Westward, Ho!

This week in my Reference class we had another article review to do. We had to choose a recent article of at least 10 pages from a professional journal focusing on reference work (aside: I didn't know, until taking this class, that there are multiple journals on this very thing) and provide a 2-paragraph summary and critique. Here's mine. I'm rather fond of my last few sentences.

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Stover, Mark. (2004) “The Reference Librarian as Non-Expert: A Postmodern Approach to Expertise.” The Reference Librarian, 87/88, 273-300.

Stover discusses the shift from the “modern” approach to knowledge and expertise, in which the professional in any field is deemed to stand in a superior relationship to the client by virtue of the expert knowledge he has attained, to the “postmodern” view, in which experts work collaboratively and co-equally with clients to help them discover and construct the knowledge they need. He draws an analogy between how this shift has affected the practice of psychotherapy to how it can inform the practice of reference librarianship. In each case the post-modern practitioner eschews the diagnosis/prescription/treatment model for one which involves dialogue and mutual discovery, in which the client is seen as a competent co-agent. Stover argues that postmodern reference librarians should abandon any sense of superiority to the patron, or any assumption that their expertise gives them a privileged position which entitles them to define the patron’s information need and determine which information should be dispensed to satisfy it. Instead the postmodern reference librarian will be a reflective practitioner who will focus on process and interpersonal skills as much as information content, and will forego the posture of a detached expert while sharing their expertise in a relational and collaborative manner.

I found parts of the article interesting—the discussion of the difference between the modern and postmodern views of knowledge and expertise in general was helpful. Having been trained to be a reflective practitioner in my previous profession (adult religious education), and being trained to always be aware of the dynamics of power and privilege and perceived “expertise” in all interpersonal relationships, the advice Stover gives was nothing new to me. Having not worked as a reference librarian (yet), I do not know how common the “modern” approach is versus the “postmodern.” This article could be useful for a supervisor of reference librarians who needed to design an inservice day on customer service/patron satisfaction. It could provide the background for a good dialogue on how reference librarians perceive their roles. My most serious quibble with the article is Stover’s advice that reference librarians avoid jargon and “professional” terminology which is meaningless to the patron and merely serves to reinforce the librarian’s superior position. I totally agree with this recommendation. I simply note it falls rather flat in a 20-page article which contains 140 citations to scholarly journals and uses such vocabulary as “univocal metadiscourses,” “metaknower” and “therapeutic modalities.” While Stover may well function as a postmodern practitioner when he is behind the reference desk, he clearly follows the conventions of modern expertise when functioning as a scholar.
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How postmodern of me--to critique the article for having a mismatch between content and form/process...... :-)

We'll see if the professor (a PhD in English Lit who then got his MLIS and works as a subject specialist at Yale University's libraries) appreciates the point ....