Bibliographic instruction and postmodern pedagogy - The Library and Undergraduate Education

Library Trends, Fall, 1995 by Taylor E. Hubbard

BI's contribution to these conditions is apparent: teaching information gathering is not teaching discovery. Some would maintain that libraries are primarily organizing activities complex enough to require some explanation in order to make them useful. In the instructional event, the emphasis falls on explaining organization (indexes, catalogs, bibliographies, etc.), implicitly assuming, it would seem, that figuring out our complex rules and organizing puzzles is somehow central to students' intellectual discovery of the world. That we assume the structure we have imposed on information is itself a topic of academic value outside our own discipline is implicitly a modernist argument that can be reduced to the premise that structure equals substance. There are obvious flaws in this thinking as struggles for librarians' faculty status attest. What composition reform faults (see below) is that finding information is only part of the lesson, and that the focus of our attention needs to be on educating about knowledge--why the documents in our collections figure in that inquiry and how they can challenge students. In pursuing how postmodernism can contribute to creating conditions of discovery for BI, it is necessary to make a few observations about the modernist/structuralist paradigm that has become imbedded in BI.

STRUCTURAL BIBLIOGRAPHIC INSTRUCTION

National attention to BI was ushered in by the Monteith College report in the mid-1960s (Knapp, 1966). By the 1970s and 1980s, one particular modernist model, taxonomy, brought scientism to BI methodology. This model maintained that, with the regularity of a conveyor belt, knowledge moved from field work, to the lab, to conferences, to journals, to the apotheosis of a text sitting on a library shelf Diagrams suggested knowledge arranged in a hierarchical structure with reference works at the apex, primary works at the foundation, with a varied assortment of publication formats in between. This Newtonian building block paradigm maintained that the bibliographic structure was isomorphic with the reality. "The correlation between the structure of the literature in a discipline and the reference sources in that discipline can be illustrated by tracing the progress of a piece of research from the time of its inception to its appearance in specialized texts," as a leading BI proponent claimed (Frick, 1975, p. 13). Friedes's Literature and Bibliography of the Social Sciences (1973) was perhaps the most extended example of this model. In it, Friedes proposed structural concepts that explained disciplines as reifications of their literature as molded by the science paradigm. Again, "the basic bibliographic structure mirrors the structure of scholarly literature," she maintained (p. 257). The success of the model was so widely accepted, it became part of professional library education.

A study by Hopkins (1987) illustrates the extent to which this taxonomic model of disciplinary literature was promoted in library school curricula around the country to at least one generation of librarians. The article, which appeared in the library schools' professional journal, begins by admonishing the profession that "to be considered professional[,] librarians would need to learn and understand something about the content of the various materials they... deal with" (p. 136). The author then proceeds to elaborate in a very detailed fashion about various formats of literature and how they can be schematized to the point of having students construct diagrams (p. 146), concluding that "in a structured approach, students should develop a clear understanding of how scientific/ scholarly communication, the substantive component of literatures, and the reference/bibliographical component, are all part of one integral process" (p. 150). The obvious question is whether this conclusion really supports the author's contention or whether "content" here is being confused with structure.