The History Librarian

[This will be a series of very loosely connected ideas because I don't have time to "work them up" right now, but I don't want to forget too many of my thoughts (I've already misplaced a few ideas about this from last night)]

Sometimes, librarians wonder how academics convey information to each other and often do things like study the citation patterns in journal articles to get a glimpse into an exotic world (librarians do “ethnographic” studies as well – though while librarians often put students into the “savage slot,” I’m not sure that academics are seen as savages in the same way. I think it’s more that librarians see academics as The Mysterious Other.). Luckily for librarians, there is now this thing called the Internet where academics leave traces of their scholarly communication, thus allowing librarians to observe academics “in the field,” as it were.

Here’s Mark Grimsley (the author behind the most excellent Blog Them Out of the Stone Age) describing how he conceptualizes a new “information need” (to use the librarian lingo):

When I think about how to go about it, my first instinct is to turn the issue around: What approach would best assist me if I were trying to learn a subject area in which I had no graduate training? This has actually happened more than once, and it’s invariably been a source of some anxiety. What is the cognitive landscape? Do I understand the main conceptual frameworks that define the area? Am I finding the best books and articles on the subject? Are there opportunities and/or mine fields of which I’m unaware? All these questions occur to me well before the crucial one: just how exactly will a knowledge of field X assist me in my own professional work?

These questions help provide a framework for understanding the information needs of graduate students as well, and I think are interesting because they can be a way of conceptualizing how librarians fit into the research cycle of historians. I don’t think many historians would find Grimsley’s questions foreign; this sounds a bit like how anyone trying to learn the field would go about it.

But then how does an historian go about answering these questions? Let’s take a look at the context for Grimsley’s questions above: he’s responding to another historian (Rebecca Goetz) who wants to know how better to integrate military history into her teaching (“Military History 101“). Grimsley doesn’t respond with “Look it up!” Instead he offers suggestions and more generally shares his expertise. While I don’t want to make this exchange into a model of “how historians do things,” it is productive to note the following:

**The learning process has a social element: Goetz remarks that she’d rather learn in a seminar setting; this whole exchange started because Goetz asked a recognized expert in the field how she might learn more about military history.
**While this exchange was facilitated by a blog, I don’t think one can assume that social software is what makes this kind of exchange possible; my guess is that, generally, the difference that social software makes is in making this kind of exchange more explicit (visible) and easier/faster (it facilitates); my own experience tells me that this sort of conversation happens all of the time. I recognize that I may be underselling the role of technology in this, but back in the day when things were sent in the mail and I was still using a typewriter, there were exchanges like this in classrooms, over the phone, via post, and at conferences.
**How useful, given this exchange and Grimsley’s enumeration of his own learning process, are library catalogs or library databases as they exist right now? That is, if we have a hypothetical researcher who wants to integrate military history into his or her “knowledge base” (to use the information literacy term), are the resources we offer the best way to resolve this kind of information need?
**Would librarians be more useful if we had expertise in subject areas beyond “search and discovery”?