> Let me reverse the question -- can you produce
> even one published research paper for which the
> author did not make use of library collections?

Not definitively, from where I'm sitting at the moment.
I don't think, though, that it would, with the necessary
effort, in fact be terribly hard to do so, in many if not
in most or in all fields ;  in fact I have do doubt that it
wouldn't.

One is easily reminded here of the infamous symposium
paper contributed by the eminent sociologist Charles
B. Perrow, entitled "On not using libraries", and published
in _Humanists at work_ (University of Illinois at Chicago,
1989, p.29-42), which probably would bear rereading in
the context of a discussion such as this one, perhaps the
more so since it was written before the www era.

Yet even though what he explained in that piece rang
and rings pretty true to me, I don't believe it's the case
that he made absolutely no use -- albeit only indirectly,
for example through graduate students -- of library
collections.

But that was not the point, either, or at any rate not
my point in posing the questions I did as an elaboration
on Bob's earlier question. I'd be the last person -- as I
have constantly made clear to anyone who would listen,
including, I suspect, previously on this list -- to deny
the importance of such *collections*, or of the great
dedication and competence of many generations of
librarians in building and maintaining them and in
furthering their accessibility. I think that almost no
researchers would deny that either. They are quite
aware of this importance, and this is precisely what
they value in librarians, and want librarians to keep
doing. ( While they care very little about other things
which we ourselves have dreamed up that we could
and therefore should be doing. )

No, the issue at hand was what we can justifiably
expect of users ( especially, of researchers ) as
regards their awareness of, their acknowledgment of
the validity of, and their preparedness to adapt their
behavior to, *our* view of how they should go about
discovering and selecting and using the documentary
resources appropriate for the scholarly/scientific/
professional tasks in which they are involved.

I am myself not concerned with proving negatives,
nor with what we all know, or think among ourselves
that we know, or of convincing *ourselves* of anything.
The point is one of convincing those researchers who
are now going about their work as they themselves
see fit, as opposed to how we as librarians think it
could better be done, of convincing *them* with
unequivocal evidence, to their own satisfaction, and
so that they can not reasonably deny or ignore it,
that they are in fact shooting themselves in the foot.
( Let's call this, if you don't mind, a pragmatically
phenomenological approach, and construe it for
current purposes as a matter of proving a positive,
if you like. )

We can go on all day about how much we know
and how much they appear yet to have to learn from
us, but if they ( the real experts in their respective
fields ), or a great majority of them, are not convinced
by now, then doesn't it seem clear that one of the two
things which we can appropriately do is to make a
grand concerted effort and find a way to effect the
necessary quantum leap of awareness and
conformation in relatively short order, and that ( failing
that ) the other is, as I suggested, at last, with pain in
our hearts, to give up on our old orientation,
unproductive as it is, possibly to concede that we
were in effect mistaken ( ! ), and anyway to start
expending our energies in more meaningful ways.

It would be an oversight, this being after all the jESSE
list, not to point out that the latter of the two above
alternatives would have significant  implications for LIS
education -- how we prepare, socialize, and -- to put it
maybe a bit bluntly -- how we indoctrinate future
professionals. I think, myself, that making the necessary
adjustments will render LIS education more challenging
and interesting than it is at the moment. It's fascinating
to imagine what all we could do to bring professional
education more into line with how the world really
works, as opposed to how we have long dreamed that
we could make it work.

When do we start :-) ?


- Laval Hunsucker
  Breukelen, Nederland