Serving Diverse Knowledge Systems in Academia

Abstract

Libraries and academic disciplines are experiencing a major transformation to the digital era. A challenge for libraries is to adapt and coordinate their transformation with differing rates and types of changes in teaching, research, and scholarly communication among the disciplines they serve. This paper argues that librarians need to acknowledge the diversity of knowledge systems and adopt a strategy that requires collaboration between libraries and multiple communities of knowing in the development and provision of heterogeneous services. Keywords diverse academic knowledge systems, homogeneous services, heterogeneous services, professional/client collaboration. The academic world has always recognized differences among the disciplines. These distinctions are often summarized as disciplinary dichotomies such as hard and soft, pure and applied, behavioral and natural, paradigmatic and pre-paradigmatic, and life and nonlife. Disciplines are "distinguished by styles of presentation, preferred approaches to investigation, and the degree to which they draw from other fields and respond to lay inquiries and concerns." Research has identified vast differences in "communication structures, reward and stratification systems, and mechanisms for social control" (Del Favero). Because of the distinctions between, and the bonds within disciplines, it is not surprising they have been described as "academic tribes." (Becher). As academic libraries continue their transformation of services in this digital era, one challenge is meeting the needs of diverse academic disciplines that are also going through their own transformations to the dynamic digital environment. Again, disciplines differ in the type, rate, and extent of change in how they teach, do research, and distribute the results of their research. Libraries strive to adapt and coordinate their own transformation with the diversity of changes unfolding among the academic disciplines. Towards this end national library associations and agencies are trying to understand disciplinary differences and their implications for library service in a time of change (Association of Research Libraries; Sparks; Palmer, Teffeau, Pirmann).