Paternalism in Library and Information Science (LIS)
"Paternalism is the attitude (of a
person or a government) that subordinates should be controlled in a fatherly way
for their own good". (WordNet 2006).
In Library and Information Science (LIS) a paternalistic attitude is described by Audunson (1996, p. 148), who writes:
"Many of these standards and methods are still viable today.....
...
- A Paternalistic attitude toward the users. The role of the public library is
to educate the uneducated. It is, therefore, the duty of the librarian to select
suitable documents for this purpose and to guide the user to the right
literature.
This paternalistic attitude, developed by the elitist and conservative fathers
of American and British public libraries was easily transferred to different
ideological soils, the Scandinavian social democracies".
An example of paternalism is an attitude towards browsing that has been dominating in many research libraries:
Browsing has been considered "bad manners". Many librarians have felt that users should be forced to search catalogs and bibliographies, and that such searches are more systematic, because, for example, browsing shelves misses the books in circulation. Browsing thus provides a false impression to the resources of a library. This idea have been taken further: By providing assess to browsing the library fails to educate the user about systematic search strategies.
Anderson & Pérez-Carballo describe an old controversy within LIS:
"In librarianship, there is a long, and sometimes controversial tradition, of providing to our users what they should be using, rather than what they ask for. A growing consensus seems to be swinging in the other direction. That the user is the best judge of what is useful, beneficial, and to be desired. . . .As in many controversies, both sides have some merit. The opinions and desires and information seeking behavior of users must be respected. But in addition, in some cases, expert librarians and other information specialists are indeed equipped to make judgments of importance, and they should be encouraged to do just that on behalf of users. . . .This avoidance is unfortunate and should stop. It is one area where human indexing can be clearly superior to machine indexing" (Anderson & Pérez-Carballo, 2001b, p. 273).
Literature:
Anderson, J. D. & Pérez-Carballo, J. (2001a). The nature of indexing: How humans and machines analyze messages and texts for retrieval. Part I: Research, and the nature of human indexing. Information Processing & Management, 37(2), 231-254.
Anderson, J. D. & Pérez-Carballo, J. (2001b). The nature of indexing: How humans and machines analyze messages and texts for retrieval. Part II: Machine indexing, and the allocation of human versus machine effort. Information Processing & Management, 37(2), 255-277.
Audunson, R. (1996). Comparing Change Processes in Public Libraries - an Institutional Perspective. Pp. 135-167 IN: Olaisen, Johan; Erland Munch-Petersen and Patrick Wilson (eds.): Information Science. From the Development of the Discipline to Social Interaction. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.
See also: Ideology; Information need; Populism
Birger Hjřrland
Last edited: 19-06-2006