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Intellectual Growth |
Carolyn L. Bowman UW MLIS Portfolio |
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Intellectual Growth We spend considerable time in Library and Information Science studying the user. A seemingly obvious concept, I nevertheless stumbled over the user in several courses and all of my independent projects—I was wary of misinformed generalizations about groups of users. I believe now, if not then, that I was grasping at the notion of context, intuitively aware that without it, we cannot really know our users. Interestingly, I began to understand the relationship between users and context by taking an historical perspective, a point of view entirely new to me. Below are two observations I attribute to my exploration of information and users from an historical perspective. In the course of the discussion, I consider two projects that stimulated my intellectual growth in this area:
Users span centuries My intellectual insights began with a paper about a 17th century English herbal. I quote here from the introduction to the paper: When Sandra Kroupa first brought me a copy of the 1636 edition of John Gerard’s The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, I was astonished at the size of the book. It weighs over ten pounds and is the size of a small (but thick) briefcase. Not exactly a field guide, I thought. I was looking at a work in a genre about which I knew little. I imagined a noisy print shop, filled with men in smudged aprons, carefully arranging woodcuts and Roman type, occasionally dropping a letter or two on the floor. The 1636 edition of the Herball has six leaves per gathering. At more than 1600 pages…that is over 260 printed sheets for this edition. And Thomas Johnson “very much enlarged and amended” the 1597 edition to produce this edition in one year? Wow. And what, exactly, is an “herbal”? And so I began a journey through several centuries, as I attempted to trace and explain the remarkable resilience of Gerard’s Herball. The book itself lacks distinction today, aside from the fact that it is so well known. I found this to be a conundrum of sorts. A manuscript unremarkable yet remarkable…perhaps this was simply semantic ping-pong. However, the historical reality pushed me to examine perspectives over several centuries, including those of scientists, barber-surgeons, apothecaries, educated people, and common folk. I understand now—and attempted to articulate in the paper—that the users of the Herball are the ones who give it meaning, convey its meaning, and contribute to the preservation of that meaning (should they choose to do so) for future users. Thus, the reasons a work endures reside in the multitude of ways people respond to, use, discuss, and disseminate the work over time. While contemporary users have much to tell us about these considerations, as does the work itself, Gerard's Herball taught me that we have to consider a range of users we may never know and some we cannot even predict. As information professionals, we are wise to consider users over long periods of time as we create, collect, discard, organize, describe, retrieve, and use information. Users trust us…completely “A good crew is like a perfect wife.” First hit, Google search terms <good crew>. (Written by a woman, the brief piece goes on to say that perfection, in crews or in wives, is illusive.) I am good crew. My skipper will attest to that. And I can say with confidence that the skippers in the Laurelhurst Sailing Fleet—for whom I began to document a fleet history—also think I am good crew. Sexism aside, an underlying issue with respect to a "good crew" is trust, and in our profession (as in sailing) trust is a serious issue. A group of sailors gave me the task of representing the past in amended form, displaying sound bites of interviews out of context. They trusted me completely. In addition, I was trusted with responsibilities unknown to the others: honor the guidelines of the Oral History Association; respect the narrators; consider young people and future generations—what will interest them? And MOHAI Historian, Lorraine McConaghy, taught me that the "product" of an oral history project ought not be pursued at the expense of the historical materials. These responsibilities are monumental and I struggled with them. Of primary concern for me was the tension between the archiving function of oral history and the tremendous pull and motivation to "produce" something (here, the website). I can appreciate that people approach interviews with a "product" in mind, that the unfolding story can guide an interviewer's questions, and that the archiving purpose can be lost (or diminished) by poor techniques as a result. And yet, the relationships I developed with the narrators reminded me of a characteristic of interviews discussed in my first journal entry: Alessandro Portelli says, "Oral sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did..." (The death of Luigi Trastulli and other stories: Form and meaning in oral history, 1991, p.50). I began to understand the importance of events for the people involved in them—the layers of stories build and the events and the people become part of a larger narrative. Portelli says, "...the narrator is now pulled into the narrative and becomes part of the story" (1991, p.57). Indeed, this is an important aspect of the history of the sailing fleet that the neighborhood wants to preserve. The interviews themselves are events with meaning. Throughout the experience, I felt a tremendous pull of another kind: the interviews informed one another, and together they informed the product, as much as the other way around. As various points of view were revealed in the interviews, I attempted to free my concept of the website from extraneous interpretation. Though I constructed slide shows using short clips from lengthy interviews, I edited the clips themselves very little. Much of what is heard cannot even be written here. Meaning lies between words, in the silence of reflections, in finger taps on the table, and in the tones and variations of the human voice. Sometimes meaning resides in background noise during an interview—for example, a seagull draws us onto Rosario Strait in the late 1930s. (Turn on your speakers for the linked slide show, which is Part II of a three-part adventure. Parts I and III of Evert Sodergren's adventure can be found on the Adventures page of the lbcsailing website, linked in the left- hand menu.) In the end, I gained a new understanding of my responsibilities to users. They trust me to honor the visions of others in combination with my own, and to balance my creative impulse with adherence to the historical record and the standards of the oral history profession. They trust me to capture the context in addition to the voices and the pictures. Further reflection can be found in journal entries written during this yearlong project, and in my final paper. Conclusion My forays into the past, demonstrated in the two projects above, taught me the importance of a work's context. This context includes users and their perspectives on the work, spanning decades, or centuries, before and after my time. <<back to Technological Tools<< >>go on to Leadership>>
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