A welcome for the book

It is a privilege and a pleasure to write the foreword for this book on The Social Future of Academic Libraries, and especially kind to be invited to contribute from this side of the Atlantic to a work largely based on the thought and experience of United States (US) colleagues. Over the last twenty-five years my own practice and theory has been immeasurably enriched, and my life generally made more enjoyable, through association with North American colleagues, partners and friends. Writing the foreword to this volume allows me the indulgence of continuing that dialogue.

This work contributes to a tradition in our field that seeks to understand libraries as part of broader social worlds. Librarians have always been curious about their own world and willing to change it, despite the tropes often attached to the profession. In the earlier parts of the last century, as a result of the broader trend for understanding organisations using scientific methods, librarians also became driven with the idea of librarianship as a science and towards the adoption of what was termed scientific management. This was not unhelpful, but had a tendency to restrict library thinking to processes and systems within its own black box and for measurement of the social dimensions and impacts of library activity to be considered too difficult. Perceptive commentators were able to consider social aspects beyond that black box of internal processes, but these ideas were often, in Blaise Cronin’s (2008, p. 466) description, ‘inchoate’. Margaret Egan’s (1955) contribution of the idea of social epistemology to build on European ideas of documentation recognised that social value is created through behaviour that develops social impact, and that the library could be viewed ‘as a social agency … ultimately in support of the smooth functioning and continued progress of society’ (Furner 2004, p. 802).

Egan records John Dewey’s shock of realisation that social concerns were of relevance to the sacred core of information science in indexing, classification and retrieval. I encountered a similar reaction very early in my career when challenging the late Jack Mills on how he could talk about classification for an hour without once mentioning users and their own identities and beliefs as a contribution to knowledge organisation.