The Chronicle: Colloquy: The question

THE QUESTION

An essay in the new issue of The Chronicle says that an important failing in libraries today is that librarians don't know enough about why people read and what they like to read. Wayne A. Wiegand, a professor at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, writes that librarians "lack a deeper understanding of how libraries already serve readers, and they miss evidence that they could use to convince state legislatures and other sources of financial support that spending money on stories is important." Mr. Wiegand writes that this failure is needless -- given all the available research about why people read. Some of the blame for this "tremendous professional oversight," he writes, belongs to library schools, which have "generally ignored" the research. He says the schools focus almost exclusively on how to give library users "access to useful knowledge," rather than to the stories they want. Is Mr. Wiegand's critique of librarians and library schools correct? Are library schools failing to teach future librarians what they should know about what and why people read? Do library schools stress information at the expense of stories?

For further information, see this background article:

Librarians Ignore the Value of Stories (10/27/2000)

: 34 RESPONSES (New 12/13)

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