Library Research and Training in Other Disciplines

Education in library and information science inculcates a service orientation that enables librarians to help specialists in other fields solve problems in their research.  But when it comes to research in the library field, we can benefit from models learned in these other disciplines.  Their analytical perspectives can help frame questions in our field and may even help us forge new interdisciplinary pathways.

I came to the library profession after earning a Ph.D. in anthropology.  I was drawn into the field in part because of my interest in systems of classifying knowledge.  The anthropological approach to knowledge organization is to explain abstract cultural concepts from an interior viewpoint, in terms of its own inner logic, and linking it to other concepts.  The anthropologist studies knowledge domains as aspects of culture by eliciting answers to questions.  Anthropological studies often elicit concepts, meanings, and connections between cultural domains that are hidden beneath the cultural surface.

The anthropological approach to conceptual domains is very different from that of library and information science, which focuses on bibliographic records.  These different approaches to knowledge are complementary and hold intriguing possibilities for designing research and aiding theory formation, particularly with the rapid development of folksonomies through innovations such as Web 2.0 and social networking sites such as Facebook.  The emerging information environment requires new ways of thinking about the creation, transmission, and categorization of information.

Anthropological approaches to cognition and classification have benefited from research in linguistics, psychology, sociology, education, and artificial intelligence, but pertinent contributions in information organization from the library world, such as authority control and faceted versus enumerative classification, have gone unnoticed.  This is most likely because these concepts are based not in empirical science but in the application of scientific principles to designing practical systems and solutions.
Library and information science is at heart a practical and applied field.  Research and theorization are secondary to the practical issues of providing service.  Service comes naturally to the librarian, and research requires an imaginative stretch.  Social sciences such as anthropology, by contrast, are essentially research disciplines.  Only by extension are they applied fields.\

Professional training in the social sciences stresses awareness of concepts of data, units of analysis, and hypothesis testing.  Such concepts are not native to library science and are not ingrained in the thinking of students, trainees, or practitioners of librarianship.  They can, however, readily be applied to problems in libraries and information centers.  Since becoming a librarian, I have used my background in anthropology as a way of thinking about data and questions in the library and information world rather than to conduct anthropological studies of the library.

Libraries as institutions provide a site for the application of social science principles of measurement, data analysis, and hypothesis testing.  A highly qualitative field like social anthropology provides theoretical and methodological frameworks for studying the attitudes, preferences, thought-processes, behaviors, and other characteristics of users through ethnographic techniques of observation, interaction, and unstructured interviewing.  Ethnographic research can bring to light subtle distinctions enabling us to separate categories of users and better understand them so as to serve their interests and needs.

Graduate training in an academic discipline such as anthropology enables one to perceive problems not apparent to those without such a background and to find ways to solve or at least better understand these problems.  The field of librarianship holds great possibilities for innovation for those who want to apply the theoretical and methodological approaches of other disciplines to questions arising in the library or information environment.

Jay Bernstein (Kingsborough)