Scholar's playground or wisdom's temple? Competing metaphors in a library electronic text center - Qualitative Research

Library Trends, Spring, 1998 by Moira Smith, Paul Yachnes

INTRODUCTION

Whatever one may feel about the incursion of electronic texts into the traditional library setting, the fact remains that full-text information technology is finding a permanent place there. Centers devoted to the use, manipulation, and creation of electronic texts are appearing in several academic libraries--Indiana University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Virginia to name some of the more prominent examples. One reason these centers exist is that the use of electronic texts and related technology pose both practical and conceptual problems for librarians and library patrons. In terms of their content, packaging, and hardware requirements, electronic texts do not fit comfortably into the library as it has been traditionally conceived.

Over centuries, librarians have developed extremely efficient procedures for handling books--tangible items which we know how to classify, store, and access, and which our patrons are generally comfortable using. In contrast, electronic texts pose challenges to both libraries' ability to manage them and the comfort level of patrons. At the very least, library procedures have to change. More importantly, electronic texts are causing both librarians and patrons to change their very ways of thinking about texts, libraries, and information.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND: WHY METAPHOR?

Electronic texts, and indeed literary and linguistic computing generally, represent a novel development in libraries. The application of computer processing to humanistic texts was once the province of specialists as represented in the journal Computers and the Humanities from 1966 on. More recently, CD-ROM technology has made it possible for a much wider audience of students and scholars to read and manipulate traditional humanistic texts in machine-readable format, causing academic libraries not only to collect, but also to provide support for, electronic information. These materials take their place alongside computer-based library catalogs and bibliographic databases, which have by now become familiar sights in most libraries in the Western world. Yet even the OPACs and databases were novel enough in recent years to have prompted a plethora of studies aimed at describing the attitudes held by both library staff and patrons regarding these developments.

Our approach borrows from theories in cognitive science that promise a way to understand and describe how people respond to new situations. The theories of cognition developed in cognitive anthropology and cognitive linguistics start with the question, How do people know how to act in the new and emergent situations they face every day? The answer is that this accomplishment is achieved by means of mental structures variously known as "models," "scripts," or "schemes." Roy D'Andrade (1995) defines a schema thus:

the organization of cognitive elements into an abstract mental object

capable of being held in working memory with default values or open

slots which can be variously filled in with appropriate specifics. For

example, most Americans have a well-formed schema for a commercial

transaction [emphasis in the original] in which a buyer and seller exchange

money for the rights over some object. (p. 179)

Schemas and scripts provide mental templates or outlines that enable people to efficiently process new and emergent situations in terms of old familiar ones. For example, someone who has never visited a chiropractor's office before will know what to do there by applying the script for going to a doctor's office. This script is in turn an elaboration of the broader script for visiting a professional office of any kind (Rumelhart & Norman, 1988, pp. 539-41). The script provides a kind of mental shortcut, a generic template into which one can insert the details appropriate to the current specific instance of the type.

It will be noted that, while such mental shortcuts are only useful, even indispensable, to everyday thought and action, they are not without drawbacks. Mental shortcuts may eliminate too many nuances. Schemas that persist as bases for action in the face of facts that contradict them are known popularly as "stereotypes." They represent the least adaptive end of the range of cognitive modeling.

In other words, the cognitive devices labeled schemes work like metaphors. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), "the primary function of metaphor is to provide a partial understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another kind of experience" (p. 154). Schemas are like metaphors in that they are "essentially cognitive transfer agents--that is, they allow the transfer of knowledge from one knowledge domain to another" (Barker et al., 1994, p. 214). Metaphorical extension allows people to understand and talk about new phenomena in terms of old ones. As Klaus Krippendorff (1993) explains: "All metaphors carry explanatory structures from a familiar domain of experiences into another domain in need of understanding or restructuring" [emphasis in original] (p. 4).