BOOK REVIEW

by Mark Rosenzweig

 

 

 

The Myth of the Electronic Library, by William F. Birdsall (Westport CT: Greenwood: 1994)

William F. Birdsallís The Myth of the Electronic Library: Librarianship and Social Change in America is an extremely important and timely contribution to critical library studies. One of a small but growing number of library scholars willing to challenge the prevailing mythologies of the information age, Birdsall has written a book which will help re-open debate on fundamental issues determining the fate of librarianship.

Proposing a framework of analysis which uses the concept of myth-replacement rather than paradigm-shift as more capable of registering changes in "contending values, perceptions and assumptions currently found in librarianship," Birdsall proceeds to closely and masterfully analyze not just the historical development of library theory and practice but librarianshipís changing self-understanding and its implications, placing it always in a broad social and cultural context. Whatever reservation one may have about the adequacy of the concept of myth (as opposed to, say, ideology) to the task of comprehending the vagaries of librarianship, the deployment of this concept allows Birdsall to provide a richly-textured picture of librarianship in its interconnection with general social mythologies and with more regional mythologies in other related fields of activity.

Disclaiming the technological determinism of most discussions of techn-ological issues, Birdsallís myth analysis shows how the change from the nineteenth century/early-twentieth century concept of libraries to the prevailing notion of the "electronic library" was not merely the passive reflection of objective and impersonal technological development. It has been an on-going process of myth-making in which a "cluster of social, cultural, and political values, beliefs, images and concepts" have been drawn together around a particular concept of the role of technology and, in particular, of information technology, consonant with an increasingly technocratic and undemocratic agenda very much at odds with "traditional conception of the library and librarianship." He is especially successful in showing how the means and methods of self-definition, especially in the drive to create a "professional" identity, have led to very fundamental shifts in orientation which belie a unilinear and unidirectional approach to library history.

Tracing the process of displacement of the myth of the "library as place" by the ideal of the dematerialized "virtual library" currently held to be the telos of library development, Birdsall, along the way, draws out the implications of successive myth-elaboration and myth-replacement on every aspect of librarianship from organization and management, to cataloging and reference and on the changing image of the librarian in our own literature and in the social imagination.

Birdsallís critical take on the whole "cult of information" (to use a phrase of Theodore Rozsakís) is a refreshing alternative to the vast literature in our field (very ably explicated as well as critiqued by Birdsall) in which a reified concept of "information" and an entirely formal concept of "communication" have replaced "knowledge" as the central value and organizing principle of our endeavors. Birdsall makes a real contribution to deconstructing the rhetoric of the "information society" which has become the common currency of our professional discourse, going on to show how it narrow and distorts our sense of feasible and desirable options for library development.

While I find Birdsallís attraction to the notion of a "therapeutic" model for librarianship problematic, I feel his discussion of this alternative mode of conceptualizing the role of the librarian and the library at least opens up the discussion of humanistic alternatives to the market-driven models currently in vogue. In summing up the book in his last chapter, he wisely provides, not a blueprint for a new librarianship (therapeutic or otherwise) but a useful list of propositions, flowing from his analysis, meant to awaken librarians to the need to "critically assess the role of libraries and librarianship in a time of social change and, in particular, to explore and debate more fully the implications of the myth of the electronic library." Readers of Birdsallís provocative book will find much to fuel such a necessary and urgent debate.

 

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