The
spatial and intellectual horizons of LIS
In response to Kerry’s pleas for
contributions to the Library History SIG blog, here’s a link to a draft chapter
I updated recently: Chapter 1 of my book International
and comparative librarianship: concepts and methods for global studies.
Chapter 1 is entitled “From local to global: the expanding horizons of
libraries and related information organizations”. In it, I attempt to sketch
the evolution of the spatial and intellectual horizons of librarianship, documentation,
and information activities – the wider field of librarianship, documentation
and information services commonly denoted by LIS – from early times to the
present. Here the focus is on the international dimension of LIS as a field of
activity.
The chapter is a radical revision – a
rewriting really – of an earlier version in which I had outlined the history of
international librarianship from the earliest times, going back to the libraries/archives of
ancient city states, Assurbanipal, the ancient Library of Alexandria, etc. It
dawned on me a few years ago that it is an anachronism to refer to
international librarianship before the advent of nation states (conventionally
but somewhat simplistically marked by the Westphalian treaties of 1648). In fact,
the word “international” was introduced in 1789 by that prolific coiner of new
words, Jeremy Bentham, and international library activities in the strict sense
only took off in the second half of the 19th Century.
How then to refer to border-crossing, cross-polity
activities before the mid-19th Century? After considering various periodizations of
library history (discussed briefly, with some references, at the beginning of
the chapter), I decided to avoid chronological periods and rather organize the
chapter in terms of roughly chronological but often overlapping and sometimes
recurring ‘horizons’. By ‘horizon’ I mean the geographic (e.g. local, national,
international, global) and intellectual space within which librarians see their
work (for example in terms of collections, bibliographic control and users) and
the extent to which they interact with librarians and scholars in other
cultural and political entities. I identified six horizons: local, imperial,
universal, national, international and global. You can read the chapter here
and judge for yourself whether the concept works: https://pjlor.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/a001-chapter-1-from-local-to-global-2016-06-29.pdf
Peter Lor
