Terms of High Culture

Looking back to literary criticism in the late 19th century we find Matthew Arnold’s work, including Culture and Anarchy and Essays in Criticism, in which he advances his beliefs that literature may be judged objectively, that a perfect society is attainable through intellectualism, and that the instrument of social perfection is the state. He is [...]

The Woman Category

Palmer and Malone examine representations of women in classification structures, which are “artifacts of a society’s intellectual history” that “reveal commonly held beliefs and assumptions” (179). They show how subject headings can be temporary in nature and can depend upon and influence relationships between published knowledge and organization and retrieval of that knowledge. They trace [...]

Literacy in prisons

The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy reveals striking stats regarding levels of literacy among prison inmates and people living in households. Most of the findings aren’t surprising to me. The study does show a slightly higher literacy rate among inmates over 10 years, but there are still significant numbers, in prisons and out, that [...]

Are librarians too nice?

Steven Bell challenges academic librarians to engage in a discourse that includes constructive criticism the way that other disciplines do.
…“perhaps we have become too welcoming, too complacent to remember that we share a responsibility to take our profession forward through intellectual discourse.”
My comments are on his page.