Librarianship and Ethnography: A Research Agenda

The recent controversy over the American Anthropological Association's decision to drop the word "science" from its long range plan--thus re-opening internal debates about what anthropologists do and what anthropology is--made it into the mainstream media (see Nicholas Wade's NY Times article Anthropology a Science? Statement Deepens a Rift) and has occupied much discussion on anthropology blogs over the past month (there is a great summary on Neuroanthropology).

One response to the controversy was an intriguing post titled Ethnography as a solution to #AAAfail, in which the author suggests that ethnography, and more specifically, an ethnography of anthropologists, could shed light on this debate by exploring how anthropologists understand their discipline. He writes:

What do most anthropologists think anthropology does? What do the terms they use to evaluate it mean to them? To the best of my knowledge, we simply have no answer to this question beyond our impressions that ‘cultural anthropologists are taking over'.  As a scientist (in the general sense of the term) my training tells me the first step in resolving the issues raised by #AAAfail is to get some data on the phenomena we want to study.

What if, as an alternative, we started a grassroots movement to say, in a public and synthesizable way, what we thought anthropology was about? An anthropologist’s creed, as it were. They would have to be short, a paragraph each, and address (hopefully in the same order) a concrete number of issues: what the word ‘science’ means to them, what disciplines are adjacent to anthropology, what research methods are important, the role of the analyst, the appropriateness of politics involvement, and so forth.

There are enough anthropology bloggers out there these days that I bet we would have a pretty nice hunk of empirical material to work with — even if it wasn’t a scientific random sample. Since it would be a chance for bloggers to narcissistically reflect on themselves, participation would be high . . .

Such an account of the discipline of anthropology would provide insights and details that accounts such as professional association statements (like the one released by the AAA in response to the recent controversy) inevitably lack.

This got me thinking about the possibility of an ethnography of librarians and librarianship. The controversy and internal debate in anthropology has parallels in the ongoing debate about the roles of libraries and librarians in the field of librarianship (for example, see Birdi et al., 2009; Durrani & Smallwood, 2008; Garrison, 1979; and Harris, 2008). What do librarians think the field of librarianship is about? What does their practice mean to them? To the communities they serve?

While ethnography has gained wide acceptance as a method for user studies in the field of LIS, I am not aware of any ethnographies of librarians themselves. I think that an ethnographic approach to the study of librarians and librarianship could make valuable contributions to the field as a whole. What would such as study look like? Thoughts?

References
Birdi, B., Wilson, K., & Tso, H. M. (2009). The nature and role of empathy in public librarianship. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 41(2), 81-89.

Durrani, S., & Smallwood, E. (2008). The professional is political: Redefining the social role of libraries. In A. Lewis (Ed.). Questioning library neutrality: Essays from progressive librarian (pp. 119-140). Duluth, MN: Library Juice Press.

Garrison, D. (1979). Apostles of Culture: The public librarian and American Society, 1876-1920. New York: Free Press.

Harris, R. (2008). Their little bit of ground slowly squashed into nothing: Technology, gender, and the vanishing librarian. In G. J. Leckie & J. E. Buschman (Eds.). Information technology in librarianship: New critical approaches (pp.165-180). Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.