Tracing the Archetypal Academic Librarian

Introduction A century of phenomenal advances in information technology has resulted in the exponential growth of information, and there is no end in sight. The modern world, what communications theorist Daniel Bell (1973) dubbed the post industrial "knowledge society," has become so swamped with information, misinformation, and propaganda that neologisms like "information explosion" and "infoglut" have been invented to describe a state of profound saturation: a cognitive overload that increases uncertainty potentially to paralysis. The proliferation of so many new storage formats complicates things further, potentially limiting access to, and the lifespan of, the "memory of humankind." A "digital dark age" looms. Although information technology has changed so swiftly and profoundly, and the amount of information has spiked so dramatically, the librarians--the original gatekeepers of knowledge--have been around for thousands of years. Humans have captured information for over ten millennia. Since the beginning of the fourth millennium BCE, people have recorded their spoken language in the form of written text. From the start, this fixing of language into the form of lasting documents (a document being anything that captures information in a physical format) has necessitated these documents' organization and retrieval, as well as the training and assignation of responsibility to those those charged with their care and management. The modern profession of librarianship, however, suffers from a severe case of astigmatism when it comes to exploring its own history (Buckland & Liu, 1998). This is disconcerting, for "From historical consciousness derives also adaptability to change, an acute realization that life has not always been as it is today, and that it will not forever remain as it is at present. Thus one arrives at a proper perspective upon contemporary events, an ability to relate each to its appropriate antecedents and to project, at least to some extent, its possible consequences. History properly comprehended enriches and deepens the understanding of contemporary society" (Shera, 1953, 110). The unreflective librarian knows not from whence she came. This lack of historical awareness results in a dearth of professional identity and theoretical grounding. Reflective librarians risk trading their professional identity for "focused pragmatism," a sin that library historian H. Curtis Wright (1986, p. 83) pinned on the seventh century BCE Assyrian king Assurbanipal himself, the first "ultrapragmatic librarian to exhibit 'a complete absence of any speculative or reasoning effort.' Not ability, mind you, but effort." The unreflective librarian, then, is a clerk. So, what are academic librarians? The answer seems obvious. However, when considering the vast tracks of time in which individuals have performed the function of "librarian" (applying the term broadly), the answer is not so clear. This paper analyzes the available evidence to answer the question: what is the eternal librarian? Understanding the things that every academic librarian does, regardless of time, culture, and context, allows for the identification of the archetypal academic librarian, the librarian qua librarian. Such an understanding, furthermore, reveals the basic differences among "librarians" that stem from culture and context. Understanding the historical development of the information profession is valuable to both librarians and information scientists, allowing for the development of valuable historical perspective and fostering professional identity. In order to achieve an understanding of the archetypal librarian, this paper compares three periods: (1) pre-Alexandrian Mesopotamian information institutions, focusing on the seventh century BCE Library of Assurbanipal (considered by many scholars to be the first universal or national library), (2) the Great Library of Alexandria (hereafter referred to as "the Library"), and (3) the twenty-first century American academic library. …