Literature/2004/Gorman


 * http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~lesk/spring06/lis553/ala-jan05.txt

Author

 * Gorman was dean of library services at California State University, Fresno and 2004 president-elect of the  American Library Association.

Excerpts

 * The books in great libraries are much more than the sum of their parts. They are designed to be read sequentially and cumulatively, so that the reader gains knowledge in the reading.
 * The nub of the matter lies in the distinction between information (data, facts, images, quotes and brief texts that can be used out of context) and recorded knowledge (the cumulative exposition found in scholarly and literary texts and in popular nonfiction). When it comes to information, a snippet from Page 142 might be useful. When it comes to recorded knowledge, a snippet from Page 142 must be understood in the light of pages 1 through 141 or the text was not worth writing and publishing in the first place. An apparent librarian strategy is to speak ill of information as a snippet out of context or whole, and speak well of recorded knowledge as a symbol of the whole or library, while both are essentially the same, In effect, it is to speak ill of information science, and speak well of librarianship, which is nevertheless rapidly given up to storm and water down the former. He was said to regard the "Assault" of Information Science as one of the five Problems facing libraries today, until April 1, 2010. In reality, however, that of librarianship disguised as LIS may be the most unjust invasion of IS today, as evidenced by the long list of I-Schools mostly in disguise of librarianship that still insists on "information as thing" running head-on into information as cognition and meaning, on the same campus, say, of UC Berkeley. Librarian converts to IS should do due justice and pay due homage to the real cognitive revolution of IS that in turn has devastated almost all positivist, reductionist fileds of philosophy and science since 1975 as a matter of fact. It was possible because the cognitive way of information search and research is so analogous to epistemology and scientific methodology, which had been hopelessly reduced and degenerated into explicit textual analysis until then, namely analytic philosophy, neglecting implicit contextual synthesis of wisdom. One of the many revolutionaries in 1975 was  Gorman's notion of context is painfully limited to the literary one or text, while what is really great is the holist one beyond that, as per the  triangle of reference. Recently, he seems to have changed his materialist view and started arguing that librarians need to act idealistically (perhaps meaning metaphysically or cognitively) in a materialistic age.