The Curious Case of the Vanishing Librarian

Setting Aside the Personal in the Professional

"[A] librarian ought virtually to vanish as an individual person except in so far as his personality sheds light on the working of the library. He must be the reader's alter ego, immersed in his politics, his religion, his morals." 

--D.J. Foskett, The Creed of a Librarian: No Politics, No Religion, No Morals, 1962 

In Search of a Philosophy of Librarianship

I don't know exactly when I adopted the stance that my personal beliefs shouldn't influence my library work or my attitudes towards library users. It may have been in a class in library school or new employee orientation at my first library job or maybe it's just the way I am. Whenever it was, I've always had a leave-yourself-at-the-door approach to my work. It's not about me. It's about the person who enters the library to seek information for their purposes. I’m a guide, a facilitator, a connector, a trainer, an "information butler." People need stuff and I know how to find stuff. I can also teach those people how to find stuff on their own. So, as the the priorities of the library profession seem to drift away from core library purposes in favor of particular social and political causes, I feel displaced and without a solid sense of what it truly means to be a librarian.

I find it exceptionally unprofessional to bend library work to the purposes of any political ideology or social cause. Libraries by their nature are created to serve their communities in (dare I say it?) a neutral way. I mean neutral in the sense that we, the keepers of the library, do not dictate to the community the terms of use or the purpose of our existence. Libraries rarely, if ever, exist independently for their own sake.  They are beholden to city library boards, university administrations, corporations, etc. They exist on the macro scale to serve the purposes defined by their governing bodies, and on a micro scale, the purposes of every member of the community who walks through the doors, calls on the phone, or logs into the library's website. The ever-changing political and social movements going on outside of the library may influence what people want, and by extension, what we collect, but the library should remain neutral ground. 

I'm a guiding-principles kind of person, so I want that in my work. Early in my library career, I thought the Library Bill of Rights and some library-level policies pretty much covered it. However, the longer I'm in the profession, the more I wish there was a coherent set of principles to guide my work. Enter D.J. Foskett's The Creed of a Librarian: No Politics, No Religion, No Morals. Until recently, I'd never heard of D.J. Foskett. I assume that most of you, dear readers, have just now learned the name. Foskett was a British librarian, information scientist, and author who had a long career in public and academic libraries in London from the late 1930s to the 1980s. In The Creed of a Librarian, he outlines principles for a guiding philosophy for the library profession. I found these principles insightful and refreshing given the current state of things. Keep in mind that in The Creed of a Librarian, Foskett is speaking to librarians in England in 1962 (hence, referring to everyone as "he"). I will attempt to outline some of his principles coherently below.

Foskett starts out by describing the state of library philosophy in library scholarship at the time. He writes, "If you look in the indexes [of Library Science Abstracts]¹. . . you will find it very difficult to discover precisely what [library] philosophy is, for the abstracts consist of ponderous platitudes, pious hopes, complaints and criticisms, and, very occasionally, a quest for normative principles by whose light we can illuminate our practice."² He continues, "Many librarians have maintained that we must not start dreaming about a professional philosophy, because it would interfere with our efficiency."³ I'm not sure many today would eschew the development of a professional philosophy for this reason. I suspect many don't think about it, or take their cues from the priorities du juor of professional library associations. This is based on my own observations, of course. I've never attended a library conference presentation or read an article in one of our journals that would indicate anyone was thinking at the philosophical level about library work. We seem to be perpetually trying to catch up on redefining ourselves in relation to what happens outside of libraries, but I digress.⁴ The point is that in England in 1962, there was apparently no profession-wide set of accepted philosophical principles for library workers. According to Foskett, "philosophy is quite basic to any kind of systematic outlook on life, and in particular to a professional outlook."⁵ This puts me in mind of that master categorizer, Aristotle, who defined the world ad nauseam. I find it ironic that for as systematically organized as libraries may be, we don't really have a basic system to guide our work. So, Let’s make one! . . . Okay, let’s try to start one.

Some Basic Principles to Start With

Now to Foskett's philosophy, or at least part of it. Below I highlight the four principles I find most compelling. There is certainly more value to extract from The Creed of a Librarian (even though it is only 13 pages long).  For the sake of organization and clarity I will outline these four principles using quotes followed by my own interpretations. My hope is that it will provide a starting point to a useful philosophy of librarianship. Here goes:

Principle 1: Librarians are guardians of knowledge

"As librarians, we are the guardians–not the owners, but the guardians–of knowledge. If we have a contribution to make to the progress of our civilisation, then we must seek after the truth, because this is what prevails and ensures that civilisation continues." ⁶ 

This may seem like a lofty goal, but libraries are places where knowledge is "guarded," where it is kept and organized and cared for. Foskett hints at quality here. In relation to this principle, he quotes one Dr. Savage who wrote, "All knowledge is open to all men everywhere, according to their need (of which they are the judges), and whatever their means," then Foskett adds, "but [Savage] goes on immediately to make the case for good books–not quackery, not pornography, not the 'pink-sugar romances of surgeons and nurses' that appear in books as on television."⁷ So, we have a role of protecting not only the sources (books) of knowledge, but in selecting for quality and potential usefulness to people. This idea may run afoul of current movements in collection development, but to me it seems logical given the constraints on library budgets and space (physical and digital). Library collections should reflect the needs of the community, but also be repositories of truths. This leads to principle 2.

Principle 2: Librarianship is a social process

"[A] library is part of a social organisation, and . . . librarianship is a social process inextricably bound up with the life of a community; a librarian is not some uninterested functionary standing guard over a collection of objects that might as well be bricks . . . Librarianship is a social process in the same sense as education, and the philosophy of education has been advanced by thinkers–philosophers and educators–who say what they wanted and tried to work out how it might be done."⁸

I interpret this to mean librarianship is a social process in two ways, in that it is socially embedded in a specific community and that librarianship as a profession develops by the initiative of those practicing it and passing that practice on to others. Here we come back to the quest for truth: Foskett writes, "Probably no child has ever been educated precisely in the way of Plato or Rousseau; yet the influence of such men has endured and will endure, because they were seekers after truth, that which has a lasting validity and is not simply an explanation of any particular set of circumstances."⁹ Librarians should be "seekers after truth" in their profession by working out what has "lasting validity" to library work, in addition to including at least some books that have endured and will endure in the collection. This implies that social or political or cultural trends should not be a basis for our work (even if we collect books about those trends). What the community needs or wants may define most of the content of the library, but the enduring principles of librarianship should be the context in which we do our work. 

Principle 3: Librarians facilitate the exchange of knowledge

"[S]omeone who writes does so because he wishes to communicate his thoughts to others. . . . A book can be read by more than one person, and therefore stores of books can be held in common. Society has become acutely aware of the value of the knowledge thus published, and has called for a further step: that of organising the flow of information from producer to user. Librarians are the key figures in this stage of the process, because they are the ones who deal directly with the reader. . . . If librarians are to provide readers with the sort of reading they want, clearly some close knowledge of readers is necessary."¹⁰

Librarians and other library workers are the ones who select and organize the books and other sources that flow from author to publisher to library to reader. We are the "guardians" of the "stores of books . . . held in common," but we don't guard passively, as articulated in Principle 2. We are embedded in both the communities we serve, the readers, and in our professional community. We facilitate the exchange of knowledge from "producer to user," albeit with discretion. If we know our readers well, we will know what to add to the collection. This brings us to the fourth and final principle I will write about.

Principle 4: Librarians must vanish in the process of connecting library users to what they need and want from the library's store of knowledge 

"During reference service, the librarian ought virtually to vanish as an individual person except in so far as his personality sheds light on the working of the library. He must be the reader's alter ego, immersed in his politics, his religion, his morals. He must have the ability to participate in the reader's enthusiasms and devote himself wholly and wholeheartedly to whatever cause the reader has at the time of the enquiry. . . . [A] good librarian must be able, as a professional, to undergo rapid, chameleon-like, changes as one enquirer follows another. If [the librarian] has no politics, no religion, and no morals, he can have all politics, all religions and all morals. An enthusiastic association with one reader after another requires the duel capacity of total involvement with each reader and of remaining objective as an individual."¹¹

This principle brings us back to where I began: I find it exceptionally unprofessional to bend library work to the purposes of any political ideology or social cause. It is not about us or what we think is important. The library exists to provide a store of knowledge that serves the needs of the community. In all library work, not just reference, we "ought virtually to vanish" in order to provide an unobstructed conduit between the user and the library's store of knowledge.

No matter how well intentioned, inserting our own politics, religion, and morals does not serve the community members seeking knowledge, entertainment, or whatever. Regardless of our personal beliefs, our actions and decisions should reflect those we serve. We have skills and knowledge that make the provision of information faster, the flow from producer to user smoother. We should know both our communities and collections well enough to maximize the usefulness of and ease of access to our stores of knowledge. 

All this is not to say we should not have strong beliefs. Foskett is clear about this when he writes, "I believe it to be absolutely necessary that, as a person, a librarian should have very strong convictions, that he should be not only deeply involved but also, if possible, personally committed to a particular view of politics, religion and morals. . . . [Otherwise] how can he enter into sympathetic association with the reader?”¹² In other words, how can we understand and mirror the deep interests and concerns of a library user if we don't have our own deep interests and concerns? Whatever our personal convictions–even if they align with those of the community–we should, in our capacity as library professionals, vanish into the interests, politics, religion, and morals of those we serve as we serve them. 

So, we have a working set of principles to start our philosophy of librarianship. It remains incomplete. I hope you, dear readers, will fill the comment section with insights and ideas. In the face of political, religious, and moral division in the world outside the library, within the library profession, and even between the people we work with in the libraries, let us vanish together into a higher pursuit of what endures, what is true about libraries and their purpose.

(Image courtesy of the author.)

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1. Library Science Abstracts was a journal published by The Library Association in London from 1950-1968 (See the record in the National Library of Australia catalog)

2. Foskett, D.J. (1962). The creed of a librarian: No politics, no religion, no morals. London: Library Association. p.3.

3. ibid

4. I realize I'm betraying my own ignorance about the library profession, for which I have no excuse other than the constant demands of my work "in the trenches." I invite you, dear readers, to enlighten me in the comments section of this post. 

5. The creed of a librarian, p. 3

6. ibid, p.6

7. ibid

8. ibid, p. 7

9. ibid

10. ibid pp. 8-9

11. ibid, pp.10-11

12. ibid, p. 11