Douglas Galbi has a great post on Jefferson’s library on his purple motes blog. Jefferson’s library is in LibraryThing. Cool.

Is it really possible to say this? The more I look into it, the more I believe it’s true. Looking to Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Linnaeus, and LC/Dewey, I have to say that yes, sex and power (which are inextricable) are deeply embedded in our classification systems. I’m reading LCSH to find explicit and implicit representations of sex and empire to show how LCSH reflects and contributes to the discourses about those subjects, reinforcing the mainstream and silencing or speaking for groups on the margins. I’m particularly interested in the idea of literary warrant, what was in print in the mainstream medical literature and in popular literature in the early 20th century, and how ideas of sexuality have shifted from the dawn of history.

What I’m reading: Londa Schiebinger and Anne Stoler and Thomas Laqueur

I’ve been a bad blogger. Sorry about that.

I am now a month into the doc program at UW, and I’m having the time of my life. I particularly love my history of science course: Historiography and Methods. It’s basically a history of the discipline of history of science. Perhaps the most significant/practical thing that I’m learning is the role that minority voices play in shaping and reframing a dominant mode of thinking. The shifts and revolutions in science are directly related to cultural shifts and seem to depend on the work of a few in a field. This reinforces my natural inclination to gravitate toward “radical” movements and minority positions. It also inspires me to stick to my guns and pursue critical theory in LIS…something that seems to be something that LIS academics do on the side in their free time. I hope that in my lifetime I see a shift that encourages and welcomes critical theory in LIS.

If we look at LCSH as a text or a narrative, we can analyze it in a way that is similar to Edward Said’s criticism of 19th and 20th century novels in Culture and Imperialism.

A crucial aspect of Said’s premise is that the novel as we know it couldn’t exist without imperialism and that when we read Conrad, Austen, and Dickens, we need to be conscious of the ways that empire permeates daily life and is expressed through literature.  The “hegemony of imperial ideology” cultivated a discourse of domination which in turn validated and supported nations’ imperialism and colonialism (12). Degrading essentialism of others, grandiose self-definitions, and incidental, marginal appearances of the colonized are frequent in 19th and early 20th century novels from England and France and continue to pervade American media today.  We must also examine the ways in which voices of resistance are shaped by imperialism.  He refers to a “structure of attitude and reference” to describe the systematization of imperialism in cultural practices.

There are many points to be taken from Said’s work…too many to go into detail here. What I want to take note of is the way that prejudices and attitudes can be so pervasive in a culture that they may be taken for granted or may be unrecognizable. Beliefs, practices, and ideology of powerful groups directly shape culture and its productions. LCSH was created at a time when white men were privileged and other races and civilizations were inferior, and although the language has changed dramatically, the structure of LCSH remains largely patriarchal and hierarchical. We can apply Said’s “structure of attitude and reference” to thinking about the cultural influences on the creation of LCSH and analyzing the ways the structure of LCSH reinforces and contributes to culture.

Said, E. (1993). Culture and imperialism. New York: Knopf.  

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 one that borrowed the term “Philistines” from Goethe to describe the middle class in need of civilization.

I’m no authority on Arnold, so until I read more of his work, I’ll refrain from saying any more about that. What I find strikingly relevant to my project is the appropriation of a word etymologically related to “Palestine” and defined by the OED as “A member of a non-Semitic people occupying the southern coast of Palestine in biblical times, who came into conflict with the Israelites during the 12th and 11th centuries B.C.” and further explained thus: “The Philistines were a people (suggested to have been of western Anatolian origin) who came into the Levant in the period c1370-1200 B.C. as one of the ‘Peoples of the Sea’ mentioned in Egyptian texts of c1180 B.C. They settled in south-western Canaan in the 12th cent. B.C. and from there expanded inland, establishing control over their neighbours (this is reflected in the biblical saga of the Israelite leader Samson, who was betrayed to the Philistines by Delilah). The Old Testament describes the defeat of the Philistines by David, who slew the Philistine giant Goliath (1 Sam. 17) and records intermittent conflict between the Philistines and their neighbours until the period of Assyrian domination.”

It all reminds me of the movie 300 and the blatant demoralization of the Middle Eastern enemy.

The American Library Association was made up of mostly male, elitist WASP’s who were of the same mind as Arnold and other writers of the time. They believed that their obligation was to promote the good of the society by providing only “good” literature, and they advised American libraries on literature worthy of being placed on the shelves.

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 the history and evolution of the heading, “Woman,” which we now know as “Women,” by looking to the Cumulative Bibliographic Index and the United States Catalog from 1902-1975, and they discuss current issues regarding the heading in syndetic structures. Categories in an organizational structure can differentiate by creating distinct classes, and the structure will dedifferentiate by fostering convergence of categories. Subdivisions and cross-references are ways to enable convergence, and their use also indicates “the acceptance and growing status of an idea or concept” (181).

The primary concern in this article is with the problem of cross referencing works on women and specific topics, and they found that “cross-references did not consistently connect books listed in the Woman section to the general body of literature on a topic” (187). For instance, The Sexes in Science and History (1916), by Eliza Burt Gamble, was listed under “Woman,” but not “History” or “Science”—not even “Science—Social Aspects” or “Science and Civilization,” and not under “Man,” “Sex,” or “Men.” They claim that the lack of a referral to “Woman” from “History” or “Science” would lead one to infer that women have no place in these fields. They do, however, point out segregating features of the headings for women and the “conceptualization of a world where male is normative” (189). They cite Denise Riley, who states that an overassertion of the category “Woman” serves to amplify its apparent remoteness from humanity. They also discuss Sandy Berman’s push for changing “Women as Chemists” to “Women Chemists,” and in an endnote state that they view this as “only marginally less sexist than the earlier Women as constructions,” that it is assumed that a chemist is male unless it is marked otherwise, but without such a division it would be difficult to find the books about women chemists (192).

By tracing the use of the heading, the authors found “no consistent composite notion of woman emerging over time” (190).  Among reasons for changes were the following: accretion of decisions about “aboutness”; use of “see also” references based on a “sense of how a reader might search for information”; standardization of headings; range of topics—resulting from public interest and publishers’ judgments. By simply looking at subject headings in a bibliography, the authors noticed “surges and declines in political, social, and cultural themes embodied in the texts” (190). And they found that practices of differentiation and categorization seem to have become accepted as natural, rather than constructions, and continue to be used today. They cite examples of poor cross-listing in internet directories, despite the great potential offered by hyperlinks.

Palmer, C. & Malone, C. (2001). Elaborate isolation: Metastructures of knowledge about women. The Information Society, 17, 179-194.

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 “below basic”—especially in quantitative literacy. Generally, prison inmates are better educated. There is a large over 40 population, and that’s the age group with the worst literacy skills. I’d be interested in finding out how long these over-40’s have been in prison, whether or not they will be released soon, and the kind of literacy training they might have received while in prison. It’s particularly frustrating to think about people being held and released worse off and ill-prepared for the world, when they could be taking advantage of the time they spend to improve their skills.

baseballbrandon1Originally uploaded by madlerbrarian.

Go Dead City!

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.

I’ve come up with some questions inspired by Charles Taylor:

What are the inter-subjective meanings embedded in library practices and institutions, e.g. public libraries, research libraries, LoC, authority controlled vocabularies, standards, acquisitions, policies, etc?   

How are these meanings expressed, e.g. bias, equity of access, readership, marketing, etc?

What self-definitions are reflected in practices, and how did they evolve?

What is library culture?

How do we define a library community and the communities a library serves? Libraries serve as bridges among a vast array of communities, so in the context of shared meaning, how do they communicate with, represent, and serve these communities?

If the strength of a community is measured by the network of shared meaning, how does the library fit? Does the library belong to all of the communities it serves?