Wayne A. Wiegand
Professor
School of Library and
Information Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI 53706
Phone:
608-263-2914
E-mail: WIEGANDW@MACC.WISC.EDU
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Why Don't We Have
Any Schools
of Library and Reading Studies?
GENERAL SESSION I: Toward the New Information Profession,
Wednesday, February 12, 1997, 11:15am - 12:30pm
There are more public libraries in this country than McDonald's restaurants; more children enroll in summer reading programs than Little League baseball; people in this country visit their libraries more than three times as often as they go to the movies; 67% of Americans used public libraries in 1995 and of that number 80% came to borrow a book.
Impressive statistics by any standard, and certainly impressive enough to prove conclusively that the public library is one of this nation's most ubiquitous reading institutions. Yet, for the most part, LIS educators seem blissfully unaware of a large body of research on reading--a growing area of scholarship emanating mostly from traditional humanities disciplines. And because scholarship on reading has been "out of sight" in LIS discourse, it has also been "out of mind" while LIS educators attempt to "reinvent the information profession."
This paper will argue that current LIS thinking has drawn definitional boundaries around the word "information" so tightly as to exclude research on reading, a major means by which Americans obtain information, whether it comes off the printed page or the computer screen. The paper is intended to:
- Bring the dimensions of contemporary research on reading to the attention of the ALISE community
- Encourage ALISE members to consider the relevance of this research to .a future they are preparing for the LIS profession
- Ask provocative questions exploring race, age, gender and especially socioeconomic class issues that at this point seem invisible in our current professional discourse
- Suggest a "price" the LIS profession will pay if it continues to ignore the findings of reading research
By analyzing the scholarship on literacy studies, print culture history, reader-response theory, ethnographies of reading, and cultural studies, I intend to show that by its very existence as a reading institution the library has for generations fostered multiple interactions with texts. It has also functioned as a liberating, an empowering, and a creative force. Finally, it has done all this to the benefit of a culturally diverse society.
I will conclude that if the LIS community chooses not to participate in the scholarship on reading, we will forego an important link to a much larger interdisciplinary information world than we are currently contemplating for our profession. If we continue to ignore reading research, we will be turning our backs on a highly relevant body of research accumulating around the essential reading interests of client groups who for generations have relied on libraries for printed materials, and we will be doing so without knowing why. That, I will argue, is professionally irresponsible and no way to reinvent our information profession.
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