Bibliographic instruction and postmodern pedagogy - The Library and Undergraduate Education

Library Trends, Fall, 1995 by Taylor E. Hubbard

Postmodernism's tangled roots, along with those of poststructuralism, reach into the materialism of Epicurus, existentialism, hermeneutics (the theory of interpretations), phenomenology, and especially linguistics. While it is not immune to speculation, its gaze is most often to the past and present rather than to the unpredictable future. It avoids grand theories or "metanarratives" as Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) calls them (p. xxiv). Like Tip O'Neill's politics, postmodernism maintains that all knowledge is local. It particularizes rather than generalizes, thus privileging social, cultural, political, and philosophical diversity. Its interest in marginal groups created by modernism is shared to some degree by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and communication theory of Harold Innis. Since this attitude denies universal laws, postmodernists may find themselves labeled irremissible relativists by modernists. Particularizing gives postmodernism a pronounced interest in linguistics insofar as it studies acts of communication and the play of language--the "linguistic turn." In its literary and legal deconstructionist form, it challenges the ability of texts to connect readers with authorial intent. In architecture, it tosses off playful facades, inversions like the inside out Pompidou Center in Paris, and eclectic quotes from other buildings, periods, and styles. It challenges traditional aesthetic theories by turning the everyday and banal into art (e.g., works by Oldenburg and Warhol). In short, it defies the aura and doctrines of orderliness and certitude found in modernism by turning them on their heads and asserting the vagaries and diversities of human intervention. Keats might have been a postmodernist.

THOROUGHLY MODERN BIBLIOGRAPHIC INSTRUCTION

Snow Crash, one text being used in Evergreen's information course this year, is a witty cyberpunk sci-fi thriller heroed by the pixelesque Asian-African-American, Hiro Protagonist (Stephenson, 1993). The action takes place in the not-too-distant future when government has been franchised and privatized, and the only employment possibilities are music, movies, software programming, and pizza delivery. Given these uncomfortably imaginable possibilities, life is lived as little as possible in sentient reality, more so in virtual reality constructed in a Metaverse. As his source of information, Hiro is served by his librarian, the keeper of all wisdom stored in the universe. Tweedy, rumpled, aged to dusty maturity, the librarian is, "cheerful; he can move through the nearly infinite stacks of information in the Library with the agility of a spider dancing across a vast web of cross-references ... the only thing he can't do is think" (p. 107).

The librarian is a piece of very expensive, user-friendly, retrieval software--a digitized Randtriever. If storage and retrieval are the only roles possible, what might this librarian's BI program look like? What would its learning objectives be?

Unfortunately, the answer to these questions may already be at hand in the form of that venerable campus institution, the Research Paper Assignment (RPA), in whose interest much BI is expended. According to one criticism: "Students generally view the research paper as informative in aim, not argumentative, much less analytical; as factual rather than interpretive, designed to show off knowledge of library skills and documentation procedures ... as an exercise in information gathering, not a discovery" (Schwegler & Shamoon, 1982, pp. 817-24).