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Professionalism and the Future of Librarianship*
THE GREAT ARGENTINIAN WRITER JORGE LUIS BORGES ( 1964) wrote a story called "The Library of Babel" describing a magnificent, endless library:
[I] ts shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols.... In other words, all that it is given to express, in all languages. Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books. (p. 54)
This strange stew of information and disinformation bewitches Borges's (1964) librarians. Although each librarian was supposedly in charge of a few of the great library's hexagonal rooms, many reacted to the discovery that the library contained all possible books by rushing off to find those special works that would vindicate their personal actions. "These pilgrims," he says, "disputed in the narrow corridors, proferred dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts. . ." (p. 55). Others became official searchers. al have seen them," he says, "in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway that almost killed them. . . sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously no one expects to discover anything" (p. 55). Still others realized that, in Borges's (1964) words; "on some shelf in some hexagon. . . there must exist a book which is the formula and compendium of all the rest some librarian has gone through it and he is analogous to a god" (p. 56).
Borges's parable serves well as a text for librarianship today, for it is indeed perpetually perched between order and disorder, between information and disinformation, between poverty and surfeit. The vastness of our current information possibilities has many librarians madly pursuing the technologies of data. Others have learned to...