The Portable MLIS Chapter 1: "Stepping Back and Looking Forward"

In "Stepping Back and Looking Forward: Reflections on the Foundations of Libraries and Librarianship," Richard E. Rubin summarizes the missions of libraries throughout history, culminating in the modern mission of the American public library, and discusses four foundational values of libraries today:

1. Intellectual freedom


2. Service and the public good


3. Education


4. The value of the past: Preservation

In a future post I will return to the subject I promised to cover in my first post on this blog, the interplay of preservation and innovation. Here I will just say that we moderns tend to view periods such as fifth-century Athens and the Golden Age of Roman literature as ages of innovation, as opposed to our view of periods such as early medieval western Europe (from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Carolingians) as focused on preservation of the ideas of earlier, more intellectually fecund eras, or more pejoratively as periods of stagnation. There is some truth to this view, but it is overly simplistic to someone with an interest in late antiquity. So I have a quibble with Rubin's headline "Think Again" for the age of the great Muslim and Byzantine libraries of the Near East (p. 6): for one thing, it suggests there was no original thought happening in the monasteries of western Europe, which is not the case; for another, it suggests that preservation is not a thoughtful process, which, while it may not have been for your average sleepy, nearsighted monk desultorily copying manuscripts, certainly is so in a more schematic sense. Simply deciding what to preserve, for example: there is my old favorite Cassiodorus' Institutiones, an annotated bibliography of works to include in his ideal library; see also the medieval obsession with etymologies, bestiaries, and other encyclopedic accumulations of knowledge. (End rant by inveterate history geek.)

And indeed, in the section "Belief in the Value of the Past: Preservation," Rubin acknowledges that preservation is an active, thoughtful process in which librarians "[n]ot merely...store contents, but...represent, organize, and maintain those contents in such a way that people have access to the materials of the past" (12). Representation entails not merely the material book or other source, but the creation of "digital repositories that make information and artifacts available to those who would never be able to consult them in the past" (13). (See my earlier post about the new connections between texts made possible by digital media; not to mention that even the most educated ancient reader with the most prodigious memory would have had much more finite access to texts and might not even have been aware of texts that existed in his or her time that are now part of our modern canon, because the transmission of texts was so cumbersome.) Likewise, the creators of catalogs and digital repositories organize information in as intuitive and user-friendly a way as possible, which involves no small amount of thought and consideration of user needs and thought processes. Maintenance of resources might not be as laborious as it was in the days when texts had to be copied so they would not be lost, but the technology in which those texts subsist is ever-evolving, so that digital technologies which we imagine to impute some sort of permanence may be obsolete in much less time than it takes paper to disintegrate, and even books that pass through dozens of hands each year require constant repair and replacement (to which I can attest from the humble beginnings of my library career in book repair).

One way in which the mission of preservation of today's libraries differs from that of earlier eras is that today we consider it worthwhile to preserve as much information as possible, and have the resources to do so. Due to the finite availability of materials and scribes, as well as the time-consuming process of copying books, librarians before the advent of printing could only preserve so many texts, and countless others were lost to fire, pillage, and other accidents of time (much to the chagrin of classicists who would love to have all the plays of Euripides, or all the books of Livy). So there was inherent to the system the sort of prioritization that is not necessary today, a process informed by value systems of librarians (i.e. for the period that interests me, a religious system, not that all texts preserved were religious). Not that every library preserves every piece of information in existence today, but the combined capacity of libraries more nearly approaches the ability to do so, and librarians themselves think it is a worthy goal to do so. In this manner libraries provide users as much as possible with "unimpeded access" to as much information and as many viewpoints as possible, leaving it up to the user rather than the librarian to select which expressions and viewpoints to consider (10). So the function of the library to preserve, as it has always done, now more than ever underlies the value of intellectual freedom (and certainly the other core values as well).

I should not make this entry much longer; however, while I haven't engaged all the content of this chapter, I do wish to note that as a parent of a toddler, I'm sure I will become increasingly interested in intellectual freedom as it relates to minors, particularly the question, "Who is ultimately responsible for what a young person is reading or seeing--the librarian or the parent?" (11). To what degree do we entrust to librarians the duty of acting in loco parentis? And does this depend on whether the librarian is at a school or public library? I am inclined to think, as a parent, that librarians have a responsibility in this regard similar to that of teachers, which might lead them to inhibit my daughter's (and other children's) intellectual freedom more than Rubin would like (and perhaps if there were a paragraph break before "The struggles to protect Intellectual Freedom" on p. 11 I would be assuaged). No doubt I have another sixteen years as a parent and my entire career as a librarian to puzzle this one out.

Rubin, Richard E. "Stepping Back and Looking Forward: Reflections on the Foundations of Libraries and Librarianship." The Portable MLIS: Insights From the Experts, ed. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2008, pp. 3-14.