From the issue dated October 27, 2000
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Librarians Ignore the Value of StoriesBy WAYNE A. WIEGANDAt the beginning of a course I teach to all first-semester students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison's School of Library and Information Studies, I run through a litany of statistics: There are more
When Americans go to the library, I tell my students, they are usually looking for stories to read. They want material that inspires them or affirms their identities, written in the narrative form that years of reading have made familiar -- from the latest Danielle Steel novel or Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, to nonfiction like Mitch Albom's Tuesdays With Morrie, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, or Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation. A 1998 survey by the American Library Association showed that two-thirds of Americans use a public library at least once per year, and of that number 80 percent (about 145 million people) go there to check out a book. Fortunately, scholars in the humanities have been studying the subject of reading stories for the past 25 years, from a variety of perspectives -- including literacy studies, reader-response theory, ethnographies of reading, the social history of print, and cultural studies, which examines how people "read" nonprint material like the videos and compact disks that libraries also circulate by the millions. Those scholars analyze who reads what stories, and why, by focusing on the complex ways that readers from various cultures use what they read in their daily lives. Statistics clearly demonstrate that many people rely on libraries for their stories, and generally, librarians know what gets checked out. Unfortunately, librarians have little knowledge of why people read what they do. As a result, they 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. They also are often unable to help patrons find just the right story to read, nor do they develop enough programs -- book clubs, for example -- to connect readers to one another. Part of the blame for that tremendous professional oversight belongs to library and information-science programs, which have generally ignored the literature on reading and -- except for children's literature -- traditionally undervalued the reading of stories. As a historian, I think I understand how that oversight evolved. Michel Foucault argued that centuries ago, the new order that we now call modernity separated people's experience of daily life into work and leisure. Over time, we came to think of information that answers questions related to work, or helps people become informed citizens or intelligent consumers, as especially important; we labeled it "useful knowledge." In a library, people usually get that kind of information at the reference desk, with the help of a librarian. We consider reading stories, however, an activity of leisure, and we underestimate the value of the information that stories contain. Evidence of that bifurcated thinking abounds in U.S. library history. For example, the Public Library Inquiry of 1949, supported by the Carnegie Corporation, concluded that public libraries ought to minimize their practice of supplying the popular reading that nearly three-quarters of their users desired, and concentrate instead on a smaller but more influential combination of "serious" readers, community leaders, and students of adult education who used public libraries to obtain useful knowledge. That same kind of thinking is evident in library schools. Today, most educators in library and information-science programs are convinced that their profession's chief responsibility is to give patrons access to useful knowledge. Further, because the curricula are increasingly driven by the technologies that do such a good job of manipulating that kind of information, many professors seem to feel that if a computer isn't involved somehow, the material in question can't be information. In library schools, basic texts that students must read for core courses include little or no coverage of the recent literature on reading. Doctoral students typically investigate topics connected to new technologies. Advertisements for new professors almost always emphasize teaching skills and research expertise in information technologies; they almost never mention the need to develop an understanding of the information that millions of Americans find in the stories they get from their libraries. Some library schools have eliminated story-centered teaching positions and courses -- like children's librarianship. Even critics of current thinking can't seem to venture outside the box. For example, The Chronicle published nine letters to the editor in its May 12 issue that sought to debunk or clarify an April 7 article titled "In Revamped Library Schools, Information Trumps Books." None of the letters cited the library's primary role as a reading institution. Instead, what united the correspondents was their belief that libraries are more than just books. The narrow vision of library professionals was made particularly obvious in 1996, when the Benton Foundation issued preliminary findings of a study on what the public thought of leading librarians' visions of the future for libraries. The investigators reported what they had found to representatives of the 18 institutions that had commissioned the study, which included four library schools. Among the findings was that a focus group of suburban public-library users had collectively identified as their top two public-library services "providing reading hours and other programs for children" and buying enough popular titles so that patrons could, as one member of the focus group put it, "get the book that everybody is reading right now." The investigators concluded that the public did not "understand what goes on in the library other than taking out books." As far as I can tell, neither the investigators nor the people they reported to connected the study's findings to the literature on reading. Referring to the work of scholars like Janice A. Radway on romance novels, George N. Dove on detective stories, Henry Jenkins on science fiction, or Matthew Pustz on comic books might have made it clear that members of the public understand that taking out books is the most important activity that happens in the library. Instead, the library leaders planned to change the public's perception of libraries. I hope that no one reading this essay concludes that I am against technology. Not at all. Professional librarians -- and the programs that educate them -- certainly have to tap the potential of information technologies in serving their patrons. But the contrast between the statistics on what Americans do in libraries and the near-total absence of attention to reading in library schools across the country shows that we aren't teaching future librarians nearly enough about the activity that is most central to librarianship. Rather than restricting the definition of information to what technology can provide, we should greatly expand the focus of library schools. In the next year, nearly 5,000 new graduates of programs accredited by the American Library Association will get jobs at public, school, and academic libraries whose patrons use them chiefly to get reading material. The vast majority of the new librarians will eventually learn who reads what stories, but they won't understand why, in spite of the abundant literature that addresses that question. Worse yet, they will have been schooled to think that understanding why millions of their patrons read stories is none of their professional business. What a shame. Wayne A. Wiegand is a professor at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and coeditor, with James P. Danky, of Print Culture in a Diverse America (University of Illinois Press, 1998). http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B20
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Copyright © 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education