Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.
—Clive Bell
Rationalism is simple to explain. It is the practice of being guided by “emphasizing the role or importance of reason . . . in contrast to sensory experience . . . feelings, or authority.”1 In short, basing one’s opinions and actions on what is considered reasonable in light of the evidence. The philosophical belief that reason is a source of knowledge in itself—independent of emotions, faith, and the senses—is the basis for the rational approach. In one sense, rationalism is the antithesis of religion in that it relies on evidence and reasoning while the latter relies on faith (beliefs not based on evidence). By contrast, rationalism is the basis of the scientific method, in which conclusions are always tested against existing and new evidence, and discarded if found wanting. As with most values, rationalism is not and should not be an absolute. Paradoxically, a total reliance on reason is quite unreasonable, and one should always be wary of those Gradgrinds who exalt reason above everything and lose their humanity in the process.2 However, in the practical matters of the world, a tilt toward reason over emotion is always to be preferred.
There is a great tide of fundamentalism, superstition, and plain craziness in the world today. From faith healers to militants of all stripes, the world is full of people who are convinced that they know the One True Way and are aggressively intolerant of those who do not share or, worse, who mock their irrationalism. It sometimes appears that the classical conflicts of most of the twentieth century are being deemphasized, to be replaced by a broad single conflict between the forces of internationalism and secular rationalism on the one side and what one writer describes as “atavistic social movements” that oppose both.3 This is not to espouse the notion proposing that the triumph of democratic capitalism over communism means that we have reached “the end of history”4 (something that even its propounder appears to have abandoned). Rather, I wish to place the various forms of irrationalism in a global context. Nor would I state—most simply because I do not believe it—that internationalism and particularly its manifestation known as “globalization” are preferable to their alternatives in all instances. Insofar as they mitigate the many evils that nationalism and fundamentalism (of all kinds) have visited upon the world and its inhabitants, surely we can argue that movements that bring people together are to be preferred to movements that set one class of person against others. Further, surely we can argue that rational, logical, and humanistic beliefs have proven to be more beneficial than irrational and antihumanitarian beliefs. I would stress here that I do not use “rational” as the opposite of “spiritual” but as an antonym of “irrational.” It is, it appears, possible for a person to be both rational and spiritual, and reason and rationality are not necessarily the foes of faith, if they are seen as belonging to different aspects of life.
Libraries are children of the Enlightenment and of rationalism. In the words of one scholar-librarian:
The philosophical and political principles of the European Enlightenment provide the philosophical foundation of American academic and public libraries. The values of the Enlightenment should seem very familiar to Americans. The Enlightenment belief that scientific investigation of nature and society leads to improvements and progress has been a constant American refrain since the early republic. American political rights are numerous: individual human rights, liberty, democracy, equality, the freedom to believe what you like, behave how you want as long as others are not harmed, study what you want, share your beliefs or insights freely with the world. These rights are commonplaces of American identity. Also derived from the Enlightenment is the belief in the necessity of education in a democratic republic and the obligation of the state to improve the lives of all its citizens, not just the lives of the rich and powerful.5
Libraries stand, above all, for the notion that human beings are improved by the acquisition of knowledge and information and that no bar should be placed in the way of that acquisition. We stand for the individual human being pursuing whichever avenues of enquiry she wishes. We also stand for rationalism as the basis for all our policies and procedures in libraries. Our bibliographic architectures, online systems, collection development, public service, library instruction, and so on are all based on rational approaches and the scientific method. Librarianship is a supremely rational profession and should resist the forces of irrationalism both external and internal.
As far as libraries are concerned, rationalism is important in two different ways. First, all the practical aspects of librarianship—what older writers used to call “library economy”—benefit from the application of reason. Cataloguing, service, library instruction, collection development, materials processing, online systems—all must be guided by policies that are firmly based on the rational method. Second, there is no better antidote to the forces of unreason than a well-stocked, well-organized library—the natural home of someone seeking objective information and well-founded knowledge and with the willingness to discriminate between them and the ill-founded and the unreasonable.
I will examine here three aspects of library work in the light of rationalism:
• the ways in which we organize libraries
• library instruction as a rational process primarily aimed at imparting the rational approach
• bibliographic control as the ultimate library expression of the rational approach
One important application of rationalism and belief in reason in libraries is—or should be—the way in which we organize libraries in order to carry out our mission. Too often, organizational structures have grown by accretion—like coral reefs—in which the original, long-forgotten organization has been shaped and added to for different reasons at different times. Why does one library have three public service divisions when another library of similar size and mission has one? The most likely explanation is that the three departments were created around long-gone personnel issues or to respond to long-solved issues and problems. The other problem with long-established organizational patterns is the Old-Shoe Syndrome. Most people are more comfortable staying with the familiar than working with new people in new work patterns. If one has the power and is determined to apply the rational method, one might think that such accidental organizations should be swept away and replaced with more efficient structures. Surprisingly often, that is not the best answer. Rationalism calls for a clear appraisal of the practical effects of each policy and procedure. It might be that an organization that has grown unplanned would, on examination, prove to be working quite well. Accepting a productive organization that may appear to be illogical is a very rational thing to do. On the other hand, we should not accept ineffective organizational structures because they are familiar and comfortable. Sensible change may, on occasion, have bad effects on morale in the short term but yield increased morale in the longer term, because effective organizations make people more productive, and most people are happier when engaged in productive work than when they feel their work is ineffective or even futile. Probably the best weapon the rational reorganizer has is that most rational of all maxims, Occam’s Razor: “Entities should not be multiplied without necessity.”6 In other words, a library should have the smallest effective number of departments and other organizational units, the smallest number of steps in the hierarchy, and the smallest number of staff and types of staff in each unit that is consistent with effectiveness.
Let us try to adduce some principles of organization derived from rational analysis of work in libraries and the functions that units within libraries are designed to perform. I would propose the following:
• The ideal organization should be as “flat” as possible. That is, it should have the least number of steps in the hierarchy that is consonant with the library’s mission.
• No one should have an impractical number of people reporting to her or him. The late Hugh Atkinson used to invoke the minyan as a model for the upper limit of the number of people reporting directly to an administrator, though even that number seems high to me.7
• Organization of work should follow my “drift down” theory of library organization, which states, aphoristically, that no librarian should do what a paraprofessional can do, no paraprofessional should do what a clerical staff member or student assistant can do, and no human being should do what a machine can do.8
• The units of the library should have a clear mission and explicitly defined and demarcated responsibilities.
• Each unit should be staffed with enough and no more than enough people at appropriate levels.
• No organizational unit or structure should be based on either personalities or temporary exigencies.
• The organizational structure should be flexible enough to allow for the formation of temporary groupings (e.g., task forces) to deal with specific projects and temporary challenges.
• Units concerned with the general functions of the library should be organized around those general functions (e.g., collection development, reference, cataloguing) and not around types of material. The exception to this is the case of materials that either need machines to be useful (e.g., sound recordings) or need special handling, storage, and conservation (e.g., manuscripts, archives).
• All organizations should permit and encourage cross-training leading to flexible deployment of human resources.
• Organizations should facilitate and encourage individual development and advancement.
It is apparent that, in practice, some of these prescriptions may conflict. For instance, it is difficult to create and maintain a “flat” organization and an organization in which no one has a lot of people reporting to her or him. The flattest organization, after all, is one in which everybody reports to one person. This is illustrative of the central problem of organization, which is that theory and practice can conflict—and usually do. Another manifestation of that problem is that most administrators have to deal with existing structures and work patterns and seldom have the luxury of sweeping change or—luxury of luxuries—the chance to build a new organization from scratch. That practical realization does not mean that administrators have to abandon the rational approach any more than the rational approach means that all libraries must, willy-nilly, be forced into impractical, theory-based structures. As with so many philosophies and values, rationalism is an approach, not a prescription, and the successful administrator is one who achieves balance between theory and practice, between pragmatism and ideals.
One of the more controversial duties of the librarian is the duty to instruct. Melvil Dewey stressed the teaching role of librarians.9 Others have called that role a fiction.10 From the earliest days of public libraries, in which the role of the librarian as raiser of the cultural level of the community was taken for granted by most, to the most modern technologically advanced library of today, there has been considerable discussion and debate about whether it is proper for librarians to see themselves as teachers. Public librarians have largely abandoned that idea, but school librarians in most states are teachers in name as well as fact. The history of librarians teaching in academic libraries is complex and difficult to untangle. It revolves about the central question of whether it is better to deliver the recorded knowledge and information that a user wants and needs or to teach that user to find what she needs herself. The mock-Oriental cliché about the superiority of teaching people to fish rather than giving them fish has been invoked often. This seemingly sage remark does not, of course, take into account the person who just wants a fish to satisfy his immediate and temporary hunger and, consequently, resents the time-consuming process of learning how to fish. It is difficult to imagine a less service-oriented approach than that of denying a simple request for help in the interest of educating the requester in a skill that she may never need again.
Teaching about libraries used to be called “bibliographic instruction” (BI) in academic libraries. BI had a long and interesting history arising in great part from two phenomena of thirty to forty years ago:
• the movement that established undergraduate libraries on major college campuses in the 1950s and 1960s11
• the manifold deficiencies of bibliographic control in the age of the mammoth card catalogue and successive layers of unsatisfactory cataloguing rules
The first phenomenon segregated undergraduate library users in designated places physically apart from the “main” or “graduate” library. (This latter was by no means an unintended consequence for the senior faculty who encouraged the undergraduate library movement.) It also created a subspecialty within academic librarianship of librarians devoted to the special needs of undergraduate students. This contrasts with smaller university libraries and college libraries, in which reference service, collection development, and bibliographic control are directed to the full range of library users, from freshmen to internationally renowned scholars.
Card catalogues became virtually unusable at a yet undiscovered size (it will never now be defined, as these behemoths no longer exist). Many millions of volumes arranged by the LC or Dewey Decimal classifications are, to put it mildly, difficult to navigate. Printed indexes to periodical literature were, at best, slow and tedious to use and, worse, months if not years out of date. These negative factors defined the environment in which a student was supposed to do library research in research libraries before the advent of the online catalogue and online indexing an abstracting services. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the relatively new specialty—undergraduate librarianship—should focus on programs that were dedicated to help undergraduates find their way through the shockingly unfriendly bibliographic maze that lay outside the more user-oriented confines of the undergraduate library. Bibliographic instruction (BI), in short, sought to make up for the many and manifest inadequacies of bibliographic control in large academic libraries until the early to middle 1980s.
BI evolved from that simple aim, however. It sought to become a new branch of librarianship in itself. Its more avid adherents seemed almost happy to deny easily bestowable help to the library user in need in favor of making that user jump through some BI hoops. They were accused of seeing BI as a subject in itself rather than a tool to help library users and of ignoring the real needs of library users. BI was even accused of being a cloaked attempt to raise the image and status of academic librarians by equating them with teachers. (Remember that this was a time in which the arguments about “faculty status” for librarians raged unchecked.)
Time may not have been a great healer in this instance, but it was certainly a great transformer. As online catalogues and online indexes and abstracting services became more sophisticated and easier to use, the need for that kind of “bibliographic instruction” became less and less. The introduction of rationality to bibliographic standards (MARC, ISBD, AACR2, etc.), their widespread adoption, and the consequently high level of second-generation online catalogues and union databases made instruction that was specifically “bibliographic” less important to library users. The result was that BI was reborn as “library instruction” (LI)—programs devoted to teaching people how to use the library, to find what they need, and to evaluate what they had found (critical thinking). In other words, the emphasis swung from the negative (making up for the deficiencies of rotten systems) to the positive (how to make the most of the library and its services). These LI programs were, in turn, transformed by the widespread availability of online resources in libraries. Given the seductive power of online resources and the ease with which one can find “something” online, it is hard to argue that library users do not require some instruction aimed at understanding the value and limitations of online resources. In fact, in academic libraries, that need is so manifest and universal that it has—for the time being, at least—settled the old “information versus instruction” debate. Today’s student needs both help and instruction, and both in great quantities.
Before I go on to discuss the application of rationalism to instruction in libraries, I wish to touch on the question of “library instruction” and the lack of it in public libraries. Schools and institutions of higher learning have, in varying degrees, captive audiences. Leading university librarian Hugh Atkinson once said, “An ounce of help is worth a ton of instruction.” It is hard to argue that it is practical to deny public library users their ounces of help when they are simply not available to receive their ton of instruction. Formal programs of library instruction are inappropriate in almost all public library settings, so the discussion tends to revolve around using reference work not only to answer the questions of the moment but also to inculcate the best way to find desired information in the future. In the guise of “information literacy,” some public libraries and librarians are addressing the need to teach public library patrons how to navigate the modern, technologically advanced public library; others are not.12 Roma Harris’s research in the 1980s indicated that there was a very high level of agreement among public librarians that reference work should involve an element of instruction, even when it was not requested by the patron.13 That was some time ago, but surely the need has increased not lessened. It would stand to reason that the influx of online resources into public libraries in years since—and the provision of new services, technological or otherwise—will have, if anything, strengthened that agreement. Every public library is now an important gateway to the “information age,” especially in the poorest areas of the country. Poor areas are inhabited disproportionately by those with less education than most. Given those circumstances, it is almost impossible to think that people should not be taught how best to make their way in that brave new world. Call it what you will, “library instruction” is not just for colleges anymore.
Once a library of whatever type has accepted the need for teaching the use of the library and its resources (which I will continue to call “library instruction” for want of a better, more inclusive term), it must formulate and understand the rationale for such a program. Given the fact that the human resources available are likely to be limited, it is vital that the program be focused on the most pressing needs. In most libraries, the most obvious need is for instruction and assistance in the use of online resources. It is likely, however, that one problem in online use is that it blinds the uninformed to other sources of knowledge and information that are available in the library. A primary skill crying out for instruction is the identification and choice of the most appropriate and effective sources in any format to fit individual questions and problems. Many people need to be taught that no one type of resource can supply the answers to everything. In an age of rampant commercialism, cyberpropaganda, “everything on your smartphone,” and the rest of the hype, that is not an easy point to make. Devising a rationale for an instruction program depends, in the first instance, on defining the skills that are most important to the library’s users.
People use “information competence” as if it were a substitute or development of library instruction; on examination, it turns out mostly not to be so. Many of the information competence programs that I have seen are concentrated entirely, or greatly, on online resources. They are, therefore, based on the idea that the all-digital library is an emerging reality and that authoritative recorded knowledge of the kind found in print is no longer relevant to the concerns of library users. I see information competence as a part of library instruction, and believe that both are in need of augmentation.
The instruction program of the future, whether carried out by formal instructional means or integrated with individual library use, should have three ascending components:
• basic library and online skills
• how to identify and locate appropriate sources
• critical thinking
At the first level, library users will learn about libraries—what they are and what they contain. This may seem to be self-evident, but elementary facts about libraries can come as a revelation to a person unused to public library use and with only scant, involuntary involvement with a school library that had no librarian to advise and teach. This first level of instruction would also contain introductory facts and strategies to enable the technologically challenged to be at ease in computer use and, thereby, able to use online resources to their advantage. This last may be the one opportunity for public libraries to attract large numbers of their users to formal classes.
At the second level, library users will become aware of the bibliographic structure of the library and the ways in which we organize recorded knowledge and information for retrieval. At this stage, it is vital that instruction should differentiate between the three concentric rings of organization:
• the highly organized and structured environment of the library, featuring authority control, controlled vocabularies, bibliographic standards, the artificial language of classification, and so on
• the less-organized environment of journal indexes, abstracting services, and the like, featuring a lack of standardization between different indexing entities but vocabulary and name control within a particular service
• the unorganized online environment, in which the user has to rely on random aggregations of sites and search engines based on keyword searching
At each level, both relevance (the match between the search terms and the documents retrieved) and recall (the percentage of relevant documents retrieved) are degraded. In other words, one of the most important lessons that must be taught is that the same search using the same terms will yield very different results in different environments. This matters a lot because a search that yielded a few highly relevant documents in a catalogue or index will, in all probability, yield a large number of mostly irrelevant documents online. (This is greatly complicated by systems that jam together the catalogue, other finding aids, and online access, all subject to default keyword searching—the predictable result being the lowest common denominator.) The temptation for the uninitiated is to take whatever is found without even knowing that there are far more relevant documents among the large number retrieved. The instruction here should be dedicated to ensuring that library users cannot just locate something but can locate and identify the materials that are most relevant to their needs. The strategies that must be imparted are dedicated to distinguishing the strengths and weaknesses of each medium and the various paths by which the most relevant of them can be located.
The third level is that of critical thinking. The ability to distinguish the true from the false, the relevant from the irrelevant, the wise from the meretricious, and the deep from the shallow has always been a part of enlightened education. It is probably fair to say that, until recent decades, librarians were happy to leave such instruction to school and college teachers. After all, we all knew which publishers were reputable, which newspapers and journalists were authoritative, and which journals ranked highest in their fields. A librarian had obviously done her job well in giving a direction to a library catalogue or indexing service that led a user to a book published by Oxford University Press or Random House, an article in the New York times or Le monde, or an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association or Nature. Today, all bets are off. Just telling someone to look something up online can scarcely be accounted a job well done. It is clearly impossible for a librarian to be there to help each library user lost in the wasteland in which, for example, the Washington post and BuzzFeed, an NIH paper and a quack cure, Citizen Kane and a kitten video are on equal footing. That being so, librarians must do their best to ensure that the user’s online struggles are not completely unequal contests. The equalizer in that struggle is critical thinking—the ability to evaluate and judge resources in all forms and from all sources.
The rational approach to librarianship demands that we dispense instruction and, in so doing, enable library users to be empowered by knowledge and relevant information.
Apart from their physical plant, libraries have three major assets: their resources in all formats, their staff, and the architecture of bibliographic control. Good buildings, resources, and staff count for nothing without bibliographic control. A place with well-housed resources with bibliographic control but no staff is a glorified warehouse. The best staff and the best organization in the world cannot make up for inadequate collections. A Russian riddle asks, “Which is the most important leg on a three-legged stool?” thus aphorizing the interdependence of the three pillars of a good library. Collection development and the hiring and care of staff have more of art than science about them, but bibliographic control is the epitome of rationalism and the “scientific approach” in librarianship.
The modern age of librarianship began in the late 1960s and culminated about ten years later. In some respects, that golden age provided us with the foundations of libraries for many years to come. The breakthrough events that characterized that period were the spread of library automation and the concurrent and linked spread of effective and accepted bibliographic standards. MARC—still the globally accepted standard for electronic bibliographic records—was born in the age of the card catalogue and is present today as an essential element of the most advanced Web-based library system. The Anglo-American cataloguing rules, second edition (AACR2) made national and international standardization of the content of MARC records possible and achievable, not least because it incorporated the International standard bibliographic description (ISBD) global standards. AACR2 was the de jure or de facto standard in all English-speaking countries—and in many that are not—for more than thirty years. It is also the basis for many codes written in other languages, a fact that makes the adoption of the misbegotten Resource description & access (RDA) all the more unfortunate. We have national standards for classification (the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress systems) and subject headings (the LC List of subject headings [LCSH]), but they are not as widely accepted internationally.
The point of this near-global bibliographic standardization is not that cataloguing has improved (though it almost certainly has) but that it has made some longtime dreams realizable. Librarians have been building union catalogues and aspiring to a universal union catalogue since the middle of the nineteenth century. Two things made those goals impractical until thirty years ago: the technology of the time and lack of standardization. It is impossible to create and maintain a current union card catalogue, book catalogue, or microform catalogue. Until 1979, not even Britain and North America shared a common cataloguing code, still less the rest of the world. Computer technology and standardization made massive current union catalogues possible and even made the dream of Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC) achievable.14 UBC is a program that states, in essence, that we should use technology and standards to ensure that each document is catalogued once in its country of origin and the resulting record is made available to libraries and researchers throughout the world. Viewed in this light, the various international and national cooperative cataloguing schemes of the Library of Congress and the gigantic world union catalogue that OCLC and others have created represent a harmonic convergence of rationality and dreams. We have come to a point at which the rational approach typified by cataloguing, standardization, MARC, and cooperation will enable the creation of a seemingly fantastic dream: the World Catalogue.
It would be a great irony if, on the verge of achieving the World Catalogue, we were to use it mostly for access to tangible documents (books, maps, journals, etc.). It is imperative that we ensure that this universal bibliographic resource includes records for, and links to, worthwhile online resources. The rub lies in those last few words. What is worthwhile? Which online resources? I have written of the value of stewardship and the consequence of deciding what is or is not significant in chapter 5 of this book, and now wish to apply that criterion to online resources and their peculiar problems.
To simplify, there are two basic problems with online resources as far as bibliographic control is concerned. The first is that the majority of such resources or aggregations of data are of no value, little value, very localized value, or temporary value. The second is that online resources are inherently unstable and shape-shifting. These two simple points add up to a massive complexity that may, at first, seem to defy rational analysis and a rational set of answers. It is clearly neither rational nor efficient to catalogue a mass of online resources that are valueless or of limited value. It is clearly not efficient to catalogue something that may have a completely different shape and content in the future. It might be natural to despair and hope that, left alone, the great online swamp will somehow resolve itself. I think such a course of action would violate the two important values of stewardship and rationalism, and I believe there is another—much more difficult and expensive—plan for the future.
One part of that plan would be to blend traditional cataloguing and “archival” cataloguing. By the latter, I mean the cataloguing of aggregations of resources rather than the resources themselves. Some electronic resources will be of sufficient importance to be catalogued on their own; others (including but not limited to websites) should be catalogued in groups with their individual components listed briefly, if at all.
Another much-discussed issue is that of “metadata”—a pompous word meaning “data about data” which, when you come to think about it, applies to any form of cataloguing.15 The most popular manifestation of metadata is “the Dublin Core,” an ill-defined subset of the MARC format that deals with a minimal structure of the bibliographic record and hardly at all with its content. In a way, metadata is a panicky response to the perceived immensity of the problem and a solution from the “anything is better than nothing” school of thought. The point is that, in considering the cataloguing (by whatever name) of electronic resources, we do not need new structures and new standards (and certainly not those as ill articulated and skinny as the Dublin Core). It is possible to catalogue any document in any format using even the spavined RDA, a major classification, the LC subject heading list, and MARC. The question is not how to catalogue electronic resources but which electronic resources to catalogue. My proposal, first made many years ago, is to devise a system in which electronic resources would be evaluated in terms of their value and whether that value is general and permanent (as opposed to local and temporary) and, thereby, sorted into the following categories:
• those to be catalogued fully, using all bibliographic standards
• those to be catalogued using an agreed-upon, enriched, better-defined set of “metadata”
• those to be catalogued using the skeletal Dublin Core
• those to be left to the mercies of search engines and keyword searching
These categories are in descending order of permanence and value. They are in ascending order of number of resources in each category. The first category would comprise no more than a few percent of electronic resources (though even that seems a high estimate of the proportion of permanently valuable items). The second and third categories might add up to another ten percent, and all the rest would be dealt with as they are today. Those percentages are pure guesses, of course, but even if they are roughly correct, foretell a massive and sustained cooperative cataloguing effort over many years.
If all the political, strategic, and financial questions were answered and this grand plan were to be implemented, libraries would still be faced with the fragile nature of online resources and the need to preserve those that had been catalogued. Such digital preservation schemes as have been proposed or implemented lack credibility and scale. Those who care at all about preservation (as all librarians should) are either fatalistic or optimistic that some technological solution as yet undreamed of will show up. Even if it does, what about the resources of today, which may well be lost by the time the Great Solution appears? The fact is, there is only one certain way to preserve electronic texts and images and to ensure their transmission to future generations. That is to print them on acid-free paper, make many copies, and distribute those copies to a number of libraries. When you have eliminated the implausible, whatever remains—however low-tech—must be taken seriously.
Notes
1. The Oxford companion to philosophy; edited by Ted Honderich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. page 741.
2. Dickens, Charles. Hard times. 1854.
3. Tax, Meredith. “World culture war.” The nation (May 17, 1999) page 24.
4. Fukuyama, Francis. The end of history and the last man. New York: Free Press, 1992.
5. Bivens-Tatum, Wayne. Libraries and the Enlightenment. Sacramento: Library Juice Press, 2013. Preface.
6. William of Ockham (1285–1349) is best remembered for Occam’s Razor, which states, “Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate.”
7. “minyan” (Hebrew: “number”) plural “minyanim” or “minyans.” “In Judaism, the minimum number of males (ten) required to constitute a representative ‘community of Israel’ for liturgical purposes.” Encyclopedia Britannica Online. s.v. “minyan.” www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/384689/minyan (consulted August 27, 2014).
8. Gorman, Michael. “A good heart and an organized mind.” In Library leadership: visualizing the future; edited by Donald E. Riggs. Phoenix: Oryx, 1982. pages 73–83.
9. “The time is when the library is a school and the librarian in the highest sense a teacher.” Melvil Dewey, “The profession.” American library journal, number 1 (September 30, 1876) pages 5–6.
10. Wilson, Pauline. “Librarians as teachers: an organizational fiction” Library quarterly 49 (1979) pages 146–152.
11. The first undergraduate library was established at Harvard University in 1949. Harvard College Library. “Lamont Library: history.” http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/lamont/history.cfm (consulted August 27, 2014).
12. Hall, Rachel. “Public praxis: a vision for critical information literacy in public libraries.” Public library quarterly, volume 29, issue 2 (April–June 2010) pages 162–175.
13. Harris, Roma. “Bibliographic instruction in public libraries: a question of philosophy.” RQ (Fall 1989) pages 92–98.
14. Kaltwasser, Franz Georg. “Universal bibliographic control.” UNESCO library bulletin, volume 25 (September 1971) pages 252–259.
15. For an unusually good discussion of metadata and cataloguing, see: Diao, Junli and Hernández, Mirtha A. “Transferring cataloging legacies into descriptive metadata creation in digital projects: catalogers’ perspective.” Journal of library metadata, volume 14 (2014) pages 130–145.