Core Chapter Concept: Knowledge is created through conversation—if you’re in the knowledge business, you’re in the conversation business.
So you’re a librarian on a mission to improve society. You are not alone. Police officers seek to improve society, as do firemen, politicians, lawyers, doctors, and teachers, among many others. One of the key things that separate you from many other professions is that you seek to do so with a firm focus on knowledge. That is, a librarian seeks to improve communities and society through making them smarter.
Here again, the relatively simple phrase “making them smarter” has deeper implications. Most texts on librarianship, and indeed most courses on the preparation and continuing education of librarians, jump directly to how we make communities smarter: a rich and well-organized collection, reference and research services, readers advisory, and so on. But they often skip over a very important question: what is “smarter” exactly?
Why does that question matter so much? Because it shapes everything in the work of librarians and the libraries they have built over the millennia. Take the Dewey Decimal System, Melvil Dewey’s—and most public libraries’—way of organizing books by numbers. Well, not all books. For example, there are no Dewey numbers for works of fiction, at least not in the original version of the system. Why? Dewey didn’t think libraries should be in the fiction business: libraries were all about learning, and, he believed, you didn’t learn from fiction. Disagree? Good. Yet the belief that knowledge comes only from nonfiction resources shaped libraries of all sorts for over a century.
What’s more, Dewey believed that all of human knowledge could be represented in a single, unified manner. In essence, he believed that libraries were in the truth business, and that there was a single truth we could all agree on. Simple, right? So then you’re okay with the fact that Dewey put cookbooks in with books about business because he thought cooking (or “cookery,” as he called it) was a woman’s business? How about the fact that, in the 200s for “Religion,” he assigned 200–287 to Christian texts, but only 289–299 to all other religious texts (288 is no longer used)? So that, for example, 278 is the number assigned to works of or about the “Christian church in South America,” whereas 296 is the number assigned to all works of or about Judaism. Do you still feel that libraries using his system are shaped by a single objective truth?
Thus, to be a librarian is not simply about knowing how to do things, but about knowing why things are done. And what underlies our knowledge-based profession is the nature of knowledge itself. The way we understand the process of becoming knowledgeable (learning) affects the services we offer, the way we organize resources, the way we evaluate our performance, and ultimately the value we provide as professionals to our communities and to society as a whole. So let’s start by disabusing you of a widely held belief that librarians are “information professionals.”
There is a good chance you’ve been told you live in the “Information Age.” You have most likely heard about the promise of information technology and how rapid access to information will improve our lives. There is an excellent chance you became a librarian because you saw power in information. Power to control your life and power to improve the lives of others. Yet do you really know what information is? Can you define it? Are the words on this page information? Is the book itself?
Don’t be ashamed if you find these questions harder to answer than you thought. I’ve a Ph.D. in information science and still find it hard to come up with a good definition of “information.” It’s kind of like a library—you know it when you see it, right?
Now just because I have a hard time coming up with a definition of “information” doesn’t mean many smarter people haven’t tried. Michael Buckland, for example, didn’t just come up with one definition, he came up with three:
- Information-as-process: When someone is informed, what they know is changed. In this sense “information” is “The act of informing …; communication of the knowledge or ‘news’ of some fact or occurrence; the action of telling or fact of being told of something” (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989, vol. 7, p. 944).
- Information-as-knowledge: “Information” is also used to denote that which is perceived in “information-as-process”: the “knowledge communicated concerning some particular fact, subject, or event; that of which one is apprised or told; intelligence, news” (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989, vol. 7, p. 944). The notion of information as that which reduces uncertainty could be viewed as a special case of “information-as-knowledge.” Sometimes information increases uncertainty.
- Information-as-thing: The term “information” is also used attributively for objects, such as data and documents, that are referred to as “information” because they are regarded as being informative, as “having the quality of imparting knowledge or communicating information; instructive” (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989, vol. 7, p. 946).1
One of the most widely used definitions of information comes in the form of the DIKW (data-information-knowledge-wisdom) hierarchy,2 which defines “information” by contrasting it with three other concepts. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the ever-plentiful data (singular, “datum”). Data are simply recorded measurements. In today’s digital world, these measurements are most often in the form of ones and zeros, but the length of a rope and the temperature outside are also data.
When you add context to data, you get information. If I tell you, “It’s 1°,” that would be a datum because it’s a measurement out of context. However, if I say, “It’s 1º outside,” you would understand I’m talking about temperature. So “1º outside” would be information.
When you connect bits of information, you get knowledge. So connecting the bit that it’s 1º outside with the bit that 1° is too cold for normal indoor clothing, you know you should dress warmly if you want to go outside or avoid going out altogether.
At the top of the DIKW hierarchy is wisdom—more an aspirational goal than a concept with a straightforward definition. Here you can use knowledge to see overall patterns and make “wisest” use of those patterns (like making money selling gloves on the street to the unprepared).
But is the DIKW hierarchy really helpful to a librarian? Even though we can all agree on what data are, what context is can and does differ from one situation or person to another. For example, when I said, “1º outside,” did I mean Fahrenheit or Celsius? If I meant 1º Celsius, that would be 34° Fahrenheit or 2 degrees above freezing—time for gloves and a warm coat or jacket, but if I meant 1° Fahrenheit or 31 degrees below freezing, chances are you wouldn’t be going outside at all. Also, there’s the problem of novelty. If I tell you it’s 1º outside (let’s just assume I mean Fahrenheit since, as an American, the metric system scares) and then someone else tells you the same, are both instances information?
It gets worse still. What if I tell you it’s 1º outside, but it’s actually 30º? If you don’t know I’m lying, is it still information? What about if you do know I’m lying?
Is this book information? If so, how much information? Does it contain the same amount for you, who are reading it for the first time, as it does for me, who wrote it?
Bottom line: talking about “information” is not helpful to a librarian. We can use terms like “information professional” and “informing” all we want, but often these are either surrogates for documents, data, or simply attempts to absolve ourselves of any responsibility for what people do with what we provide.
No, librarians aren’t in the information business—we’re in the knowledge business, and, as you’ll see, that puts us in the conversation business, which leads to some rather startling new types of services and practices.
Philosophers, theologians, and scientists of all stripes have argued about the nature of knowledge for millennia. Throw in terms like “truth” and “belief,” and the debates get deeper and longer. In this guide, I’m not going to provide a simple and universally accepted definition of “knowledge” because, frankly, one doesn’t exist. Instead, I’ll provide a pragmatic framework for approaching learning and knowledge creation in the amazingly diverse communities we interact with.
For librarians, “knowledge” is the set of beliefs held in relation to one another that dictate behaviors. This set is a network constructed through conversations and actions on our own and in larger communities. Note, knowledge is not equivalent to absolute truth. Truth is an area of pursuit reserved for philosophers and priests (and apparently for Melvil Dewey as well). Instead, librarians are interested in what people believe, and how this will impact what they do. This is a scientific or rational approach.
If you thought the scientific approach was all about truth, you are not alone. Many take the output of scientific studies as truth. Certainly, the media report it as such. This is why we regularly see headlines about what’s good for us (chocolate, coffee, lean red meat), followed months later by headlines that directly contradict those findings. How can scientific truth be so malleable?
Although the scientific method and the underlying philosophy of scientific inquiry are about the search for truth, the tools of science, paradoxically, are such that scientists can never declare with absolute certainty whether something is true or not. Take, for a moment, gravity. Clearly, there is something in the universe we call “gravity”—so that’s true, right? Except that, when you ask physicists to explain gravity, you’ll quickly find out that there’s a lot of debate about what gravity really is, and how it works. Further, even though physicists know quite a lot about gravity, the two prevailing paradigms of physics, relativity and quantum mechanics, approach gravity in two separate and incompatible ways. That’s right, we understand the physical world around us in two separate and incompatible ways. Which way is true? Probably neither. Which is useful? Both.
Using the scientific or rational method of understanding anything, you observe a phenomenon and create a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon. You test your hypothesis against the data for that phenomenon, and, if it holds up, you eventually develop a theory. A theory, as used in science, is not a guess, but a logical explanation of a phenomenon that can account for all the data. What’s the difference between a theory and truth? Every valid scientific theory, from the theory of evolution to the theory of relativity, from the germ theory of disease to the theory of climate change, must be falsifiable—that is, it must be able to be disproved. In science, every theory is considered our best understanding thus far. If there’s even one datum that can’t be explained by the theory, the theory is considered invalid, no matter how useful it might be. That’s why theories like the theory of evolution and the germ theory of disease are so important—they have lasted for centuries with plenty of people trying—and failing—to disprove them. On the other hand, it also means that scientists never take a theory as truth. It is a working understanding only, a grounded and logically supported belief of how the world operates.
Before we dive deeper into the nature of knowledge, we need to clear up something we’ll come back to again and again. Knowledge is uniquely human, which means you can’t write it down and you can’t record it. What you have in a book or a file is not knowledge, but an artifact of knowledge. Now don’t get me wrong, artifacts are very important and have helped to propel us forward through the millennia, but they’re still not knowledge.
Take Ayers Rock in the outback of Australia, for example. Geologists can tell you the composition of the rock, its age, even the forces of nature that formed it over time. The aboriginal people can tell you why the rock is an important part of their culture and belief system. But none of this comes from the rock itself. Without knowledge of geology, you couldn’t determine the rock’s composition or its age. Likewise, without knowledge of aboriginal culture and beliefs, you couldn’t read its cultural significance. The knowledge of time and significance is not contained within the rock; it’s brought to it by people.
The same is true of a book or article. A book is not knowledge. Just because you can read its words doesn’t mean you can make them part of your knowledge. If transferring knowledge from text to brain were that simple, we’d all be brilliant.
As you look at rack upon rack of books in a library, don’t think of them as packets of knowledge. Instead, think of them as flints, waiting to spark something unique in each person who encounters them.
So if knowledge isn’t truth (at least not as “truth” will be used in this guide), then what is it, and how does this affect everything librarians do? The short answer is that “knowledge” is a set of interrelated agreements that drive how people act. These agreements are derived through conversants using language and are held over time in people’s memories. The agreements dictate our actions, and if, as librarians, we want to follow our mission of improving society through facilitating knowledge creation in our communities, we have to both understand how people come up with these agreements and start with what people know, not with what they should know.
In this section, I’m first going to cover the agreements, memories, and such that make up knowledge. I’m then going to talk about how we create knowledge—how we learn. And I’ll finish by discussing what I mean by “start with what people know.” Throughout, I’ll show you specifically how a knowledge framework shapes our work as librarians.
To some of you, the phrase “knowledge creation” in the mission statement set forth in chapter 3 might seem odd, puzzling, or even illogical. After all, most people come to a library or librarian to find some existing piece of knowledge, don’t they? Not everyone can be a scientist pushing the frontiers of science … right?
Although it may be true that not everyone can be a scientist, everyone does create knowledge all the time. Take something as simple as 1 + 1 = 2. You probably learned this rather early in life, and when you did, you created knowledge.
“Wait! Wait!” you protest. “I may be old, but not that old. I didn’t create 1 + 1 = 2—it already was.”
When you added your understanding that 1 + 1 = 2 to how you approached the world, you created a new bit of knowledge for yourself. Take a closer look at this example. When you read 1 + 1 = 2, you assumed the “+” symbol meant “plus” (or “added to”). And you assumed that whoever taught you this was talking about normal counting numbers or the base 10 system. So the fact that you associated 1 + 1 with the base 10 system was your understanding—your view—your creation. And the fact that it was and is widely shared, based on a huge set of social agreements, doesn’t make it any less so. When I talk about “creating knowledge,” I’m not talking about learning something brand new about some objective reality in the universe, I’m talking about how we learn and react to that reality.
What does this have to do with librarianship? Well, consider the following situation. A grade school student walks up to the reference desk and asks you what’s the best way to add two numbers. Absent any indication to the contrary, you can safely assume the student means numbers in base 10. But there’s a good chance that the way you learned to add two numbers is different from the way students do today. I learned addition by memorizing addition tables—“sums”—of all number pairs from 1 to 10 (1 + 1 = 2, 1 + 2 = 3, 1 + 3 = 4, and so on; 2 + 1 = 3, 2 + 2 = 4, 2 + 3 = 5, and so on). Today, the emphasis is on number theory and quantities. So today’s students learn with grouping blocks, groups of 10s, “friendly numbers,” and number lines. And, as a good reference librarian, you would need to know that.3
What’s more, let’s say you’re a public librarian serving students from a local school that uses the Common Core math standards.4 If you simply provide students with answers to their math problems or hand them a number table, you’re short-circuiting their schoolwork, and you may well be confusing them. Understanding that knowledge is created within each individual means that, as a librarian, you can’t simply assume that everyone starts with the same context, or that there is a single way of knowing something. Librarians must make every effort to understand what an individual or community knows, and build from that point.
Our math example may seem overly simple, so let’s make things more interesting. A community member walks into the library and wants information on climate change (or, as we now understand it, wants to “create knowledge on climate change for him- or herself”). Do you provide articles based on the preponderance of scientific evidence for human-caused climate change? If the member is a skeptic, all you may have done is prove to this person that the library and you as a librarian are biased and support a “liberal agenda.” Do you provide articles on both sides of the debate? Now you’ve given the impression that both sides of the debate are equally valid.
The realization that knowledge is constructed—created—by an individual is not limited to direct exchanges either. What books do you collect on the topic? What materials do you highlight in digital resources? Do you support changing energy use policies for your organization (library, school, business, research team)? What message does it send to your community, for example, if your library puts solar panels on the roof?
The short answer to all of this is that you must start by understanding where each member is in terms of knowing, and you must be well aware of where you want that member to go from there. When a member asks a question, your first response should be a set of questions of your own, not a Google search. In building a collection development policy for your organization, you should start by surveying the community members who will use that collection, not with the materials available. For example, at a university that has faculty studying climate change, they probably will need materials that oppose the prevailing consensus as much as materials that support it. They’ll need to study both to determine whether prevailing theories of climate change still work in the face of contrary data, and they probably will need to understand the public debate when they interact with people outside their domain or the academy.
Now comes the tricky part. You need to know not only where each member is—what that member knows—but where the member needs to go. This means you need to have a point of view. If the member is a climate change denier, you need to make that member aware of the prevailing scientific consensus. But it also means that you realize you’re taking the member somewhere—from what he or she knows currently to a new state of knowledge. The first part, point of view, we’ll explore in much greater depth when talking about how librarians improve society in chapter 7. The second part, changing states of knowledge—or what we’ll simply call “learning”—that’s what we’ll explore now.
As a librarian, you are an educator. You’re not in the information business because we don’t really know what information is. You’re not in the book business because people in the book business don’t wrap books in durable plastic and stick bar codes on them. You’re in the knowledge creation business. You’re in the learning business. Whether you spend your time gathering and organizing resources, answering questions online, or standing in front of classes, you’re all about learning.
People learn by reading. People learn by doing. People learn in groups and alone. People learn, it seems, in a myriad of ways. Except that they don’t. People learn from conversations.
Although this was posited by a fellow by the name of Gordon Pask in his Conversation Theory,5 the idea pervades learning theories from those of cognitive psychology to those of pedagogy and of social interactions. In fact, so many people have come to the conclusion that learning takes place in conversation they’ve created an overarching term: “dialectic theories.”6
The basics go like this. You understand the world in a certain way. We’ll call that your “current state of knowledge.” When you encounter new ideas, you process them, and change that current state of knowledge into a new state of knowledge. We call that change “learning.” I know this seems really elementary, but it gets very interesting very quickly.
Now this new state of knowledge may be radically different from your previous state (a Eureka moment), or it may be different in the most trivial way. But, just to be clear, any change in that state of knowledge is learning. Furthermore, learning is not just an accumulation of facts, but a network of beliefs and understandings. Is 68º warm or cool? Are the Bears a better football team than the Patriots? What’s the best variety of apples? The process of learning, however, remains the same. Let’s break this process down into specific ideas because each idea helps define the work of librarians.
At first blush, learning through conversation makes intuitive sense. You learn from talking with teachers and experts. However, you are probably thinking that you learn a lot of things through activities other than conversation. Reading, for example. Except that reading is a conversation. It’s just a conversation with yourself. In learning theory, we refer to this as “metacognition.” This is very important because when you read, you’re not having a conversation with the book or screen, nor are you talking with the author (even if that author’s still alive). You’re talking with yourself. Your reading can confuse or enlighten you, but, either way, it changes you—you are learning. What’s more, you learn from conversations about fiction and nonfiction alike: opinions, beliefs, facts, laws, songs, art—all generate conversations and learning.
The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie stresses the importance of breaking down stereotypes and prejudices of foreign cultures through literature.7 She contends that many in Western cultures see places like Africa in shallow, two-dimensional terms because they have so few narratives about them in their media. She talks about how many in the West see African countries like Nigeria simply as places of poverty, or sickness, or civil strife because those are the only stories they encounter, not the stories about growing up in Nigeria, or about love and ambition there. Only by opening ourselves up to conversations beyond event-driven news can we come to truly empathize with a people.
We need to have rich and deep conversations with ourselves on a wide range of topics, from technology, to history, to science fiction, to romance, so that our state of knowledge is rich and varied. What’s more, we need to not limit our knowledge to things that are easily put into words. We learn from aesthetic experiences—from a painting or a song that moves us, for example. Thus learning as mediated by librarians should not be limited to purely utilitarian facts and figures.
Of course we also converse with people. Most of these interpersonal conversations come from those close to use—friends and family. It is why our politics start out looking like those of our parents, and why often time our Facebook feeds are filled with confirming evidence of our worldview—because we filter out ideas and conversations we don’t agree with.
The concepts of conversation and conversants are crucial to the work of librarians because we want to be included in our community members’ conversations, which means we need to be not just accessible but also credible. Credibility is one of the key assets of librarians. The good news is that, just by including yourself in the ranks of librarians, you start with the benefit of the doubt—people tend to trust librarians. That said, credibility is a fickle thing and easily lost.
Previous approaches to credibility saw it as an attribute of a channel or source. Thus TV might be seen as more credible than the Internet, and the president of the United States, as credible because of his position. Yet today we see credibility as something much more nuanced, as an aspect invested in a channel or person by the learner. For example, there are plenty of people who distrust authority in all its forms and who therefore find the president of the United States less credible because of his position. Credibility is not some inherent attribute of a person, resource, or position; it is something we learn as part of our knowledge, and that knowledge can change.
One of the clearest examples of this was seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Many people displaced by the flooding that ravaged the city turned to official agencies for help, only to receive instructions that were conflicting or downright wrong. The agencies lost credibility in the eyes of the citizens, who turned to online forums, many offered by the local newspaper, to find the answers themselves. What emerged were sources seen as credible not because of their official titles, but because the answers they gave worked. “Authority” was replaced by “reliability.”
This reliability model of credibility has extended to almost all aspects of our life. Rather than listening to the weather report on the evening news, we watch the real-time radar to plan our day. Rather than simply following the directives of our doctors, we independently read up on medication and side effects on websites like WebMD and Medline. In a world of easily accessed digital resources, we have moved from accepting someone’s authority based on position, to disputing that authority and looking elsewhere for credible, reliable guidance.
In this world of credibility by reliability, librarians are stars. That is because librarians provide services in a transparent, principled, and consistent fashion. Note, they do so with consistency in principles and intent, rather than in form and function, as libraries do in their role as institutions, discussed in later chapters.
I can’t stress it enough: we must be credible if we are to fulfill our mission as librarians. If our communities don’t trust us, we can’t help them improve. That trust must be earned over time, however, and granted to us by our communities. Trust comes from a mutal respect, not from a disputable neutrality that refuses to take stands. In the language of learning, we must be credible conversants. And what, as conversants, are we doing in our conversations with community members? We’re exchanging language.
In order for learning to take place, there has to be some sort of effort. After all, you don’t learn through osmosis. You can’t simply surround yourself with books and expect to learn. If this worked, I wouldn’t have failed French in high school. So, what are all these conversants doing? The first thing they are doing is exchanging language.
Once again, my focus here is on spoken and written language, but this does not exclude the language of dance or sound or body language for that matter. It’s just that librarians have traditionally focused on language that can be stored.
So what kind of language are the conversants sharing? It comes down to two basic types: “L0” and “L1.” L0 is language where at least one of the conversants has little knowledge of the topic being discussed. It tends to be directional and is used mostly to negotiate meanings and terms at a very simple level, to set the stage for deeper, more engaged conversations. We use L0 a lot in our life for simple directions, introducing ourselves to strangers, and so on, and there’s great power in this level of language. L1 language, on the other hand, is where both conversants have a higher understanding of the topic being discussed and where real learning (knowledge creation) occurs; it is used to negotiate agreements.
Take the conversations that might follow if one conversant asks the other: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” If the asker is a grade-schooler from Wisconsin who’s come to New York City for the first time, and the person asked a subway token booth clerk at Grand Central Station, the answer will likely be something like “You take the uptown Lexington Avenue Express to the 59th Street stop, then transfer to the downtown Broadway Express …” They’re using L0 language. But if the asker is a grad student wearing an NYU sweatshirt and the person asked is a homegrown newsstand owner, the answer might well be “Practice, practice, practice!” Both conversants might chuckle (or groan) at the old joke and swap guesses as to whether it really was Jack Benny who told it first. They’re using L1 language.8
One of the best L0 interfaces on the web is Google. If you type in “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” it will spit out “About 11,300,000 results” in “0.78 seconds.” The first result is most likely a map of New York City. Then you start seeing results on the old joke, including attribution to Jack Benny, even though the first results clearly state it wasn’t Jack Benny who came up with the joke. What Google is doing is trying to add some background facets about your context into the query you gave it. It’s trying to turn your L0 query into an L1 conversation. So it adds things like your location, previous search results, and YouTube videos you watched to try and dig deeper than “how + to + get + to + Carnegie + Hall.” You see, L1 language is where you begin to talk about substance. As people become more knowledgeable about a topic, they represent that deeper knowledge in the terms they use. So as an information scientist, for example, I can talk about “relevance” to grad students or to other information scientists and know that the term will be associated with a whole history of inquiry, experimentation, and publications in the information retrieval literature.
You do this, too. At your work, in college, or simply by living where you do. Here are two quick examples. Each time I give you a word, write down the first thing that comes to mind.
Light
Okay, did you write “illumination” or perhaps “not heavy”? How about “to set on fire,” as in light a candle? But if you’re trying to watch your weight, you most likely wrote “low in calories.” Next word.
Formula
Did you write “mathematical expression?” Probably, if you’ve read this chapter straight through. How about “chemical recipe,” like the formula for gunpowder? If you’re a new mother or father (or aunt, or grandparent), you most likely wrote “something you feed to babies.”
You see language, like knowledge itself, is a set of relationships. Some relationships we use all the time and are reinforced (you use “turn on the lights” more than “light the house on fire”). Other meanings are there, but because we don’t use them all the time they become unexpected. You knew formula was given to babies, but you probably smiled a little when I mentioned it to you not because it was new information, but because it was an unexpected pairing. This varied connected concepts with words is the basis of a huge range of comedy—the true, but unexpected punch line … how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice.
We could keep going, but I have to take this opportunity to jump ahead to talking about libraries for a moment. If you do this same sort of experiment with the general public and ask them to give you one word to describe a library, the most likely answer you will get back is “book” or “books.” Many have taken this as our members wanting books from their libraries. But just as with light and formula, there is attached to this word a huge network of possible meanings. Is a book a surrogate for something I read, or learning, or stories, or what?
Bottom line: as librarians, we must see language as something more complex than a collection of words or terms. People and groups use special language to speed communication, to exclude people from conversations, and for a whole host of other reasons. If we’re going to help our community members learn, we must be able to communicate with them in their language whenever possible or at least to negotiate a new language for our exchanges. We can’t simply take a question and type it into Google. And we can’t build systems that do that either.
Why does Google do a better job with simple searches than library catalogs? Because Google seeks to see how terms are connected to a broad range of resources, whereas library catalogs seek to match them to an L1 system that only librarians truly understand. Where Google took the words “how + to + get + to + Carnegie + Hall” and found matches in maps, archives, and discussion groups, library catalogs try to find matches in books as classified by the Dewey Decimal System or by the Library of Congress (or another system).
Librarians for centuries have been attempting to reduce the complexity of language to an efficient, specialized “classification system.” We felt that if we could all agree on one means of labeling a thing, then we could more easily find that thing. It is the same logic that, if we all just spoke one language, like English, all misunderstandings would go away. We see how well this has worked when US diplomats speak to the people of England, and Australia, and the world’s largest pool of English speakers, China.
To be fair, these specialized language systems have worked exceptionally well, particularly in a world of physical objects and limited time and capacity. But it has become increasingly clear that, in reducing complexity, we have also reduced understanding and nuance by assuming that everyone’s language and meaning were the same.
This idea in language and in science is called reductionism. Reductionism is the belief that if you take anything complex and break it into its component parts, and break those down again and again until you understand the smaller parts, you can understand the whole. Take a car engine apart; understand the parts, and you can build a new engine. Except with language, and most human endeavors, this approach doesn’t work.
Take My Two Super Dads,9 a storybook about a girl who has two gay fathers. If you’re organizing a collection of materials, where do you slot this one in? In fiction (the intent of the author)? Gender studies? In political works? Family studies, knowing that what constitutes a family is not universal? Your job as a librarian, as a professional, is not simply to apply existing tools like classification systems in some seemingly objective way. It is to understand the complexity of thought in your community, and to respond as best you can to match that complexity as you engage with community members. And that leads us to what all these exchanges of language are about in the first place: seeking agreements.
Let’s start with something no one can deny: the world is round. Except, of course, that people can deny it. Even setting aside the “flat-earthers” (yes, they still exist), and confining ourselves to the scientific or rational world of librarianship, there are still people who can deny the Earth is round. Because, as carefully measured and remeasured, it really isn’t round, or at least not perfectly round. It’s what’s called an “oblate spheroid,” flatter at its poles and fatter round its middle. As physicists see it, the Earth also exists in four space-time dimensions, so its shape is always changing. Or, as some people think, the Earth may not exist at all in the normal sense of the word, much less be round, but be a holographic projection of an underlying reality. That last view is not from The Matrix, by the way, but from an actual scientific paper.10
Now, once again, I can hear you say, “Thou doth protest too much.” The views I’ve just listed are really just refinements (well, all but the last one) of something we can all agree on. And there’s that word: “agree.” Remember when I said that knowledge is a set of interrelated agreements? Well, it’s time to talk about those agreements. That the Earth is round is not a fact; it’s an agreement put into words. Part of that agreement limits what you’re talking about. You may be happier with simply saying, “Generally, the Earth can be considered round,” but that’s wordy, so you just shorten it. We’ve already done the same with 1 + 1 = 2 because what that really says is “The sum of 1 and 1 is 2 in base 10.” We hold agreements on all sorts of things, not just facts. Blue skies are nice, that dog is cute, and so on. We come up with these agreements through conversations where the conversants are exchanging language.
This work itself is an example of trying to guide internal conversations to arrive at certain agreements about the field of librarianship. To be clear, it’s trying to guide your internal conversation, not with the book, or myself as an author, but with yourself as learner.
Why does this matter to you as a librarian? Well, remember all those times I said you can’t simply respond to a community member’s request or question by providing answers or resources? That you had to respond by understanding the context of that member? What you’re trying to do is come up with agreements.
“You say you want information on climate change. Would you prefer scholarly articles or things from the popular press? Although there’s a scientific consensus on the reality of human-caused climate change, would you also like to see minority dissenting views?” Note, by the way, that the language you’re using (“minority views”) is already exposing preexisting agreements you hold.
Note, also, that these agreements can be made manifest in ways other than the language we use. Dewey placing books on cooking in with books on business, for example. Or even in how we organize physical spaces. I’ve walked into school libraries filled with stacks and very few desks, where the librarian and the community that librarian serves have agreed that the best use of the space was to house materials. On the other hand, I’ve also walked into school libraries with a few low shelves and a large number of round tables, where they’ve agreed that the best use of the space was group work. Of course, I’m assuming this was an agreement with the community and not just a librarian making their own agreements physical.
Remember our word game with “light” and “formula”? Each word has a network of agreed-upon meanings. Some of these networks are quite small. If I say “granite,” it’s pretty certain you’ll think of a type of rock (or counter tops if you’re in the real estate business). As we’ve seen, however, terms like “library” and “radical” can have a huge network of agreed-upon meanings.
So, as librarians, we seek first to understand the agreements in place with those we serve, then add to or help change those associated agreements. But here’s the key: we must start with where people are now. If incoming freshmen believe the best sources for a research paper need no documentation, simply telling them they’re wrong and showing them the peer-reviewed literature to that effect won’t work. You must build from what they do now (a reflection of what they believe) and help move them to where you want them to be. Also, understand that both the starting and ending points are knowledge, as defined here, because both will affect their behavior.
So now you’re done, right? Your community members have learned (and, most likely, so have you). You’ve created knowledge. Except for one thing. If you don’t remember your agreements, there’s no learning. The fourth vital component of knowledge creation (with conversants, language, and agreements) is memory. Without memory, we’d have to constantly renegotiate agreements and discover everything anew.
Now you might think that memory is a simple thing: an account of agreements, events, and such over time. But that’s not how memory works. For example, as we’ve established, at some point in your life you learned 1 + 1 = 2. But you probably don’t remember exactly when unless something very significant also happened at that time. Memory is not like a computer with inputs and outputs. It’s a complex web. Many, many agreements go into our knowledge, yet their exact origins disappear in what psychologists call “source amnesia.”11 For a moment of agreement to stand out, it must have lots of meaning and lots of connections, mostly emotional. Even then, there’s a good chance that our memory of an event is also colored by those meanings and connections.
Take a significant moment in time from your life. Your wedding, the birth of your first child, your first kiss. Now picture it clearly in your mind. What color socks were you wearing? Unless socks were part of your memory (my aunt had to bring me black socks on my wedding day because I forgot to pack them), you won’t remember what color they were. Memory is a network of agreements over time. Parts of that network are reinforced and kept, parts are not and lost, and most are reinterpreted in the light of new knowledge.
Memory is also important because it is relational. If you’re like most people, you had a hard time in history memorizing who was president when, and who conquered whom when. This is the reason so few historians teach history that way. Dates matter, but the themes and ideas that we learn from moments in the past are much more powerful. Not only that, but history is rarely seen as simply a linear progression of events. History scholars don’t simply recount events in order, they seek out themes and influences to illuminate the past in light of the present.
Take something like Columbus discovering America in 1492. Except that he didn’t. There were plenty of native peoples already living in the “New” World. A way of looking at Columbus—sailing the ocean blue in 1492—is being replaced, or at least augmented in schools and society, with a new view—the impact of that “discovery” on native populations. So did history change? No, but how we interpret it, and our perspectives and language did.
What does this mean to you as a librarian? Well, not every community you’ll engage with is going to have the same memory of events. For example, the city of Syracuse, where I live, has many issues commonly associated with urban centers in the United States; poverty, segregation, unemployment, and, youth violence. It seems like the community goes through cycles, with sudden upsurges of street violence and gang activity. Almost like clockwork, the police, the mayor, and community leaders sound the alarm and begin a series of town forums and launch new initiatives to curb youth violence. Is there a way that librarians could
Making best use of the relational nature of memory needs to be among the librarians’ tools in engaging with their communities. Can public librarians embed the history of their communities into their buildings, as they’ve done with the Memorial Room at the Fairfield Public Library in Connecticut? There the whole room is covered with murals and plaques that re-create the history of the town and memorialize soldiers from Fairfield who lost their lives. When members of the library board or civic groups meet in this room, they can feel how their actions connect to and build on the actions of those who’ve gone before them. The Vatican Library takes this one step further. On its ceilings above the scholars working below are fifteenth-century frescoes that tell the story of book making from the manufacture of paper to printing to selling to education to the value of reading for pleasure.
School librarians can provide more than books to students for history projects. They can team with teachers to organize field trips to local historical sites, and they can even host historical reenactments. Across the globe, librarians work with historians, archivists, and preservationists not simply to preserve the past, but also to make it accessible and relevant to their members today, by compiling photo archives accessible not just by date, but by theme (poverty, civil rights, urban violence).
Bottom line: as librarians, we can act to represent and preserve agreements over time within our communities. In doing so, we can foster knowledge creation, enable new understandings of the past, and speed discovery of new opportunities.
As we’ll see throughout the rest of this guide, knowledge creation through conversation will shape everything librarians do. For example, why should you as a librarian (we’ll ask this question again for libraries) build a collection? If you start with a loose, commonsense definition of “librarian”—“someone who works in a library”—the answer would be, “Because libraries have collections.” This tautology—librarians build collections because libraries have collections— gives us no sense of why. With our view of knowledge creation, however, librarians can build collections to fuel a learning process: either an internal conversation of a community member or a conversation among many members. Furthermore, collections can document agreements in language that can be understood by a community and provide an accurate memory of these agreements over time. On the other hand, there is nothing in our view of knowledge creation that requires a collection. Building a collection is only appropriate for some communities, not an inherent part of librarianship.
We also see that where a conversation occurs is also important. This is not just a question of building spaces and whether those spaces should be quiet or not. Librarians should go to where the conversations are occurring. With the advent of increasingly connected and mobile technologies, this is easier and easier. Librarians can do their work on subways and in homes, in business meetings, Facebook Groups, and even deep in the forests of Colombia.12
By seeing learning as conversations not confined by a space or a time, and librarianship as independent of the buildings and institutions called “libraries,” we can expand our mission of improving society further than ever before. There are, of course, many reasons to build libraries, something we’ll talk about later on. But these reasons are no longer the bounds of librarianship and the knowledge creation we facilitate. They are simply hubs and tools in our pursuit of a better tomorrow.