Class in Review: Week 10

1. Books are for use.
2. Every reader his [or her] book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The library is a growing organism.


So this week in class we covered the apparent library-school necessity of talking about Ranganathan's five laws of library science, as seen above. Though I'd heard of the five laws in passing, I'd never really reflected on them much before. Overall, I agree with people who think the laws have aged pretty well. I think all of them save perhaps #3, if you substitute some broader term for book, still hold up pretty well today. I was surprised it took us so long to talk about #4, because I think it's the most compelling and challenging still today. If we aren't saving users' time in finding resources, what are we really doing in libraries?

As usual, I'm going to ponder a little how these "laws" do or don't apply or can be transferred to an an archival setting. As far as I know from my ARM coursework, there isn't a similar succinct formulation of what archives are or should be. So let's try to substitute "archival materials" (an unwieldy term, but the best we can do) for "books" and think about how the laws hold up circa 2012. Part of the complicated history of archives is the tension between archivists thinking of themselves as historians versus thinking of themselves as librarians. My contention is that we have a lot to learn from doing the latter, so this ought to be a helpful exercise.

I think laws #2 and #4 transfer pretty easily. With the complexity and overwhelming-ness of archival materials, everything we do in archives should definitely be geared toward saving users' time. Since archives (almost always) have closed stacks, this becomes especially important when archivists still have to for the most part mediate access. With digital materials there's pretty much a direct analog to libraries, though archives sometimes have to deal with more complicated digital content. Likewise, "every user his or her archival materials" (as awkward as that sounds) should be broadly accurate, though I think what this actually means is a little complicated, just as it is for libraries. Basically that's my way of saying this is the "law" I think is the vaguest and least helpful.

Beyond this, things get complicated. We noted in class that for non-academic libraries, law #3 really doesn't make sense as a guiding principle. For archives this is true to the extreme. Deciding what archival materials to preserve and keep, and why, and even constitutes "archival materials" is one of the most complicated areas of the field. We have a whole class on Archival Appraisal (SI 632), and I think those of who've taken it would still say we've only touched the basics of this issue.

.... which brings us to law #1. Are archival materials "for use"? What does that mean in the context of archives? You could touch off a lot of controversy among archivists from the questions that leap of off this law. Obviously, we want people to use materials in archives, but what does that mean for our collecting/appraisal decisions? Do we only collect things people want to use or we judge likely to be used? Or is our job as archivists to preserve those documents/artifacts/whatever that best represent whatever we're documenting the history of? What does "best represent" mean? As you can tell, the role of "use" in archival collecting is controversial to say the least. So I'm not so sure this law should be one we try to "transfer" to archives.

This leaves us with law #5. This seems like an easy proposition to agree with, and certainly it should apply to archives in terms of technology and access in many of the same ways it does for libraries. I guess I'm a little wary about the word "grow" because it implies getting bigger. Change, if done well, can be good. Growth for the sake of growth (because we're supposed to be "growing") usually is not. I think pondering whether this applies to archives can lead us into complicated philosophical territory about what our mission is and what we should or shouldn't be doing. Then again, the same thing can probably be said for libraries. And a lot of this is contextual; there are so many different types of archives that do different types of things that it gets very complicated. (Not that this isn't true for libraries as well.)

The other big thing I recall from class is hearing about the webinars people watched. I'm glad I wasn't the only one who had a disappointing experience with my webinar, but it was really fun to hear about the cool things some people's webinars did. I hope ours in this class can meet the high expectations!


(Edited to make this look... like it should. I blame Google.)