What does it mean to be a library and information science (LIS) professional in 2021? How do our issues differ from those addressed by archivists or knowledge managers or people who work in museums and galleries? What is the body of knowledge that underpins our professional identity? How is it evolving in response to social, political, economic and technological change? What’s the latest?
Big questions. Fortunately, lots of big answers in this classic textbook, encyclopaedic in its coverage – and heft!
Father and daughter team Richard and Rachel Rubin have delivered an up-to-the-COVID-19-minute update to the 2015 fourth edition with new material on:
social justice and the impact of library services to underserved communities;
threats to privacy and intellectual freedom in the digital and social media worlds;
the evolution of library services from an emphasis on collections to an emphasis on services;
the political role of libraries and librarians in a heightened political atmosphere with increasing varieties and sources of misinformation and disinformation;
the rise of virtual reality in libraries;
changes to the organization of knowledge, including the development of the Library Research Model (LRM) as an outgrowth of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR);
the role of sustainability as a core value of the profession;
the role of open access and open educational resources; and
the historical role of library service (or lack thereof) to African Americans and the role of tribal libraries. (p.xii)
As you might expect there is a strong US flavour to the same chapters which have been updated from the previous edition, but the authors’ focus on the profession’s mission – providing knowledge and information to all who desire it – supports their claims for the fundamental and essential contribution of libraries and librarians to social and educational infrastructure. Some aspects of the coverage of censorship and services to minorities may not be directly relevant to our local situation, but this is more than compensated for by the excellent chapters on social media, personal and organisational use of technology, library services in a time of COVID, and the opinion vs fact vs misinformation vs disinformation imbroglio currently playing out on screens near us. By the way, did you know that ‘agnotology’ is the label for the new field of spreading falsehoods to seed doubt and fragment society?Footnote1
I found the discussion of technical issues especially enlightening, with comprehensive coverage of progress with discovery systems, the Semantic Web, Big Data, Linked Open Data, and information access and organisation in general. Given that the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology ceased publication in 2011, Foundations … helps fill the void, rounding up the most significant developments in library IT. But IT is just one thread. Other topics handled in depth include library history; information policy and legislation; issues facing public, academic, school and special libraries; and LIS values and ethics.
This is a very impressive contribution to the LIS literature; in many ways it puts a useful boundary around the entire field. All 10 chapters list references and selected readings for those who wish to dive deeper, and there is a 2%, 13-page double column index for the book’s 613 pages, which seems a bit thin given the depth and breadth of the text (indexes to scholarly publications usually average around 5% of the text), but this is a minor whinge.
For students qualifying and qualified, for practitioners, teachers and researchers, this book is a stimulating, informative and reassuring companion.
Thoroughly recommended.
Notes
1. See also: Manipulated: inside the cyberwar to hijack elections and distort the truth, by Theresa Payton. Lanham MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. xi, 199 pp., ISBN 978-1-53813-350-7.