Introduction to Library and Information Science/Contextualizing Libraries: Their History and Place in the Wider Information Infrastructure

This chapter will draw on two important fields to define roles and contexts for librarianship and other information work. First, we will explore the many diverse roles libraries have played throughout history, exploring the different motivations for libraries and services library workers have provided towards these motivations. We will then look at how different individuals and fields conceive of information in today's world, and how these conceptions inform their practice. We will conclude by drawing on historical LIS practice and lessons learned from related disciplines to establish roles and a scope for contemporary LIS practice and scholarship.

After reading this chapter, a student should be able to articulate:
 * 1) what a library is
 * 2) the value of critically examining library history to inform current library practice
 * 3) the missions and practices of libraries in ancient and medieval European libraries
 * 4) the contributions of pre-modern East Asian, Middle Eastern, and African libraries to contemporary library practice
 * 5) exclusionary practices and policies in 19th- and 20th-century libraries in the United States
 * 6) the concepts of ahistoricism and tunnel vision
 * 7) definitions of information from several different fields, and how they inform LIS practice
 * 8) how the following fields relate to LIS
 * 9) * Computer science
 * 10) * Education
 * 11) * Information theory
 * 12) * Social work

Defining libraries
A library can be defined as a major department concerned with the collection, organization, dissemination of recorded information, facts or readable material for the purpose of teaching, learning and research.

Libraries of the past
This section will introduce characteristics and purposes of libraries throughout time, and then introduce some critical issues and methods of library history.

Early libraries (2600 BC – 800 BC)
The first libraries consisted of archives of the earliest form of writing - the clay tablets in cuneiform script discovered in temple rooms in Sumer.

The earliest discovered private archives were kept at Ugarit (in present-day Syria); besides correspondence and inventories, texts of myths may have been standardized practice-texts for teaching new scribes. There is also evidence of libraries at Nippur about 1900 BC and those at Nineveh about 700 BC showing a library classification system.

Over 30,000 clay tablets from the Library of Ashurbanipal have been discovered at Nineveh, providing modern scholars with an amazing wealth of Mesopotamian literary, religious and administrative work. Among the findings were the Enuma Elish, also known as the Epic of Creation, which depicts a traditional Babylonian view of creation, the Epic of Gilgamesh, a large selection of "omen texts" including Enuma Anu Enlil which "contained omens dealing with the moon, its visibility, eclipses, and conjunction with planets and fixed stars, the sun, its corona, spots, and eclipses, the weather, namely lightning, thunder, and clouds, and the planets and their visibility, appearance, and stations", and astronomic/astrological texts, as well as standard lists used by scribes and scholars such as word lists, bilingual vocabularies, lists of signs and synonyms, and lists of medical diagnoses.

Philosopher Laozi was keeper of books in the earliest library in China, which belonged to the Imperial Zhou dynasty. Also, evidence of catalogues found in some destroyed ancient libraries illustrates the presence of librarians.

The Library of Alexandria
The Library of Alexandria, in Egypt, was the largest and most significant great library of the ancient world. It flourished under the patronage of the Ptolemaic dynasty and functioned as a major center of scholarship from its construction in the 3rd century BC until the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC. The library was conceived and opened either during the reign of Ptolemy I Soter (323–283 BC) or during the reign of his son Ptolemy II (283–246 BC). An early organization system was in effect at Alexandria.

Much of what we know about the Alexandrian library is not based on verifiable fact, but rather a collection of stories, many of which we should forego according to Jochum’s research. There are no physical remnants of the library left, only written allusions from classical writers, but he believes that the great library did not exist merely as single building. The Alexandrian library claimed to have contained every book on every subject in every language. The methods for acquiring these books varied. One reported method was to employ traders to buy books wherever they could be found. Another claimed that books were confiscated from ships in the Alexandrian harbor, then copied for the library and returned to their owners. Catalogs were made of the collection’s books, including the metadata on the original owners and where the copy was copied or written.

Today, the thought of a library containing every book on every subject in every known language is impossible, especially as technology advances. As long ago as 1976, having the information available digitally was proposed as the way to emulate the ideal of the Alexandrian library. The economies offered by digitalization can get us access to the type of knowledge sought by the Greeks. Jochum offers that the Alexandrian may not have existed as the ultimate facility. Once we can weed out the lore from fact, we can then begin to move forward with the library as a learning center instead of a just physical repository for books.

Other Classical libraries
Private or personal libraries made up of written books (as opposed to the state or institutional records kept in archives) appeared in classical Greece in the 5th century BC. The celebrated book collectors of Hellenistic Antiquity were listed in the late 2nd century in Deipnosophistae. All these libraries were Greek; the cultivated Hellenized diners in Deipnosophistae pass over the libraries of Rome in silence. By the time of Augustus there were public libraries near the forums of Rome: there were libraries in the Porticus Octaviae near the Theatre of Marcellus, in the temple of Apollo Palatinus, and in the Bibliotheca Ulpiana in the Forum of Trajan. The state archives were kept in a structure on the slope between the Roman Forum and the Capitoline Hill.

Private libraries appeared during the late republic: Seneca the Younger inveighed against libraries fitted out for show by illiterate owners who scarcely read their titles in the course of a lifetime, but displayed the scrolls in bookcases (armaria) of citrus wood inlaid with ivory that ran right to the ceiling: "by now, like bathrooms and hot water, a library is got up as standard equipment for a fine house (domus). Libraries were amenities suited to a villa, such as Cicero's at Tusculum, Maecenas's several villas, or Pliny the Younger's, all described in surviving letters. At the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, apparently the villa of Caesar's father-in-law, the Greek library has been partly preserved in volcanic ash; archaeologists speculate that a Latin library, kept separate from the Greek one, may await discovery at the site.

In the West, the first public libraries were established under the Roman Empire as each succeeding emperor strove to open one or many which outshone that of his predecessor. Unlike the Greek libraries, readers had direct access to the scrolls, which were kept on shelves built into the walls of a large room. Reading or copying was normally done in the room itself. The surviving records give only a few instances of lending features. As a rule, Roman public libraries were bilingual: they had a Latin room and a Greek room. Most of the large Roman baths were also cultural centres, built from the start with a library, a two room arrangement with one room for Greek and one for Latin texts.

Libraries were filled with parchment scrolls as at Library of Pergamum and on papyrus scrolls as at Alexandria: the export of prepared writing materials was a staple of commerce. There were a few institutional or royal libraries which were open to an educated public (such as the Serapeum collection of the Library of Alexandria, once the largest Great library in the ancient world), but on the whole collections were private. In those rare cases where it was possible for a scholar to consult library books there seems to have been no direct access to the stacks. In all recorded cases the books were kept in a relatively small room where the staff went to get them for the readers, who had to consult them in an adjoining hall or covered walkway.

Han Chinese scholar Liu Xiang established the first library classification system during the Han Dynasty, and the first book notation system. At this time the library catalogue was written on scrolls of fine silk and stored in silk bags.

Middle Ages (501 AD – 1400 AD)
In the 6th century, at the very close of the Classical period, the great libraries of the Mediterranean world remained those of Constantinople and Alexandria. Cassiodorus, minister to Theodoric, established a monastery at Vivarium in the heel of Italy with a library where he attempted to bring Greek learning to Latin readers and preserve texts both sacred and secular for future generations. As its unofficial librarian, Cassiodorus not only collected as many manuscripts as he could, he also wrote treatises aimed at instructing his monks in the proper uses of reading and methods for copying texts accurately. In the end, however, the library at Vivarium was dispersed and lost within a century.

Through Origen and especially the scholarly presbyter Pamphilus of Caesarea, an avid collector of books of Scripture, the theological school of Caesarea won a reputation for having the most extensive ecclesiastical library of the time, containing more than 30,000 manuscripts: Gregory Nazianzus, Basil the Great, Jerome and others came and studied there.

By the 8th century first Iranians and then Arabs had imported the craft of papermaking from China, with a paper mill already at work in Baghdad in 794. By the 9th century public libraries started to appear in many Islamic cities. They were called "halls of Science" or dar al-'ilm. They were each endowed by Islamic sects with the purpose of representing their tenets as well as promoting the dissemination of secular knowledge. The 9th century Abbasid Caliph al-Mutawakkil of Iraq, ordered the construction of a "zawiyat qurra" – an enclosure for readers which was "lavishly furnished and equipped". In Shiraz, Adhud al-Daula (d. 983) set up a library, described by the medieval historian al-Muqaddasi as "a complex of buildings surrounded by gardens with lakes and waterways. The buildings were topped with domes, and comprised an upper and a lower story with a total, according to the chief official, of 360 rooms.... In each department, catalogs were placed on a shelf... the rooms were furnished with carpets". The libraries often employed translators and copyists in large numbers, in order to render into Arabic the bulk of the available Persian, Greek, Roman and Sanskrit non-fiction and the classics of literature. This flowering of Islamic learning ceased centuries later, after many of these libraries were destroyed by Mongol invasions. Others were victim of wars and religious strife in the Islamic world. However, a few examples of these medieval libraries, such as the libraries of Chinguetti in West Africa, remain intact and relatively unchanged. Another ancient library from this period which is still operational and expanding is the Central Library of Astan Quds Razavi in the Iranian city of Mashhad, which has been operating for more than six centuries.

The contents of these Islamic libraries were copied by Christian monks in Muslim/Christian border areas, particularly Spain and Sicily. From there they eventually made their way into other parts of Christian Europe. These copies joined works that had been preserved directly by Christian monks from Greek and Roman originals, as well as copies Western Christian monks made of Byzantine works.

Buddhist scriptures, educational materials, and histories were stored in libraries in pre-modern Southeast Asia. In Burma, a royal library called the Pitaka Taik was legendarily founded by King Anawrahta; in the 18th century, British envoy Michael Symes, upon visiting this library, wrote that "it is not improbable that his Birman majesty may possess a more numerous library than any potentate, from the banks of the Danube to the borders of China". In Thailand libraries called ho trai were built throughout the country, usually on stilts above a pond to prevent bugs from eating at the books.

In the Early Middle Ages, monastery libraries developed, such as the important one at the Abbey of Montecassino. Books were usually chained to the shelves, and these chained libraries reflected the fact that manuscripts, created via the labour-intensive process of hand copying, were valuable possessions. Despite this protectiveness, many libraries loaned books if provided with security deposits (usually money or a book of equal value). Lending was a means by which books could be copied and spread. In 1212 the council of Paris condemned those monasteries that still forbade loaning books, reminding them that lending is "one of the chief works of mercy." The early libraries located in monastic cloisters and associated with scriptoria were collections of lecterns with books chained to them. Shelves built above and between back-to-back lecterns were the beginning of bookpresses. The chain was attached at the fore-edge of a book rather than to its spine. Book presses came to be arranged in carrels (perpendicular to the walls and therefore to the windows) in order to maximize lighting, with low bookcases in front of the windows. This "stall system" (fixed bookcases perpendicular to exterior walls pierced by closely spaced windows) was characteristic of English institutional libraries. In European libraries, bookcases were arranged parallel to and against the walls. This "wall system" was first introduced on a large scale in Spain's El Escorial.

Renaissance


In Rome, the papal collections were brought together by Pope Nicholas V, in separate Greek and Latin libraries, and housed by Pope Sixtus IV, who consigned the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana to the care of his librarian, the humanist Bartolomeo Platina in February 1475.

The 16th and 17th centuries saw other privately endowed libraries assembled in Rome: the Vallicelliana, formed from the books of Saint Filippo Neri, with other distinguished libraries such as that of Cesare Baronio, the Biblioteca Angelica founded by the Augustinian Angelo Rocca, which was the only truly public library in Counter-Reformation Rome; the Biblioteca Alessandrina with which Pope Alexander VII endowed the University of Rome; the Biblioteca Casanatense of the Cardinal Girolamo Casanate; and finally the Biblioteca Corsiniana founded by the bibliophile Clement XII Corsini and his nephew Cardinal Neri Corsini, still housed in Palazzo Corsini in via della Lungara.

The Republic of Venice patronized the foundation of the Biblioteca Marciana, based on the library of Cardinal Basilios Bessarion. In Milan, Cardinal Federico Borromeo founded the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. This trend soon spread outside of Italy, for example Louis III, Elector Palatine founded the Bibliotheca Palatina of Heidelberg. These libraries don't have so many volumes as the modern libraries. However, they keep many valuable manuscripts of Greek, Latin and Biblical works.

Tianyi Chamber, founded in 1561 by Fan Qin during the Ming Dynasty, is the oldest surviving library in China. In its heyday it boasted a collection of 70,000 volumes of antique books.

17th and 18th centuries
During the 17th and 18th centuries, some of the more important European libraries were founded, such as the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the British Museum Library in London, the Mazarine Library and the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, the Austrian National Library in Vienna, the National Central Library in Florence, the Prussian State Library in Berlin, the Załuski Library in Warsaw and the M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library of St Petersburg.

The 18th century is when we see the beginning of the modern public library. In France, the French Revolution saw the confiscation in 1789 of church libraries and rich nobles' private libraries, and their collections became state property. The confiscated stock became part of a new national library – the Bibliothèque Nationale. Two famous librarians, Hubert-Pascal Ameilhon and Joseph Van Praet, selected and identified over 300,000 books and manuscripts that became the property of the people in the Bibliothèque Nationale. During the French Revolution, librarians were solely responsible for the bibliographic planning of the nation. Out of this came the implementation of the concept of library service – the democratic extension of library services to the general public regardless of wealth or education.

19th century
_The Industrial Revolution_

20th century
After the World Wars, Cold Wars and the introduction of Technology in libraries Stephen Cresswell reviews literature concerning libraries, the civil rights movement and the end of segregation in Southern libraries. The ALA did not actively support library integration. As Rubin notes, until the 1960s, the ALA considered itself an association representing only its constituency of librarians (Rubin, 294). Efforts by the ALA included:
 * 1) The 1936 decision to boycott convention cities where hotels and restaurants were segregated.
 * 2) In the late 1950s and 1960s ALA denied membership to segregated state library associations and ruled a state could have only one state association.
 * 3) The 1961 amendment to the Library Bill of Rights stated that the right of an individual to the use of a library should not be abridged because of his race, religion, national origins or political views.
 * 4) In 1962 the organization undertook an “Access Study” to evaluate freedom of access throughout the country.

The study revealed more segregation and inequities in libraries in northern cities than in the South. Northern libraries were sometimes the focus of destructive demonstrations. In the South they were often the first focus of civil rights demonstrations rather than schools, because they evoked sympathy for the individual’s right to learn, rather than the more emotional reactions to integrating public schools.

Ahistoricism
Lancaster, F.W. (1978). Toward paperless information systems.

Harris and Hannah (1992). Why do we study the history of libraries?

Black, Alastair. "Information and Modernity: The History of Information and the Eclipse of Library History." Library History 14 (May 1998): 39-45.

Gender
Garrison, writing in 1972, highlights a problem of the public image of librarianship: it has not attained the status of the more scientific professions such as doctor, sociologist, etc. One possible reason, the one central to this article, is the entrée of women into the field during the Victorian era. Garrison examines three tenets that make a profession: service, knowledge, and autonomy. Librarians, as professionals, serve their clients (community or society); female librarians, on the other hand, were to be almost subservient. The knowledge required of a librarian, considered highly educated for a woman at the time, lacked the standardized training for a doctor. Libraries were governed by boards populated by men, not female librarians, who made key decisions. Garrison concludes that until library science comes to terms with women’s early employment in libraries and the way it has shaped the current assumptions, it will never attain the rank of other professions. Garrison provides a lively essay on the history of female librarians and its manifestations today. Her perspective, however, is colored by feminism’s second wave in the 1970s.

Perhaps the public image of librarianship today should not focus so much on doctors and sociologists, but the more technology-based professions under the information science umbrella. For instance, librarians are not seen as the driving force behind innovation like software engineers and others in the IT field. Would an analysis of women in the early stages of librarianship give insight into why some have trouble with the information science moniker?

Even though the profession of a librarian is considered "women's work" there are men who have chosen this profession. However, they usually hold positions of upper management and other higher paying areas. What exactly is "women's work" within the library environment? Suzanne Hildenbrand argues that cataloging and services for children and youth are most often seen in this way. There are statistics that show these two positions are the lowest paid and are not held in high esteem within the library workplace. The author raises a great point that what needs to be focused on is not the movement of women into management positions and other high paying positions but one that focuses on the equality of salaries and conditions within the most female concentrated specialties up to the standard of the profession

Inclusions and exclusions
Before 1960, there were no public library services for ethnic minorities. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, many attempts to design and develop library services for ethnic groups were put into motion. The cultural programs that flourished were programs that had adequate federal funding for services and experimentation. Other factors that contributed to successful programs: Ethnic library services have been dropping gradually since 1981; and libraries are still failing to include: books, periodicals, films, recording, and archives that relate to various minority groups. Rethinking ideas to meet different needs is required when there are demographic changes, and libraries should take proper steps to appeal to everyone.
 * Recruitment of appropriate staff to identify information needs and promote library programs
 * Involvement by the community in planning and developing services
 * Developed mechanisms that enable the community to identify its own needs
 * Link the needs to the expertise of librarians

It is important to have a diverse staff, particularly when a diverse clientele is involved. There has been a decrease in college enrollment amongst minorities; and in 1991-1992, only 8.5% of the Library and Information Science graduates were minorities. There are five tasks administrators and librarians should implement, so the number of graduates increase in the library program: In 1993, a few efforts have been made to recruit minorities, but none had been particularly successful. In order to make recruitment more successful, it must be considered a priority
 * Cooperative efforts to hire minority graduates
 * Additional monetary incentives ? scholarships, tuition waivers, and housing
 * Recruitment activities aimed at students as early as the junior high school
 * Recruitment of nontraditional students from military or community colleges
 * Development of an academic and social environment on campus conducive to success

Salvador Guerena and Edward Erazo have three recommendations for the future of Latinos and libraries:
 * 1) Increase recruitment, retention, and mentoring of bilingual/ bicultural Latino professional personnel.
 * 2) Include members of the Latino community in the process of planning library services for the community.
 * 3) Foster networking among libraries providing service to the Latino community.

Hispanics represent the fastest growing demographic group in the United States, but Latino librarianship has remained constant at 1.8% of librarians. Shortages of bilingual librarians will continue to increase. Foreign language proficiency is not required of library schools so graduates are not prepared to serve the needs of the Latino community. REFORMA, LSTA, and ALA have been advocates for training, improving technology and curriculum in response to changing multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual society. The article is informative yet pessimistic. It recognizes the technological divide in the Hispanic community and the need for education and availability of computers in libraries. The affordability of computers has not increased ownership of computers in their homes. In West Chicago Middle School, many Latino students use the computers in the classroom to complete their assignments. For many of these students, high school will be the end of their formal education. At the Olcott library, the greatest demand for Spanish titles comes from Miami and Los Angeles not locally. A telling observation of the article is that Hispanics do not feel welcome in libraries because Hispanics feel libraries are Anglo American institutions run by and for Anglo Americans.

Tunnel vision
Wayne Weigand says that "a constant re-examination of our past [...] can show the parameters of tunnel vision and reveal many of the blind spots". Librarians often act as "stewards" of the past, which may mean perpetuating many of the past's close-minded views.

Library collections, like the steward-librarians Weigand mentions are "products of our pasts". Unless we have the luxury of throwing out our entire collection and starting anew, we are stuck with including the tunnel vision of the past in our libraries.

Defining information
There are many ways of defining and conceptualizing information. Definitions can focus on the technical aspects of information, or the societal aspects.

Information as a sequence of symbols
In its most restricted technical sense, is a sequence of symbols that can be interpreted as a message. Information can be recorded as signs, or transmitted as signals.

Information as a right
In an article written for the Bowker Annual in 1987, Kenneth Dowlin discusses the need for the library profession to ensure that access to information remains available, as a basic human right, to everyone in an age where we are moving from an industrial to an information society. He argues that the mission of libraries should be to develop minimum standards of access and “promote the compatibility of information systems”. Dowlin gives a brief discussion of why information must be considered a human right, and identifies several barriers to this, namely He then proposes some strategies to reduce these barriers and defines the role the library profession should play in implementing them.
 * 1) Legislative barriers
 * 2) Competitive barriers
 * 3) Technological barriers
 * 4) Perceptual barriers
 * 5) Economic barriers

I believe that he is correct in his assessment of the barriers that exist, and that libraries should play a role in ensuring access for all to information, but disagree with most of his proposed solutions, which in my mind are based on false assumptions, which time has borne out. He asks the library profession to implement solutions they are not equipped to deal with and have no control over. The library profession has no way to set standards of technology to ensure access for all. Letting the private sector derive solutions to these barriers, has proven the best way to overcome the barriers he has identified. Although Dowlin’s fundamental statement is correct, it is questionable whether his solutions are practical or achievable in the real world.

Quantifying information
There is a plethora of ways to think about information, and those involved in information and knowledge work have a number widely divergent agendas. This can make evaluation of information services very difficult. Some groups attempt to make such evaluation mathematical and scientific, while others rely on tools from the social sciences, such as surveys and studies. The mathematical and scientific groups often try to measure a service's value using calculations and monetary values.

While the United Kingdom conducted a survey that had people evaluate how much service they received and how it contributed to their productivity. The article wasn't necessarily aimed at just the business world. The author did a great job at relating this to the library field by talking about the amount of knowledge you poses and how useful that makes you. It talked about the more knowledgeable you are, the more productive you will be, and the more assistance you will be able to provide. From our discussion last week in class about what makes a good librarian this was one of the major things that we all thought made a good librarian. I feel the more informed and versatile you are in all different aspects, the more you will have to draw upon and offer. All of that contributes to your ability to be more productive for the patrons that you assist.

Defining knowledge
Knowledge is a general understanding or familiarity with a subject, place, situation, etc. Knowledge can be acquired through experience or education.

Information needs
An information need is a gap in a person's knowledge. When a person identifies such a gap, it may be expressed as a question or a search query.