Interdisciplinary needs: the current context - Navigating Among the Disciplines: The Library and Interdisciplinary Inquiry

ABSTRACT

Meeting the Interdisciplinary needs off today's library users begins with understanding the activities that create these needs. The answers to three basic questions provide the basis for a common discourse about those activities and their place in the knowledge system: (1) why and how do interdisciplinary, activities emerge? (2) what form do they take? and (3) where are they located in institutions? Interdisciplinary activities are the result of historical and contemporary developments in disciplines, professions, and new interdisciplinary fields. Recent accounts indicate that interdisciplinarity is no longer peripheral to the academy but is regarded in many quarters as essential to the knowledge system. The cumulative effect of alternative organizations of knowledge and new social and cognitive forms exposes a lack of fit between interdisciplinary needs and existing knowledge taxonomies and classification schemes.

INTRODUCTION

Meeting the interdisciplinary needs of today's library users begins with understanding the activities that create them and their place in the knowledge system. The task of understanding is complicated by the "jungle of phenomena." Interdisciplinarity, as Ludwig Huber put it, is on "everyone's agenda" (Huber, 1992a, 1992b, p. 285). Borrowed tools and methods stimulate cross-fertilization. New concepts and theories transform the ways that objects are treated in traditional disciplines. New subjects generate interlanguages and hybrid knowledge communities. The challenges of the modern world require integrative problem solving and, at a more comprehensive level, holistic thought and transdisciplinary schema promote unity of knowledge.

The information needs created by these activities land squarely on the desk of the librarian, whose job it is to organize knowledge and make it accessible. Yet, Susan Searing (1992) remarked earlier, interdisciplinary approaches call into question the familiar verbal, numerical, and spatial systems on which we rely. Classification systems function as a "hegemonic representation of human knowledge." Interdisciplinary studies and many modern subjects must be squeezed into pre-existing outlays of knowledge that no longer fit the shape of current scholarly output" (pp. 9-10).

The problem of interdisciplinarity is the problem of fit. The metaphor of fit, Lynton Caldwell (1983) observed in a genealogy of environmental studies, prejudges the epistemological problem at stake. Interdisciplinary approaches arise because of a perceived misfit among needs, experience, information, and the structure of knowledge embodied in conventional disciplinary organization. They represent a "latent and fundamental restructuring of knowledge and formal education" (p. 247). Recent accounts of interdisciplinary activity affirm Caldwell's claims. They indicate that interdisciplinarity is no longer peripheral to the academy. In many quarters, it is regarded as essential to the knowledge system (Salter & Hearn, 1993; Klein, in press; Klein & Newell, 1996).

The current extent of interdisciplinary activity and the attendant rise of alternative organizations of knowledge underscore the need for a common discourse about interdisciplinary needs. The answers to three basic questions provide the basis for such a discourse. Why and how do inter-disciplinary activities emerge? What form do they take? And where are they located in institutions?

INTERDISCIPLINARY ACTIVITIES

Klein and Newell grappled with the first question - Why and how do activities emerge? - when they wrote the chapter on "Interdisciplinary Studies" for the new edition of the Handbook on the Undergraduate Curriculum. They found familiar reasons alongside new ones: * general education, liberal studies, and professional training; * social, economic, and technological problem solving; * social, political, and epistemological critique; * holistic systems and transdisciplinary approaches; * cross-fertilizations of borrowing and subdisciplinary interactions; * new fields, hybrid communities, and inter-institutional alliances; * faculty development and institutional downsizing. (in press)

The intermingling of older and newer reasons is not surprising. "Interdisciplinarity," Geoffrey Squires (1992) reflected recently, "is both a permanent and a transient issue in higher education" (p. 201). Any restructuring of knowledge creates the possibility of questioning, altering, or transcending those structures. Yet interests come and go as a result of factors internal and external to the higher education system (p. 201). Consequently, current activities exhibit both historical and contemporary, influences for histories, see Kockelmans, 1979; Klein, 1990).

In the West, the underlying ideas of general knowledge, integration, synthesis, and unified science developed in ancient philosophy. "Inter-disciplinary," nonetheless, is a twentieth-century word. The earliest dictionary citations are references to a December 1937 issue of the Journal of Educational Sociology and a subsequent notice regarding postdoctoral fellowships of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Yet, ideas of "interrelation," "interfiliations," "intercommunication," cross-relation-ships", and "interpenetration" appeared in the social sciences during the 1920s (Frank, 1988, pp. 93-94). In the previous decade, the idea of integrated curricula also appeared in the first general education reform movement in the United States. The current plurality of activity is the result of developments that have made heterogeneity, hybridity, complexity, and interdisciplinarity characterizing traits of knowledge in the latter half of the twentieth century (Klein, in press).