A Devotion to Knowledge
Posted October 31, 2015 by Amy Wilson
This post is for anyone who may be worried about their undergraduate programs being (or seeming) totally unrelated to a master’s program. I came into the SLIS program feeling a little bit of this anxiety, which lived next door to my fears about having been away from any school for a year. I have adjusted without too much difficulty, and I think this last year has been invaluable in terms of gaining some real perspective.
In May 2014, I graduated from Saint Michael’s College (VT) with a double BA in English and Religious Studies. After those four years of liberal arts, I appreciate a healthy dose of critical self-reflection. I have recently been trying to imagine a rough intellectual trajectory to rationalize how I came to my present studies in LIS – in fact, this question is part of why I started this blog. The English piece of my B.A. degree makes sense (books, right?), but how do I bridge my past studies in religion to my present work in LIS? My answer arrived in an article during the first week of my Foundations class; “Toward a Theory of Librarianship and Information Science” was published in July 1972 and it certainly shows its age. Jesse Shera adorably ponders where computers will take us, and even hints at the potential for thought control.
I don’t agree with everything that Shera has to say, but I was quite taken with the term that he ascribes to library studies. He calls for librarianship to be seen as a “social epistemology,” and basically describes it as the study of the nature of knowledge. Shera (1972) challenges us to examine the way that knowledge is used and the “nature of the intellectual process in society – a study of the ways in which society as a whole achieves a perceptive and understanding relationship to its environment.”
This phrase “social epistemology” really caught my attention because Shera’s definition reminded me of the way that I always explained my religion major as an undergraduate. I attended a Catholic college but remained agnostic during my education, and I focused mostly on the academic study of Islam. When asked about my interest in RS, I would say something like; I’m interested in how and why people believe, and the ways that belief influences their lives. In other words, I wanted to know about the spiritual lenses that people use to interpret and know the world – the “perceptive and understanding relationship.”
In the 1980s, social epistemology as a field evolved away from library science and became a separate study in philosophy and sociology; however, I think Shera’s original thought process is still related to my own. There is something comforting about the idea that I haven’t strayed so far from my original path; for me, it has always been about a devotion to knowledge.