the librarian bird of paradox and promise

Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE)

The Librarian Bird of Paradox and PromiseAuthor(s): Marjorie SullivanSource: Journal of Education for Librarianship, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Summer, 1970), pp. 46-54Published by: Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40322098 .

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The Librarian Bird of Paradox and Promise

MARJORIE SULLIVAN

Once in the Time of Things, The Librarian Bird, obscure in his drab smock, flitted noiselessly and efficiently from shelf to shelf assisting those few of the flock seeking the true and the beautiful.

CONCEIVABLY, the abundant experimentation reported in current library journals might evoke from some readers an ejaculatory whistle: in Venice, California, McLuhanesque immersion in media; in Oak Park, Illinois, a random access octopus poised to spread its ten- tacles; and in Washington, D.C., swirls of M. A.R.C, tape promising a bibliographic boon; Such auguries of change might assure the prac- titioner that the library remains a viable institution. At the same time he might experience faint tremors of trepidation, the misgivings of a square peg approaching a round hole. Perusing the same or similar publications, the student preparing for librarianship could also feel a twinge of anxiety, an intimation that his professional education might continue endlessly. As for educators responsible for the curricula of librarianship, they turn from evidence of change reported in the litera- ture to seek a bedrock, an enduring theoretical core. They probe for essentials: What is a library? What is a librarian? What must a librarian know and do?

Whatever his type of library, the librarian has traditionally been a handler of information. Closely associated with learners, learning, and the products of learning, he has embraced these as his sphere of expertise. In the information-oriented society of the next century, the

Mrs. Sullivan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Librarianship, Kansas State Teachers College, Emporia.

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Bird of Paradox

librarian, as mediator between man and knowledge, will perform the crucial function. His technical proficiency will undergird all information services. His discrimination, i.e., his ability to appraise materials in terms of truth and beauty, will remain a professional requisite. (Dis- plays of technology may be as tasteless as Woolworth's window heaped with gadgetry or as false as NBC's afternoon sequence of soap operas and give-away shows - or as sublime as the Golden Gate Bridge or The Book of Kells.) The librarian-information specialist's philosophy will embrace services for all patrons as lifelong learners in a data-rich culture in which evolution is impelled by growth in knowledge and knowledge technology. To fulfill his obligation, this facilitator of learning must himself be a learner par excellence, knowledgeable concerning patron needs and skillful in the technical know-how of serving them. An intellectual, he must stand firmly on Here and Now and like a double- Janus apprehend clearly There and Then.

Once the servant of kings, the librarian in The Learning Society will serve all men. Oddly enough he will be doing the same sorts of things done by his Sumerian predecessors: acquiring, arranging for access, preserving, advising, searching, and circulating. These charac- teristic acts will be performed in a context enlarged in conception and contracted by electronics. For the patron a needed bit of knowledge will be as far away as his communications console or as near as his pocket interrogator-receiver.

In the Times of Ideas, The Librarian Bird of the World, gay plumes in tuft and tail, wings to widely dispersed Learner Birds myriad messages. Bird listeners hear an added joyous note.

In the past generation the status of learning has rocketed. In the thirties the man on Mainstreet asked, "If you're so smart, why aren t you rich?" He dubbed members of the academy "impractical" or "nuts." F.D.R/s secretary of agriculture hybridized corn, but the aver- age citizen usually referred to Henry Agard Wallace as "that professor from Iowa who killed little pigs." Anti-intellectualism persisted into the fifties, when voters twice rejected presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, disdained as an "egghead."

In the closing years of that decade, Sputnik's ascent startled Amer- icans and spurred their Congressmen into underwriting education pro- grams designed to strengthen national defense. A Saturday Evening Post1 cover acknowledged the switch in popular regard for learning: A pretty coed clung adoringly on either arm of the beaming campus

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JOURNAL OF EDUCATION FOR LIBRARIANSHIP

brain. Trailing forlornly behind this trio was a Saturday hero, the idol of yesteryear. In the early sixties scarcely a murmur was heard on Main- street when professors became New Frontiersmen. The only audible complaints rose from the deserted classrooms on prestigious campuses.

In recent years social scientists have examined the role of "brain power*

' in our society and have predicted its future. Americas Chal- lenge, the recent best-seller by Frenchman J. J. Servan-Schreiber,2 sounds the tocsin for a Europe overwhelmed by American industrial and business enterprise. The author also gives common currency to studies supporting his thesis: The real American secret is the discovery that social justice, far from retarding economic growth, is the essential technical ingredient for expansion in an industrial society.

Servan-Schreiber cites the Denison Report,3 which links our phe- nomenal increase in productivity in the twentieth century to the dif- fusion of education and the growth of knowledge. For instance, three to five times as many children of workers and farmers have access to higher education in the United States as do such offspring in common market countries. The Chorafas Report4 further documents Servan- Schreiber's contention. In 1966, 40 per cent of the population in the United States, ages 20 to 24, were enrolled in colleges and universities as compared to 24 per cent in the U.S.S.R., 13.5 per cent in Japan, and 7 per cent in Britain - all less productive countries. From 1930 to 1964 money spent on research and development, "growth of knowledge," rose in the United States more than a hundred fold, from $166 million to $19 billion.

So much for the past. For prophecy Servan-Schreiber cites a one- thousand-page report based upon projections of current information and published by Herman Kahn and the Hudson Research Institute.5 By the turn of the century, the United States, with Japan, Canada, and Sweden, will enter the post-industrial society. (Other nations will lag behind at pre-industrial, transitional, industrial, or mass consumption levels of development.) There will be 147 work days, 218 free days. Per capita income in post-industrial societies will range from $4,000 to $20,000. According to Bell6 and Kahn:

1. industrial revenue will be 50 times higher than in the pre-industrial period

2. most economic activity will have shifted from primary (agriculture) and secondary (industrial production) areas to the third and fourth areas (service industries, research institutes, non-profit organizations)

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Bird of Paradox 3. private enterprise will no longer be the major source of scientific and

technological development 4. the free market will take second place to the public sector and to social

services 5. most industries will be run by cybernetics 6. the major impetus for progress will come from education and the techno-

logical innovations it utilizes 7. time and space will no longer be a problem in communications 8. the gap between high and low salaries in the post-industrial society will

be considerably smaller than today.7

Whereas the industrial society sprang from combinations of capital, labor, and natural resources, its successor springs from a remarkable integrated entity John Kenneth Galbraith8 calls a "technostructure": a fusion of talents from government agencies, corporations, and universities. Old enmities between government and business or between business and the academy have died to give birth to a new creative alliance. The energizing force powering progress will be learning, the well-spring of innovation. Bell's post-industrial society might be appro- priately called The Learning Society.9 By the year 2000 the popular query of the thirties could be transposed to "If you're so smart, why aren't you learning?"

Computer technology promises to make increasing complexities more manageable. Martin Shubik dramatizes this necessity by drawing an analogy between a billion-person society and a ballet: as the set becomes more complex and the dancers more numerous, the choreography required to maintain a given level of coordination becomes far more refined and difficult. Shubik cautions, however, that data processing, while "increasing by several orders of magnitude" our ability to obtain, store, and retrieve information, will not be enough: "Sophisticated devices and sophisticated measures and methods for the coordination of behavior in a complex free society may call for a sophisticated society with sophisticated individual members. . . . The next changes may well have to be within ourselves." 10

Charles R. DeCarlo, director of Automation Research, I.B.M., en- visions an ennobling educational experience: Education is more than didactic form, more than an unfettered explosion of information; in an intellectual society it can become the ultimate noble act.11

To serve its peculiar needs The Learning Society may fashion a new educational pattern, one that will foster sophisticated and creative

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individuals, serve a host of learners running the gamut of individual differences, and make accessible a vast array of computerized educational options. Our present education has been likened to a giant socializing machine, depositing the conforming and productive in one pile, spewing out the nonconforming and unresponsive on a heap of rejects. To provide more sensitivity to human needs, some experts would tinker a bit. Others, alarmed by the sizable mound of human waste, would junk the juggernaut and focus more on the nurture of individuals.12 In such a person-centered education the learner would choose from an array of possibilities those furthering his purposes. He would be responsible for his self-development; society would be responsible for furnishing his repertoire of opportunities.13 Anticipated outcomes would be self-fulfillment and social betterment.

The shape of education in The Learning Society to come is veiled. The following features are offered as possibilities:

Self-directed learning instead of teacher-directed instruction. Learning consultants instead of instructors. Opportunities for the learner to discover his guru instead of arbi-

trary teacher assignment. Flexibility of time and place instead of rigid hour- and room-

scheduling within the confines of a school house or a school system. Multi-media carriers of information instead of reliance on print. Diversity of experience instead of narrow sameness. Intense experience instead of diffuse and prolonged experience. Spontaneous association with other learners on the basis of in-

terests and tasks instead of rigid and arbitrary groupings. Learning as play instead of learning as work. Learning for leisure and work instead of learning mainly for work. Involvement with the breadth, depth, and scope of human experi-

ence instead of narrow pre-occupation with the recital of facts, the mastery of concepts and techniques.

Emphasis on enduring human values instead of narrow and pass- ing allegiances.

Lifelong education of the open individual instead of terminal education for short-time ends.

In The Learning Society ' 'information" will designate a generous

domain. The Conference on National Library Information Service foot- notes a broad definition:

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Bird of Paradox . . . Commonly, most people tend to use the word information to mean

specific facts and data; to mean what scientists are concerned with as opposed to what the humanist, the philosopher, the novelist, and the poet are concerned with. ... In its more general sense it is ... the meaningful content of

any communication as opposed to the random meaningless, interfering noise or static that may also be present. In this sense, the text of a poem, a novel, a history, and an engineering handbook are all equally information. . . ,14

Within the limits of this encompassing definition, knowledge will continue to proliferate. Machlup has documented the growing numbers of workers in growing numbers of occupations producing an ever- increasing volume of knowledge of growing economic value.15"18 Al- ready deluged, we shall require still more information about ourselves and our activities in order to make rational decisions. With each increase, the disparity between society's capacity to produce knowledge and the individual's ability to comprehend, retain, and use knowledge will inevitably grow. Speed of innovation might be expected to ac- celerate as time and space are compressed to intensify human experience. Harold Orlans contends, however, that human beings will continue to pace intellectual progress: "Time will remain incompressible and undistensible, its allocation between traveling and staying put, between learning and reporting what one has learned, between listen- ing and talking, doing and thinking, working and relaxing will, as always, influence the pace of intellectual progress." 17

By the year 2001 homo sapiens may well be immersed in a vasty deep of messages. To stay afloat, to withstand the waves in this ocean of data, man will require the tutelage of an accomplished swimmer. Mounting demands for vocational and civic competence18 in our dy- namic technological society will make imperative cradle-to-the-grave learning. Automation, freeing man from the drudgery of labor, will enable him to devote considerable energy to becoming a superior person,19 one self-fulfilled and capable of coping with the complexities of a technological society. Rising educational levels, coupled with increasing affluence and leisure, promise greater involvement with aesthetic and intellectual pursuits. Appreciative of past contributions to our national well-being and aware of future exigencies, the elector- ate should continue its investment in education. Hopefully, education, society's chief socializing instrument, will initiate the learner into a life of responsible freedom and offer him opportunities for continuing personal development.

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Pursuing self-realization, the learner will be the vital force of The Learning Society. Depending upon his needs, he will consult a librarian/information generalist or specialist. He may require a package of services, information from various sources in a variety of formats, with visual and audio displays prepared especially for his use. On occasion the learner may enroll in library-sponsored courses, workshops, or seminars. Clusters of services will involve teams of professionals sup- ported by technical and clerical aides.20* 21 Technical services, supplying access to information, will contrive systems responsive to learner needs. Administration will insure structure and direction to this learner- centered enterprise. Ultimately, The Learning Society, powered by knowledge and knowledge technology, will be driven forward by the efforts of individual learners.

In the Twenty-first Century the library-information center may realize the dream of providing the learner-client optimum access - to all information, at all times and places, systematically gathered and dispersed through electronic networks. The library then may be re- garded as a resource instead of a repository. Information resources, integrated into the structures of all institutions, will be widely dispersed, permeating the social fabric. The information user may well choose whether to consult with his information advisor face to face or via electronic media. With more clients and a more diverse clientele, with more and more diverse knowledge and carriers of knowledge, and with increasingly sophisticated means of storage, retrieval, and dispersal of that knowledge, the cry for more and more highly and diversely skilled professionals to serve the myriad seekers after knowledge will crescendo to a shout.

Those engaged in the education of librarians, because they serve the profession devoted to serving learners and learning, are no doubt gratified by tributes to the past contributions of education and pleased with the prospects of The Learning Society. Setting aside momentarily their rose-tinted binoculars, they should experience a sense of urgency. The maintenance and growth of civilization require continued expansion of scientific and technological knowledge. Growing social com- plexity demands the kinds of information needed to create and sustain a smoothly functioning whole. Basic to the good life are competent individuals of quality, informed in the broadest, most humane sense. Library educators, like other citizens, often question the quality of our democracy. They are even nagged by the fear that education may be losing its race with catastrophe. The more thoughtful are also anxious

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Bird of Paradox

lest, as the function of knowledge grows increasingly crucial, librarians will muff their traditional role as purveyors of information and re- linquish it to competitors.

The time to consider the implications of The Learning Society for library education is now. The New Day will not dawn January 1, 2000 A.D., with the suddenness of Athena springing full-blown from the brow of Zeus. The birth of The Learning Society is prolonged, even painful - yesterday, today, and tomorrow. No Delphic voice shall or should determine the response of library schools to the evolving new order. Each faculty must muster the intelligence and will to re- shape its program. In this Promethean task, experimentation will be their ally.

Prescient library educators, peering ahead through the obscuring mists of three decades, can discern in outline the shape of the emerg- ing librarian-information specialist. As a professional he will facilitate and enhance the learner's engagement with information. An information authority, he will be informed concerning the structure and sub- stance of knowledge, discriminating as to its quality, familiar with its carriers and the means of access. Essential to his expertise will be ac- quaintance with learning theory and patterns of human development, as well as a grasp of the elements of leadership, group dynamics, and management. Fundamental to his professional orientation will be a social awareness and a commitment to his crucial role. He will regard practice critically, seek imaginative and innovative approaches, and engage in experimentation and research. A life-time learner exemplar, self-education and in-service training will be integral to his personal and professional way of life.

Paradoxically, the genus Librarian Bird is immutable and ever- changing. Today he thrives on tomorrow's promise.

Notes 1. Cover-artist Dick Sargent, on the Saturday Evening Post of October 17, 1959, de-

picts his hero carrying the book ]et Propulsion and his erstwhile hero holding a pigskin. 2. Servan-Schreiber, Jean- Jacques: The American Challenge. New York, Atheneum,

1968, 291 pp. 3. Servan-Schreiber, pp. 68-75. Edward F. Denison, writing his doctoral thesis in

1964, made the first systematic study of the sources of American economic growth. 4. Servan-Schreiber, pp. 72-73. Dimitri Chorafas wrote Brain Gain or Brain Drain. 5. Servan-Schreiber, pp. 31-36. The Hudson Institute, located near New York City,

was founded by a group of former Rand analysts.

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6. Daniel Bell referred to the "post-industrial society" in "Notes on the Post-Industrial Society/' The Public Interest, n. 6 (Winter 1967), pp. 24-36.

7. Servan-Schreiber. do. W. 8. Galbraith, J. K.: The New Industrial State. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1967, 427

DO.

9. Robert M. Hutchins concludes that The Learning Society, made possible by technology, will be realized if and when traditional values shift away from their work orientation. Because education, like other institutions, perpetuates traditional values, such a cul- tural change must originate with innovative individuals. Hutchins, R. M.: The Learning Society. New York, New American Library, 1968, pp. 151-166.

10. Shubik, Martin: Information, Rationality and Free Choice in a Future Democratic Society. Daedalus. 96:771-778. Summer 1967.

11. DeCarlo, C. R.: Technology and the "Open" Man. Pace, October, 1968, p. 4. 12. See Fantini, M. D., and Weinstein, Gerald: The D is advantaged. New York, Har-

per and Row, 1968, 455 pp.; National Education Association. Schools for the Sixties: A Report of the Project on Instruction, National Education Association. New York, McGraw- Hill, 1963, 146 pp.; Schwebel, Milton: Who Can Be Educated! New York, Grove, 1968, 277 pp.

13. See Friedenberg, E. Z.: Coming of Age tn America: Growth and Acquiescence. New York, Random House, 1965, 300 pp.; Goodman, Paul: Compulsory Mis-education. New York, Horizon, 1964, 189 pp.; Leonard, G. B.: Education and Ecstacy. New York, Delacorte, 1968, 239 pp.; and Neill, A. S.: Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing. New York, Hart, I960, 392 pp. The last title describes an experiment in Eng- land.

14. Ad Hoc Joint Committee on National Library/Information Systems. "A National Library Agency ... a Proposal." Report presented to the A.L.A. Council at Midwinter Conference, 1968. ALA Bulletin, 62:256, March 1968.

15. Machlup, Fritz: The Production and Distribution of Knowledge tn the United States. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1962, 416 pp.

16. Machlup reckoned that the knowledge industry in 1958 represented 30 per cent of the national output. Burck claims that by 1963 knowledge output had increased by 43 per cent. See Burck, Gilbert: Knowledge: The Biggest Growth Industry of Them All. In: Westby-Gibson, Dorothy: Social Foundations of Education: Current Issues and Re- search. New York, The Free Press, 1967, pp. 23-39.

17. Orlans, Harold: Educational and Scientific Institutions. Daedalus, 96:830, Summer 1967.

18. Dan Lacy, in his Windsor Lecture of 1959, asserted that citizenship in 20th Cen- tury democracy requires an educational level comparable to that of college and university students. In: Lacy, Dan: Freedom and Communication, 2nd ed. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1962, pp. 2-4.

19. Harry S. Broudy writes that "self-perfection is the last refuge for the common man in a mass culture."/»: Broudy, H. S.: Paradox and Promise: Essays on American Life and Education. Englewood Cliffs, NT., 1961, 176 pp.

20. Asheim, L. E.: Education and Man-power for Librarianship, ALA Bulletin, 62: 1096-1106, October 1968.

21. Joel A. Roth discusses imaginative services offered by publishers now dealing in information instead of print publication alone. In: Roth, J. A.: Publishing in Non-Print Media. Book Production Industry, 44:36-40, Dec. 1968.

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the librarian bird of paradox and promise

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