When and why is a pioneer: history and heritage in library and information science

Library Trends, Spring, 2004 by W. Boyd Rayward

   All the past we leave behind,
   We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
   Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
   Pioneers! O Pioneers!

   --Walt Whitman

THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORY

Underlying this collection of papers is a belief in the value of history in helping us to achieve a reasonably full understanding of current trends of development in what we might call society's "knowledge apparatus" and in the institutional arrangements to which libraries and information services are central. Such a historically based understanding presents a richer, more considered context for planning for the future than would otherwise be possible. I am intrigued by the paradox that history is only in part about the past. History provides us with a way to think about the present and the future. Because we can never know it directly, it is actually constituted and reconstituted by what we bring to it from our ever-changing presents. It offers the opportunity to question both simplistic descriptions and quick and easy explanations of what seems to be happening, what seems to be the case in the present. It also offers the opportunity from the ever-changing perspective of the present to go back to reassess what seems to have happened, what seems to have been the case in the past and how it has influenced the present. It is this dialectical process that keeps history as a discipline always unfinished and alive.

The idea that we learn from the past seems to me powerful in its implications, but it is not easy to grasp how we learn or what is actually learned. I suspect that what is most important in what we learn from the past is not really direct and instrumental, though we often seem to think it is. The old saying that those who do not understand the past are destined to repeat it seems to me essentially a rhetorical ploy designed to support a desired course of action in the present. Nothing is ever the same, not even from one minute to the next let alone across extended periods of time or from place to place. One cannot simply apply history in a given situation, though every situation has a historical context that can illuminate the situation. And yet, there are continuities, parallelisms, similarities--one moment is indeed much like the next until time gradually exaggerates the differences or something striking happens to create a change in the course of events.

Thus, I see "history" as problematic conceptually--the past is slippery and exists only in viewpoint-dependent recreations. It is problematic analytically--what uses can we reasonably make of historically based argument? Because of the difficulties history presents, it is easy to dismiss it as arcane or irrelevant in the face of the pressing exigencies of the current moment, especially in relation to a group of modern library and information science-based occupations reconstituting themselves around cutting-edge technology.

But we are nothing without a past. Personal, social, and institutional identities are inevitably created in important ways by experience through time, that is, historically. Not only how we think but what we think and when we are able to think it depend to some degree on historical circumstance. Each time we seek from historians an account of something important to us as a group--a profession, the lay public, a cadre of scholars--the past changes because of what the group as consumers of history, and historians as its producers, bring to it and seek from it. What is brought to it are different frames of references and knowledge of the current status of the cumulating record of earlier historical studies. These help determine what will be recognized now as important both as historical evidence and as explanation. What is sought from the past are different kinds of understanding that may involve possible and desired explanations, sometimes justification for a particular state of affairs, sometimes reassurance--or perhaps the opposite, confirmation of our fears and trepidation--about the direction of events. But most generally what is sought may be described as a rather amorphous awareness of having attained a special insight into the phenomena, the events, the personalities under historical investigation.

In bringing these observations to library and information science (LIS), one may argue that LIS as a field and the interrelated communities of practice that it entails are in the midst of major transformations under the impact of new technologies. These technologies and the social, economic, and political circumstances of their development and use seem to be leading to a restructuring of society's "knowledge apparatus" and the libraries and information services of various kinds that have been and will continue to be an important part of this apparatus. LIS institutions are a fundamental component of the infrastructure by means of which societies manage access to public information through time. They store, retrieve, and provide information in anticipation of use. Their commitment to time is essential, definitional, and helps to establish their particular role in relation to other components of society's information infrastructure.