ACONDA and ANACONDA: social change, social responsibility, and librarianship

ABSTRACT

In the context of the declining legitimacy of the war in Vietnam and widespread challenges to the authority of established institutions and cultural norms, the American Library Association (ALA) was the target of criticism by a diverse coalition of librarians who asserted two broad demands; first, that the ALA expand the scope of its activities to include consideration of social and political issues that had not, to that point, been regarded as "library" issues by the established leadership of the ALA; second, that the ALA democratize its structure of decision making. This challenge led to the creation of the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT), which is still active as a component of the ALA. It also prompted the formation of two committees in response to the above demands: the Activities Committee on New Directions (ACONDA) and the Ad Hoc Activities Committee on New Directions (ANACONDA). A central concept at play in the politics of these events is the notion of "social responsibility" and its meaning in time of war and social change. This article focuses on the discourse of the challengers to the ALA and the ALA's response through the work of ACONDA and ANACONDA to examine the contesting and contested meanings of the "social responsibility" of libraries, librarianship, and the ALA. These events and this discursive struggle established an explicit professional concern for and continuing conflict over the meaning and role of libraries and librarianship in the creation of culture that before these events had been merely implicit in professional discourse.

INTRODUCTION

While not explicitly employing the term social responsibility, the July 1852 Report of the Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston made clear that the library had two primary social obligations. One was to provide the means of equalizing and maximizing individual opportunity to participate in civic society while combating divisive cultural, social and political influences. The second was to provide the public with a means of developing a uniquely American culture, founded on a notion of engaged citizenship. The report states: "the means of general information should be so diffused that the largest possible number of persons should be induced to read and understand questions going down to the very foundation of social order" (City of Boston, 1852, p. 281). This language reveals a set of mutual responsibilities. The public library is to provide the knowledge required by citizens for them to make rational decisions regarding the essential nature of the social order. Citizens are to use the library for this purpose. The notion of social responsibility has long been at the center of the professional ideology that grounds thought and justifies practice in librarianship. And it is an essentially contested concept (Connolly, 1993). Its meaning is central to professional identity, yet that meaning is historically and politically contingent, like the notion of professionalism itself (Larson, 1977).

During times of "normal practice" professional ideology can remain peacefully embedded within practice, going unrevealed and unexamined. However, given librarianship's close ties with the terms of discourse that generally articulate the legitimacy of American democratic culture, when the latter experiences a crisis of meaning, so does the former. Just after World War II, America confronted self-imposed questions regarding its surprising ascendance to the role of world leader at the same moment mutual assured destruction was about to become military doctrine. The Cold War caused problems for the meaning of peace. The peace of 1945 assured a victory for democracy on a global scale over its fascist challengers but left a sense that democracy, at home as well as abroad, was not as secure as we might like. These conditions triggered a professional crisis leading to the Public Library Inquiry (Raber, 1997).

The inquiry was organized by the American Library Association (ALA) and was conducted under the direction of Robert Leigh of the Social Science Research Council at the University of Michigan. The Carnegie Corporation provided about $200,000 to fund the study. Its goal was to determine the status of the public library and, based on that empirical assessment, define an appropriate and legitimate purpose for the library in American culture. The inquiry repeatedly and explicitly links library services and the essential values and requirements of a democratic culture in a way not unlike that of the Report to the Trustees of the Boston Public Library. In both, the library is broadly identified as an institution whose services are necessary for the existence of a vital public sphere (Habermas, 1991).

A generation later, a new crisis associated with a new war and new questions regarding the meaning of democracy arose from perceived and experienced contradictions between idealized and practiced democracy. Social problems associated with race, gender, and class raised questions regarding whether or nor the pubic sphere admitted genuinely democratic participation. These questions were accompanied by political unrest and cultural division that also posed questions for librarianship. If librarianship's fundamental moral commitment is to the progress of democracy and democracy is threatened by social problems, including a war whose legitimacy is questionable, then does not librarianship have a moral responsibility to address these problems? Is not this responsibility especially acute when the source of the social problems is the denial of equal opportunity to participate in the pubic sphere? But even if the answer to both of these questions is yes, what is librarianship to do?