Literature/1991/Traue

Excerpts

 * "The Research Library and Public Knowledge" (pp. 53-57)


 * Librarians are document oriented; they are professionally dependent on documents and fail to realise the limitations of documents, their difficulties, and the problems they present to 90 per cent of the population. Documents are irrelevant to most people most of the time; they prefer wherever possible to use other people to acquire information face to face, where they can ask questions and clarify what is uncertain or not understood. When they need help on a course of action they usually seek advice from other people.
 * Knowledge, in Wilson's formulation, consists of private knowledge and public knowledge. At any one time a great deal of knowledge is private, an individual's knowledge which is unrecorded, unavailable, private, never revealed. Public knowledge consists of recorded knowledge and other knowledge held by individuals which is publicly available though not necessarily recorded.
 * ... documents are but representations of knowledge, not knowledge itself, and one has to work at the documents to obtain the knowledge for oneself. You may give a document to a person but he or she may not necessarily have the ability to acquire the knowledge represented. [...] Making knowledge available in a documentary representation is not necessarily making it accessible. (p. 54)
 * Let us now turn to the role of the library .... Jesse Shera ... has neatly summed it up in one sentence: 'the library is an instrumentality created to maximise the utility of graphic records for the benefit of society.' Shera's formulation, with its emphasis on utility, that the usefulness, the profitability, of the use of graphic records, makes knowledge transfer the key element. A library's function, in my gloss of Shera, is to maximise knowledge transfer to society from graphic records for the benefit of society.  However, if you accept Wilson's argument, by maximising document availability you are not necessarily maximising the accessibility of the knowledge contained in the documents, not necessarily maximising knowledge transfer.
 * Clearly then, if the acquisition of knowledge from documents by a person depends on the abilities and effort of that person, the most useful libraries are those in which the documents are closely matched with the abilities of the user, where the effort to acquire information is minimised.
 * The contents of a specialist library ... have been chosen to match the specialist knowledge of their users, and while they will have utility for their specialist user groups they could well be incomprehensible and therefore have no or very low utility for those lacking specialist knowledge.