Ken- en werkwêreld van die biblioteekkunde

Abstract

Although there is at present no doubt that librarians should receive a university education, there is no agreement as to the scientific status of library science or its place in the university curriculum. It is still felt, i.a. by Georg Leyh that what is called library science is little more that an disconnected assemblage of useful knowledge in some way dealing with books. There is, indeed, a great deal to be said for this judgement as long as the conception of science, as a body of accepted and systematized knowledge, concerning a fundamental phenomenon, is held to be true. Charles Sanders Peirce, as long ago as 1902, opposed to this nineteenth century notion, the ideal of a science as an enterprise of living men initiated by interest in a fundamental problem. From this point of view it is possible to find a unifying centre for library science in the problem of conserving and organising for use, the record of human experience, learning and imagination. This allows the intergration of the various aspects of librariarship into a coherent whole.

The problem of the record is a practical problem which has been partly and provisionally solved by prescientific thinking resulting in a universe of means: the librarianship of the past and to a large extent of the present, as a totality of techniques and instruments. In order to increase the effectiveness of librarianship as a universe of means, we need a science of theory of librarianship founded on basic research concerning the record, its nature, forms, functions, its various uses and users in the past and present, as well as of those co-operative systems that have been developed for attaining common ends. This body of theory, the universe of facts, should be the basis for anticipating the future.