INSEPARABLE: Library Science and connections

across disciplines

Paul Sturges

Academic subject areas

The literature (journals, monographs, textbooks and popular works) presents knowledge as autonomous subject areas.

Educational structures at school and higher education levels largely support this.

Yet it is worth asking if knowledge isn’t better thought of as an inseparable whole– Particularly in the case of Library Science.

Library and Information Science

Whilst many subject areas are – – Old-established, – Have a well-defined field of study,– A body of distinctive theory, and– A very substantial literature,

Library and Information Science cannot necessarily make equivalent claims.

It looks like a dependency of related subject areas, rather than an autonomous area.

LIS and the inseparability of knowledge

Another view might be that LIS is interwoven with other subject fields in a positive way.

Examples of the interweaving of LIS and other disciplines will be offered, where– LIS research can be shown benefitting from other

fields of study, and– (Rather tentatively) how LIS approaches

contribute to research in other fields of study.

Information and communication in rural Africa

In the 1980s and 90s there was effectively no relevant LIS literature.

However, Agricultural and Development Studies had a great deal to say on– Traditional farming knowledge– Farmers’ experimentation– Diffusion of innovations.

Much of this offers answers to a LIS researcher’s questions.

Freedom of Expression and the problem of giving offence

FE is a basic building block of LIS, but, what happens when people take offence?

The Danish cartoons (and Charlie Hebdo) were (offensive) satirical comedy, so what do Comedy Studies tell us?

Bahktin, Freud, Legman and others have something to say, but

A programme of interviews with stand-up comedians added more.

History: Domesday Book (1086) as a database.

Domesday Book is essentially a structured database compiled for tax administration.

Entries tell of the ownership and value of land and livestock, location by location.

The essential searchability of the data offers added value for:– Contemporary legal and military administration– Future studies of demography and national wealth

History: The Glorious Revolution (1688) and transparency.

The events of 1688 in Britain can be seen as: – An aristocratic coup– A successful Dutch invasion– A triumph for democracy over despotism.

In support of the latter, there was an injection of transparency through:– Parliamentary supervision of national policy– An independent judiciary– Financial supervision by the Bank of England.

Conclusion?

Maybe LIS gets more than it gives in terms of input from other subject areas, but

It need not all be one way traffic, for example– Black, A. and Brunt, R. ‘MI5, 1909-1945: an

information management perspective’. Journal of Information Science (2000) 26, pp185-197.

LIS researchers and teachers could be bolder in asserting the inseparability of all knowledge and exploring without boundaries.

Exploring without boundaries

‘Now he would prowl the stacks of the library at night, pulling books out of a thousand shelves and reading in them like a madman. The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad.’

Thomas Wolfe’s protagonist Eugene Gant at Harvard, in Of Time and the River, 1935.