Academic Libraries and the Remaking of the Canon: Implications for Collection Development Librarians

Introduction An issue of central importance for academic librarians of the future will be how to perform successful collection development in a time of narrow budgets and a rapidly expanding universe of information. For librarians in the humanities, in particular, the issue of how to decide what to collect is even more fraught with tensions in a multicultural era in which conventional standards used to evaluate materials have been radically contested and in which the very existence of the canon, or any type of core collection, has been called into question. It will be important to the local culture of the college or university and the broader society as a whole for librarians to become more aware of their part in the process of canon-formation and the social construction of knowledge and for us to take into consideration the difficulty of balancing the needs of present and future scholars. This article will look at how the canon has been problematized by postmodern critics, how this will affect collection development decisions, what librarians can do to address some of these issues and, finally, how electronic resources and hypertext are changing the role of the collection development librarian of the future. First of all, it is important to understand what the argument is about and how the word "canon" is being used in these arguments. Originally, the "canon" signified the books of the Bible officially sanctioned by church authorities, while everything falling outside that list was deemed apocryphal. Later, the word "canon" was used to denote the verified works of a particular author. In its most recent manifestation, "canon" is used to refer to those texts which are passed on from generation to generation as being worthy of study, reflection, and admiration, those works which are believed in some way to be inherently superior to others. Of course, from the very start, the canon has been the site of much conflict and constant flux. It has never been a static, unchanging pantheon. On the contrary, each generation of writers and critics has developed its own set of standards and has revised and added to the canon that was handed down to it. Librarians and the Canon Librarians in the United States have long had an interest and involvement in the evolution of canons. Beginning with the establishment of the Great Books program at the University of Chicago, for instance, libraries soon became the sites of "great books" discussion groups (Quinn, 1). In the early 1930s, college libraries began to make efforts to establish definitive core collection lists, such as Shaw's A List of Books for College Libraries, and after World War II the ALA published its widely used Books for College Libraries. The compilers of these lists operated under the assumption that it was indeed possible to identify a "core" collection. One of the projects claimed, for example, that it "was based on the premise that there is a body of knowledge--the classics, the important scholarly titles, and the definitive works on all subjects of interest to any undergraduate community--which should be in any college library.' " Thus, in the past (and for traditionalists in the present, as exemplified by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind), the theoretical underpinnings of the canon arose from the assumption that the value of a literary work could be determined via some sort of absolute and objective criteria, though these criteria were not necessarily made explicit. Matters of taste and theories of value were believed to be based not on a relativistic but on an objective system. If these criteria were articulated, what would they have been? Traditionally, the "best" works in the canon have been defined as having a kind of aesthetic beauty, timelessness, and universality. Literary works of superior quality were considered rich and intricate enough to sustain multiple readings; in other words, critics, readers, and other writers would be likely to continue to find new information about and new aspects of the material, which would remain fresh and original no matter how many times it had been read. …