1. What, in your view, are the current debates in Information History?

I think the main debate concerns the nature of ‘Information History’ itself: how it connects or differs from ‘Library History’.

Is ‘Information History’ the politically correct designation for essentially the same area of study (encompassing modern systems of information retrieval in the same way that ‘World History’ would take this morning’s developments into account) or is it an entirely separate school of discourse? If it is a separate school, does data on ‘Library History’ continue to be generated for future historians or will they be concerned exclusively with ‘Information History’?

2. How would you like to see the subject develop?

I’d like to see the field come together more seamlessly with other areas of library and information science. Library and Information History isn’t taught in library schools to the extent that it may once have been and I think that’s a shame. Maintaining a collective knowledge of the history of information makes our discipline an exciting one. It puts us into an historical context: shows how our daily professional activities, no matter how mundane they may seem when we’re doing them, are grounded in the human timeline.

3. Why, in your opinion, has Information History (however defined) tended to focus on Nineteenth Century studies?

The journals do seem to contain a lot of nineteenth-century studies, though I don’t know how objectively we can claim there is a tendency to focus upon them. If this is the case, however, it’s probably a combination of three things:

‣ records of Nineteenth-century librarianship (Mechanic’s Institutes; significant developments in academia; developments in open access) are both thorough and intact (compared to, say, the libraries of the Ancient world, for which records were not as meticulously kept and for which a lot of evidence has not survived),

‣ a disproportionate interest among investigators in this period, probably due to ninteenth-century developments being temporally ‘graspable’ yet slightly – teasingly – beyond living memory. The legacy of these libraries is all around us – in the the way we work, in the architecture of our older library buildings – so it’s a highly stimulating and relevant era of study.

‣ it was probably in the Nineteenth Century that scholars began to take an earnest interest in library and information history, library science being properly founded by Dewey in 1887 and the application of subject-specific classification by people like Thomas Jefferson. It may have been the start of earnest study, so the discipline of library history may be grounded to that time intellectually if not necessarily.

4. What do you think has been the benefit of this approach?

Of the proposed tendency to focus on the nineteenth century? I suppose the main benefits have been to capture data and to analyse it before it is lost; and also to offer graspable historical perspective for present-day librarians and library scholars: an investigation into the history of our discipline provides context to what we’re doing. It gives meaning. By focusing on the immediate past of the Victorian era, we can trace the evolution of our present-day libraries and information systems back to a different time without leaping dramatically back into the comparatively quite different libraries of middle ages or antiquity.

While this heft of a document is a reasonable starting point, I am amazed at how naive my ideas and writing style were, only three short years ago. One paragraph relates to another only tangentially. A single sentence is a graceless string of needless adjectives.

In 2006, I was confident in my ability to write a passable dissertation. Looking at it today, I cannot believe I got anywhere with it. The introduction is a poorly structured mish-mash of ideas, oftentimes resembling an action painting of research, random paraphrases blasted onto the canvas.

I puzzled for nights over how to reduce the word count to a tolerable 15,000. Today, I could Biro my way through the whole final product, easily taming it into a more graceful economy.

Hindsight can be both useful and humbling and it’s important that we remember this in libraries.

“The philosophy, objectives and role of the library have sometimes been discernible only in retrospect by the historian, endowed with the objectivity of distance”. – Luckham (1971)

It is incredible how our outlooks can change in such a short time. Change can be giddying, but through the identification of ever present principles, Library History can be our balustrade.

In way of marking this, here follows the slightly controvertial article which may have played a part in my being picked up by the group. This was published in the 11-24 July edition of CILIP’s Library + Information Gazette:

Should Library History make a return to the prospectus?

In 2006 I presented my MSc. Dissertation to the University of Strathclyde. It was boldly titled The Nature of Librarianship and took a deeply historical approach to literature review. I wanted to challenge the idea that we live in a time of excessive change by showing that the history of librarianship is riddled with such periods; that we are constantly in a state of developmental flux; but that a thread of intrinsic values has been present from the libraries of antiquity to the modern day service. Some of these values were practical while others were moral or intellectual. With our hands on this balustrade we would see that there is no particular threat from a rise of “leisure industries” and that HTML should be no more feared or adored than the scroll, the codex, the videotape or anything else one might label as a “paradigm shift”. In recognising these lessons from history, we would have a moral and practical guide to which to turn when change really does occur.

When constructing the initial proposal, I wasn’t sure I would be able to run with this at all. Library History wasn’t listed as a research interest by any of the departmental staff. One ray of hope lay in Dr. Paul Burton’s interest in “Social effects and impacts of ICT”. I pitched it to him and he caught it. But it was a lucky catch and I was glad for it: I really didn’t want to spend three months distributing questionnaires about the benefits of installing coffee machines in public libraries or wondering why SPSS hates me.

After a bit of research, it appears that Library History is largely dispensed with in the modern library school. Vestiges of the subject survive among academics who once lectured in it and are still ready to engage with it at the dissertation or PhD level; it also seems to have survived in some slides accompanying ‘Introduction to Librarianship’ modules. But looking for Library History in the modern library school is much akin to the cultural archaeology practiced by Library History itself. History, if you’ll indulge a silly joke, is a thing of the past. Perhaps this is due to the shifted perspective that Library Studies now constitute science rather than art. Or perhaps it is due to a perception that Library History is no longer relevant.

Let us not dwell on the science versus art debate and turn to the problem of relevance. “Our ignorance of history,” writes Goethe, “causes us to slander our own times”. History is always relevant and what history could be more relevant than that of one’s own discipline? We want to know about family histories; the histories of nations and the comparatively short histories of our favourite bands or television shows so why not that of our profession? One could posit that it transcends mere relevance and heads into the territory of the essential: the history of libraries takes on the war against censorship, the proliferation of science, the changing of formats, the rise of open access, the need for social inclusion, the politics of change and the rise of consumer society.

The marketing process and the installation of plasma screens are not what make librarianship an exciting discipline. A knowledge of Library History makes librarianship exciting and consequently contributes to the dynamism and importance of our services.

Bring Library History back to Library School. It disserves its own module and not to be crowbarred into existing classes. A healthy understanding of our history can only lead to a healthy design for our future.