Introduction
Rewriting libr@ries:
Space, knowledge and capital
Cushla Kapitzke
Bertram C. Bruce
Libraries contain gold, pure gold. The gold that banks contain is worthless
compared to the contents of scientific libraries… and it’s all free!
(Daniel, postgraduate science student)
I don’t have to go to the library anymore. If it’s not on the Net, I don’t want it.
(Sophie, Information Environments student)
Unlike Forgoing the customary opener—something profound from poet or philosopher—we chose these remarks made by students to one of us in the course of casual conversation. There are two reasons for this. First, because the comments give voice to the raison d’être of educational institutions and their libraries: namely, learners all. And second, because their startling differences of viewpoint capture the continuities and contradictions, the politics and possibilities of emergent libraries and other forms of information organization and access. Daniel’s fervent appreciation of his university library resonates with some of our own experiences of libraries as familiar places where people go for a range of different reasons. As symbols of institutional and community support, they are deemed variously friendly, safe, and helpful places to go not only for information per se, but also for community, colleagues, and a place to work, learn, and engage with culture. Part of what we want to do in this book is to examine the notion of library in all its richness as implied by Daniel’s comment.
Sophie’s quote, however, represents a different perspective. For those like her, the library lacks capital in the image stakes and is, quite simply, not relevant. Rather than reveling in the riches that libraries have to offer, she sees them as outmoded, difficult to use, and inadequate to the fast-paced information environments of today. To Sophie the traditional library is no longer aa constrainingplace, whereas she seeksbut is a space of new possibilities. Her experiences of information and learning are tied to a web of hyperlinked multimedia, rather than to ‘bricks and mortar’ and physical documents. For some of us, Daniel’s enthusiasm for the library as place invokes fond memories of our experience of libraries, but at the same time Sophie’s fascination with the Internet resonates with a different set of experiences in which we see the virtual world playing a bigger role in our lives. In fact, as many librarians and library users are discovering, there may not be a simple choice of place versus space.
The purpose of this book is to explore the tension between Daniel’s place and Sophie’s space, as it is reflected in the new libr@ry. As editors we set ourselves the challenge of exploring the multiple ways in which physical libraries are assimilating virtual libraries, and vice versa. That is, we sought to understand how library as place and library as space blend together in ways that may be both contradictory and complementary, a blending we revisit in the concluding chapter.. In turn, this exploration provides an opportunity to examine ways of using ideas of community, culture, and history, as they have been conceived in traditional libraries, to inform conceptions of virtual space. In order to haveSeeking a suitable term for to designateing this rapidly evolving and much contested object of study, and to understand the conditions of formation of new libraries within contexts of space, knowledge, and capital, we have devised the word libr@ry and employuse the term arobasearobase to signify the. conditions of formation of new libraries within contexts of space, knowledge, and capital.
The arobase in the libr@ry
We began the project using the word cybrary—from cybernetics and library—as a generic expression encapsulating the range of terms commonly used to denote new library and information forms. Upon realizing that notions of digital libraries and hybrid libraries did not sit comfortably together within the semantic parameters of the term cybrary, which had an established history and quite specific application, we subsequently devised the term libr@ry. Whilst some contributors chose to continue using the term, cybrary, we adopted libr@ry to avoid privileging technological aspects of shifts in library and information practice. The symbol “@” that we inserted within the word library is used to indicate that technological mediation has a history, an established set of practices, and a political economy, which the technology may alter but not fully supplant. It is offered here as a semiotic space, deliberately speculative, variable, and open to be rejected, or adopted and co-constructed by those envisioning a different discursive and disciplinary field for libr@ries of the future.
We use this rhetorical device to convey two things. First, that digital tools and new media are part of the current practice of traditional libraries, and second, that “new” cannot be understood merely in technical terms but must be thought about within the context of longstanding questions around who has access to materials, how they are used, and who has control over them, and so on. We avoid the convenient phrase “new” because it tends to allude to improvement or advancement of the old, and to support teleological approaches assuming social progress through technological development. These approaches ultimately generate either naïve celebration or condemnation of technological innovation. In relation to space, for example, we refrained from adopting the terms digital space, virtual space, and cyberspace because they too privilege techné and to invite a decontextualized understanding of technological affordances and constraints. This disembedding of techné from the social creates simplistic and unhelpful dichotomies between old and new, technical and non-technical, virtual and real, and so on. We propose the use of the term, libr@ry, to represent and foreground the incorporation of change in information use as ongoing social practices.
As used here, the symbol “@” refers to changing evolving discursive practices that are infused with—and which in turn infuse—technological values and logics. This familiar sign is used in email addresses and is seen in the streets of major cities to identify Internet cafés. For example, the image below of a café in Europe used by one of the authors contains no less than 9 @s.
The symbol “@” has had a long and somewhat confused history (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2004; Herron, 1997; Le dictionnaire encyclopédique de la langue française du XXIe siècle, 2004; Le 'pataphysicien Net, 2004; Quinion, 2002; Tallmo, K.-E., 1995). We view this history as emblematic of the ambiguous and often conflicting aspects of technology developments today. Both the symbol itself and the words used to describe it have evoked diverse responses in the realms of commerce, diplomacy, technology, art, and humour, and these reflect the multiple ways in which new information and communications technologies (ICTs) are entering into our daily practices in every way. The sign was used, for example, in commerce to indicate prices, and to denote locations long before the advent of email. In 1896, the surrealist playwright, Albert Jarry, used it on the costume of Père Ubu in his play, Ubu Roi. The words for the symbol are as diverse as the cultures using it. Some Finns say “miau” (cat); Germans say “Klammeraffe” (monkey’s tail); Italians say “chiocciola” (snail); Israelis say “strudel”; Americans say “at”; Swedes say “Snabel-a” (elephant trunk); and Czechs say “rollmop.” All of these words metaphorically signify non-linearity and open circularity. Rather than employing the somewhat awkward symbol “@”, or the English preposition “at,” we deliberately sought a non-English term that would flow better and evoke the global dimensions of the processes we are investigating. We therefore chose the French term, arobase, and use it here to signify the recursive processes by which new digital technologies are assimilated into existing material conditions and social relations through space, knowledge, and capital.
LIBR@RIES: SPACE, KNOWLEDGE, AND CAPITAL
Libraries oftentypically have been framed in terms of places, as mere repositories of organized collections. Birdsall (1994), Nardini (2001), and Radford and Radford (2001) show the power of metaphors of place and their related assumptions and social values through which industrial age libraries have been experienced and interpreted. Yet, contemporary libraries comprise increasingly complex informational networks and diverse ecologies providing access to online services and resources within global information infrastructures.
Our theoretical position on this complexity is grounded in poststructuralist ideas in that, irrespective of what physical forms these entities take, we believe that what counts epistemologically as a library or other knowledge resource is a product of discursive and spatial practice. That is, whilst information materials and services exist as objects and processes in the world, they have no social meaning outside of language, location, history, and culture. Library resources and services are understood and used within the linguistic and other meaning-making formations of their designers, creators, managers, and users.
Following theorists like Foucault (1973) and Fairclough (1995), we use discourse to refer to a rule-directed set of statements that enables and constrains what can and cannot be thought, said, and done in and through sites of social and pedagogical activity like libraries. We assume a genealogical approach in which technological innovation is viewed in relation to a field of forces. Whereas itIt is disruptive of these forces, like things “old,” it comes replete with possibilities for both emancipatory and oppressive social practices and relations. This follows our premise that no (informational) text is free of politics because, irrespective of whether it is part of a inquiry exchange at a reference desk or national policy formulation, all language and semiosis is awash with agendas, interests, values, and ideologies. Regardless of the context—real, virtual, or the conflated “real/ virtual”—information work spaces are not outside of the logics and politics of text (i.e., language and image). Library buildings and their virtual counterparts alike can be viewed as texts that tell stories about their historical times, social powers, and political economies. Because the most successful ideological effects are those “that have no words, and ask no more than complicitous silence” (Bourdieu, 1977), no building or byte is free of ideology, viz., free of meaning in the service of power.
Starting from this premise, we invited the scholars herein to explore developments in contemporary forms of information storage, sharing, and service for educational contexts. From different disciplinary perspectives, they variously—and on occasion divergently— interrogated and interpreted what they saw as key issues around change in libraries.
Three themes—Space, Knowledge, and Capital—bubbled up and out of the chapter content and are used to structure the volume into three subsections. In Bakhtin’s (1981, p. 84) terms, they “thickened, took on flesh, and made artistically visible” the social, economic, and political dimensions of libr@ries and new knowledge spaces. The first theme, Space, encapsulates the where of the library, usually indicated by its name (e.g., Peaceville Public Library). The name can tell us perhaps where the building itself is located; how it is structured and organized spatially according to rooms; which objects are within which rooms and on which shelves; whether the information is open or closed stack; and whether there is a reference librarian available to assist. The second theme, Knowledge, is the what, and refers to what the collection is, and what kinds of knowledge are valued and represented in that physical space. The third theme, Capital, which is less visible, but equally important nonetheless. It is Capital, and concerns how the library works socially in terms of internal and external policies and budgets. This includes who decides which materials to purchase, how support services are provided, and other issues that connect the library to users and to the outside world. These three3 dimensions, which that are crucial in understanding the traditional library, afford a means of organizing the chapters in this book becauseas we examine the ways that the arobase enters into, suffuses, supplants, contradicts, engages, and changes the library. In what follows, we look at the where, the what, and the how—the space, knowledge, and capital—of libr@ries.
Some core questions thatThe authors address include the followingcore questions:. Considering the shift from print-based information to online modes and texts, what is the ongoing role of that once powerful mediatory institution, the library? What spatio-temporal sensibilities enable and constrain what can be thought, said, and done in relation to library practices and cultures within fast capitalist nation-states? What role does policy making in the related fields of information, technology, intellectual property, and so on play in these developments? How can librarians and cognate professionals extend the terrain of their everyday work beyond conventional parameters of dominant languages and knowledges, canons and cultures, texts and technologies? How can we imagine and practice libr@ries to better reflect and refract the highly complex and differentiated times and spaces of postmodernity? What kinds of textual and pedagogical spaces are libr@ries and new knowledge spaces framing for learners, young and old, to develop the literate sensibilities required by symbol-saturated and mediatized communities and economies of the twenty-first century?
Arobase Space
Theories of virtual culture emphasize the disconnectedness of online experience from the embodied, emplaced world of “real” life. Enthusiasts and critics alike stress the “extra-territorial” conditions of life online. As human subject and cultural artifact have become increasingly separated from the physical world, contemporary knowledge too is considered de-referentialized, and the spaces of its location ever more de-territorialized(Robins & Webster, 1999). We argue here that though it is important to recognize the ways in which new media and communications technologies disembed and displace knowledge from local, cultural, and national roots, this exercise, of itself, is not enough. Instead, our focus is on ways in which information occurs in particular kinds of social, symbolic, and semiotic spaces that are constructed by discourse through the production and consumption of knowledge and knowing. That is, we believe it is important to acknowledge and We need to understand how knowledge is not outside of space, but is variously spatialized through discursive practice. The reason for this is that differential discursive practices translate intoentail disparities of access to social and cultural capital and the hence, material wealth accruing to this capital.
How then can we examine and understand this interface of discourse and space within the theory and practice of libr@ries? Space and time are fundamental categories of ontological contemplation because all human knowing and knowledge is referential. That is, things are typically understood relatively:Oobjects are here or there; moments are now or then (Munt, 2001). In ‘western’ ways of knowing, positivist epistemologies and objectivist positions on knowledge purged space of the pollution of materiality occurring through inclusion of aspects of agency and place. That is, the messiness of action and social agency, and the unpredictable sentiment-based politics of place, were removed, from theories of space, thereby reducing it space to a spaceless abstraction.
By contrast, more recent post-Kantian approaches to space assert that space is not an inert medium that stands “outside” of the way it is used and conceived. Crang and Thrift (2000), for example, show that space is not prior to, or separate from, social practice. It is not an inert container for things, thought, or action, but is better conceived as “process and in process,” that is, “space and time combined in becoming” (p. 3). This assumption recognizes that being and learning about being—of self, others, and the world—is experienced as practice in and through space and time. Because space occurs in and through different institutional and discursive contexts (capitalism, ethnicity, gender, media etc.), it creates different objects of knowledge, different ontologies, and different epistemic parameters. To begin to explore such “becomings” of social life, Crang and Thrift develop a number of “species” of space, some of which are the spaces of language and writing, spaces of self (interiority) and other (exteriority), and spaces of experience. More recent work on “timespace” by (May & Thrift, 2001) avoids the prioritization of space over time by recognizing their indivisibility. May and Thrift concede nonetheless that, because we exist within it, theorizing timespace requires “conceptualizing at the limits of representation” (p. 20). They then begin to do so by examining the spatial metaphors of twentieth-century theorists.
Dominant images—mostly from the work of Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Heidegger—are those of energy, dynamism, and motion. Unprecedented global movements of people, capital, and trade, combined with the uptake of new media and virtual technologies, generated interest in metaphors of flows. Within a technocultural paradigm, however, this notion of flows views the source of philosophical understanding—cognition and intuition—as separate from the instant and the context. Yet, any separation between the organic and inorganic is now considered untenable (Bentley, 1941; Haraway, 1994). Theorists like Deleuze (1991) uses a metaphor of the “rhizome,” comprising “directions in motion” rather than separate units to overcome these unhelpful dualisms. Using the concept ofHe conceives “rhythm,” which he conceives as orders of ceaseless connection and reconnection comprising circulations rather than entities, or essences, Latour (1993) subsequently blurredblursany the distinction between the material and non-material worlds. Lefebvre (1991) similarly arguesd that the lifeworld is “folded into rhythms” through the textures of everyday time and space. Feminist theorists too have used metaphors of rhythm to disrupt what they call the ‘sexualization of space’ and the commodification of time by the forces of capitalist labour (cf., Clément, 1994).