians in this light. As librarians we also know the fallacy of the neutrality notion, but we are 'trapped within our own discursive formations,' (Wiegand, 1999) and so are unable to see clearly what is happening to our institutions. The fact that we are not offering interpretations of the quality of the information retrieved by our students does not mean that we are unable to. Part of the reason for this is the assumption that whatever is on the academic databases that we subscribe to is correct. Nothing could be further from the truth. Truth itself is under increasing pressure in our time, and there is a greater recognition that what is 'truth' for one individual is not necessarily so for someone else.

The culture we live in dictates our version of it; whether it is a western world view of the truth, or a Middle Eastern version of it. The truth on its way to becoming accepted is circulated through various discourses in the culture. Truth becomes knowledge (or vice versa?) and eventually ends up on the shelves of a library or, more likely in post- modernity, as data on a server somewhere. This somewhere is usually the United States, where it has become increasingly obvious in recent times that the dominant truth is strikingly different from that in other parts of the world. For the sake of argument since much of what is in our databases originates from the US with their distinct cultural underpinning does that not then mean that it is also our truth, because we subscribe to it, both literally and metaphorically? No librarian would readily agree with that statement, but without guidance from us, our students will not be as easily able to make the distinction between different versions of truth. The nature of the format knowledge is stored under or accessed through is cause for distrust, and so the postmodern idea of there being no absolute, single truth is again fulfilled. But in our increased reliance on online databases, knowledge is becoming increasingly homogenised. When that happens, truth is no longer knowledge; it is in danger of becoming propaganda.

There is also a separate danger rarely mentioned in relation to the almost exclusive reliance on online databases. In many university courses, the first year is combined for all majors in order to give a shared grounding to academic life, to lay the foundation for the rest of the degree and possibly in these economically rational times to achieve certain efficiencies of scale. When the deadline rolls around for the completion of assignments by this aggregated cohort there will be, in some cases, more than a hundred, perhaps several hundred, students completing assignments within the same parameters. For many, the first, and often the only stop will be the library's electronic databases. Without much fuss, they will devise a search strategy based on the assignment parameters as outlined in their course handouts, and so many students will end up retrieving and basing their essays and reports on identical material collected from the database.

This inbred and circumscribed use of material will result, in the main, in the majority of students being exposed to only one version of the truth - the one that the publishers of the databases dispense. With the loss of book-based learning, we have lost control over what is in our collections. Libraries have been abandoning the physical, tactile world of raw unprocessed knowledge material, and are more and more relying on prearranged packages to access information through the aggregation of serials. We have outsourced almost everything that can be outsourced and as a result, cataloguers are a dying breed. In the post-modern library, the librarians do not have contact with the material in the library, mainly because much of the information in demand is electronic, but also because there is no need for a librarian to handle books or journals any longer. Someone, somewhere at the end of an infinite electronic line, has already classified the physical material that finds its way to the shelves, so the librarians lose more and more contact with their own collections.

Obviously, many of us would say that there is no choice in the matter, pointing to the access versus ownership debate that has been ongoing during the last decade. Under the auspices of information technology, with its inherent postmodern ideal that 'knowledge is objectified through the technologies used to communicate [it]...' (Budd, 1998) academic libraries have come to a point where searching the databases has acquired hegemonic status and the search is more important than the knowledge it uncovers. Because the amount of knowledge stored in an aggregate database is simply enormous, the task of extracting a sufficient modicum of information from it is not a difficult task. Even the most flawed search has the potential to conjure up results from the almost limitless amount of information being searched. They are conducted with speed as the primary concern, which turns the searchers into knowledge hoarders, who are continuously piling up information in a never-ending procession of printouts, indecipherable hyper-links and endnote entries, all to be read at some undefined later stage. Since the search is very similar to searching the internet, the same distractions occur where there might always be more and better information just over the virtual horizon.

In the academic library today chances are that there will be a multitude of computers in the middle of the room. In some instances a librarian might be circulating through the room, offering advice on constructing searches on the various databases. It will be rarely that assistance is given to a student who is unsure of the quality of the information uncovered, nor is the librarian in a position to help with the topic, sometimes by choice, but more often than not, because that is not part of their job. For many years, librarians knew what was in their collections. They had this knowledge because they were intimately connected with what was on their shelves, through cataloguing, selection, and receiving of the materials. There is little doubt that a librarian who had a book placed on their table before it went out to be shelved would browse the book at the very least, sometimes actually read it. In either case, the physicality of the item provided a hook in the mind of the librarian that would be tugged at some later stage at an interview, or a request, where a user inquired about the subject. This is even truer of the specialised subject librarians in our universities.

Foucault believed that the very existence of knowledge in our presence is enough to make us absorb it, and as such libraries are crucial to the growth of knowledge. It is as if a book can osmotically leak knowledge through being handled. Moving through a library in search of knowledge is an organic, serendipitous pursuit where the thirst can be slaked by browsing through and past the subject areas where one started. In contrast, when engaged with a mechanical database, one is confined to the search results, and the knowledge one gains is dependent on the quality of the search. There are no accidental finds to be had; in fact in a database every path is a dead end.

The effect of a library where the librarians are not intimately familiar with the collection can be devastating to both students and the library itself. To the students it means that the librarian is no longer someone who they can turn to as a first, or last resort; who can help when no-one else can. Once they have accumulated what they judge to be sufficient information to fulfill their needs, they are left alone to interpret and analyse it. The role of making our users knowledge-literate has been obliterated by our disconnection from our collections. For universities, this means that the quality of graduates will fall, initially slowly while there is still some residual knowledge circulating through the corridors of the library, but this will accelerate once all the knowledge contained in the library resides in data bases and in a diminishing collection of unknown, unused and un-evaluated monographs.

The management practices accepted by libraries have not only brought with them a new, business-oriented way of thinking, but also a production-based view of how we work. Productivity is based purely on practical outcomes, based on projects that are finite and measurable and that can be shown to leading to a concrete, tangible outcome. It is here that we find another root of our discontent, because we are suddenly wrenched away from our discursive formation and are instead forced to work for/in the hegemonic discourse of business with its attendant demands for profit. It is a discursive direction eminently inimical to a library. Because academic libraries are now run as businesses with 'products' and 'customers' the librarians in them are directed by managers whose main concern is the bottom line, who are concerned about how much it costs to supply the service to the students and who move librarians from subject to subject regularly.

For most businesses it makes sense to have multi-skilled staff who can perform the duties of others, and who can fill voids left by absent employees. Necessarily these positions are exclusively concerned with processes; with doing a cluster of duties that have a clear beginning and end. This trend lies behind the regular changing of subject areas for senior/subject librarians. Change for no reason other than change itself. It is a management tool that has been so constantly promoted as relieving boredom and enhancing the work environment that librarians have accepted the argument. A subject librarian who specialises in the humanities cannot be expected to have even the slimmest grasp of subjects within the sciences for example: nevertheless, they are asked to move between subject areas often indiscriminately. This is only possible because the librarians are reduced to being neutral and unknowing searchers for information and are asked only to find it without having any understanding of it themselves. It is not difficult to imagine a subject librarian in the humanities who has no idea what the canon of texts is; or who has no knowledge of developments in the area, or even worse, has no interest in it. Since they have no specific knowledge they have no specific claim to any one position and as such are eminently replaceable.

Knowledge and power are intrinsically linked and until recently the library was a site of power in academic institutions. New management practices have slowly eroded that power base, transforming the library from a place where knowledge could be gained, to a site where information is accessed. This distinction is important in the environment of online resources, which is the other great eroding factor to have changed the status of the academic library. Librarians, through working with management methods that are incompatible with and foreign to their environment, have relinquished the specific knowledge they had about their workplace and now find themselves in the gray zone between knowledge and power; being in possession of neither, but not being disconnected from them either.

To return to Foucault briefly: in his view the relationship between power and knowledge is not mutually exclusive. Rather, he proposes that knowledge leads to power and that power leads to knowledge (Foucault, 1969). Knowledge can be withheld as an exercise of power, and power can be imposed through knowledge if its transmission is curtailed. It is the latter of these two statements that rings true in academic libraries today. The power of the publisher, manifesting itself through copyright and licensing laws, through spiraling subscription fees for academic journals added to the technology treadmill of buying and upgrading computer equipment, are all factors in inhibiting the free exchange of information. The structure of how the library controls the flow of information is more important than what the structure contains or as Castells characterises it: '...schizophrenia between structure and meaning.' (2000) Because of this confusion in distinguishing between meaning and the structure that conducts meaning, libraries have been annexed by large corporations that control information, or knowledge.

What is needed in the 21st century is a new epistemology of libraries. We need to abandon positivism as the sole guiding light and investigate our own ontology, separated from other discourses. This archaeology of the library has already begun through the work of Gary P Radford in his seminal essays on the subject: Positivism, Foucault, and the fantasia of the library: conceptions of knowledge and the modern library experience (1992) and Trapped in our own discursive formations: towards an archaeology of library and information science (2003). It is obvious that the old way of applying our trade does not work in the networked environment. As a professional group, librarians need to work together to find a new ideology from which to develop a response to the erosion of the very raison d'être of the libraries existence. Unless we are able to re-invent and re-apply ourselves to the core value of being knowledgeable about our collections and being cognizant of the needs of our clients and our shared culture, there is every chance that we will be bypassed by information technology professionals whom, much like ourselves today, have no real interest in knowledge itself, but who only have eyes for the hunt and the search. It is possible that in fifteen years time, the new generation will not be able to distinguish between a librarian and an information technologist. And it will not be because the IT professional has become extinct.

References

Augst, T and W Wiegand (eds) (2001) Libraries as agencies of culture. Kansas: American Studies Association.

Birkerts, S (1995) The Gutenberg elegies: the fate of reading in an electronic age. New York: Ballantine.

Budd, MJ (1995) 'An epistemological foundation for library and information science'. Library Quarterly 65 (3)

Budd, MJ and D Raber (1998) 'The cultural state of the fin de millenaire library'. Library Quarterly, 68 (1)

Castells, M (2000) The rise of the networked society (2nd ed). Oxford: Blackwell.

Foucault, M. (1969) Archaeology of knowledge. London: Routledge.

Foucault, M (1977) The fantasia of the library. New York: Cornell University Press.

Foucault, M (1997) Society must be defended. London: Penguin.

Frantzen, J (2002) How to be alone. London: HarperCollins.

Giroux, HA (1997) Post modern philosophical critique and the pursuit of knowledge in higher education. Westport: Greenwood.

Gray, J (2003) Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern. London: Faber and Faber.

Harley, B, Dreger M and Knobloch P (2001) 'The post-modern condition: students, the web and the academic library services'. (Electronic Version). Reference services review, 29 (1)

Harvey, R (2001). 'Losing the quality battle in Australian education for librarianship' Australian Library Journal, 50 (1)

Hubbard, ET (1995) 'Bibliographic instruction and post modern pedagogy'. (Electronic version). Library Trends, 44 (2), pp439-453.

Kane, L (1999) 'Access versus ownership'. (Electronic version). Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, 64 (Supplement 27).

Kruk, M (2003) 'Truth and libraries'. (Electronic version). Australian Library Journal, 52 (3)

McGuigan, J (1999) Modernity and post-modern culture. Buckingham: Open University.

Peters, M (1995) Education and the post-modern condition. Westport: Greenwood.

Raber, D (2003). 'Librarians as organic intellectuals: a Gramscian approach to blind spots and tunnel vision'. (Electronic version). Library Quarterly, 73 (1), pp19-32

Radford, GP (1992) 'Positivism, Foucault, and the fantasia of the library: conceptions of knowledge and the modern library experience'. Library Quarterly, 62 (4), pp409-424.

Radford, GP (1998) 'Flaubert, Foucault, and the Bibliotheque Fantastique: toward a post-modern epistemology for library science'. (Electronic version). Library Trends, 46 (4).

Radford, GP (2003) 'Trapped in our own discursive formations: towards an archaeology of library and information science'. Library Quarterly, 73 (1), pp1-18.

Radford, GP and MJ Radford (2003) 'Librarians and party girls: cultural studies and the meaning of the librarian'. Library Quarterly, 73 (1).

Raitt, D (1997) Libraries for the new millennium. London: Library Association Publishing.

Sapp, G and R Gilmour (2003) 'A brief history of the future of academic libraries: predictions and speculations from the literature of the profession, 1975 to 2000 - part two, 1990 to 2000'. Libraries and the Academy, 3 (1), pp13-34.

Slight, Owen (1988) The academic research library in the post-modern era. Australian Academic and Research Libraries, 19 (3), pp87-98.

Wiegand, WA (1999) 'Tunnel vision and blind spots: what the past tells us about the present; reflections on the twentieth-century history of American librarianship'. Library Quarterly, 69 (1).

Wisner, HW (2000) Wither the Post-modern Library? Libraries, Technology, and Education in the Information Age. North Carolina: McFarland.

Biographical information

Peter Pierre holds a Graduate Diploma - Information Studies Curtin University, plus a BA in Communications and Cultural Studies, with a double major in Creative Writing and Cultural Studies. He says 'I'm currently working my way through a Masters which investigates Knowledge literacy and the globalisation of knowledge. I work at the University of Western Australia as an information officer in the Student Services area. I'm submitting this as my first attempt to enter the debate on the future of the academic library'.