The institutional identity of libraries - a theoretical framework

Defining the institutional identity of libraries can be done in many ways. Several questions have to be answered, each one of them creating specific problems which have to be addressed. What is a library in the first place? Is it possible to speak of 'libraries' in a general sense or is it necessary to narrow the concept down to specific types of libraries? Can libraries be defined as institutions? Is it at all possible to speak of an institutional identity of libraries - and if so - of what does such an identity consist?

Institutional identity is a concept used in several academic disciplines. Among the most prominent is organisational psychology, where the concept covers issues on, for instance, how employees get to incorporate a managerial vision of a certain organisation in such a way that they are able to identify with it on a personal level. Studies of this which take a theoretically critical position see a process of identification as central to the ability of an organisation to create an identity from within, one which is based on assumptions by the employees that are in all, or most, aspects coherent with the will of the management (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002). Through the establishment of an organisational culture, by what might somewhat drastically be labelled as manipulation of the employees, the organisation simultaneously gains a solid recognition as a homogenous good and upholds an identity regulation crucial in the public relations of the organisation and in the work of creating a perhaps similar recognition of identity among clients or customers. A very distinct set of norms is created and the possibility of control over individuals within the organisation is facilitated. Easily recognisable examples of this are transnational corporations such as hamburger brands and sports clothing.

Another issue studied within organisational psychology and relevant for this essay is the shaping of organisation identification from a so called 'social identity perspective' (van Knippenberg et al., 2002; Hogg and Terry, 2001). In this perspective, social identification and organisational membership is studied not least in relation to mergers between different organisations. Creating a social identification within an organisation is something quite different from the control- oriented identification process initially mentioned. Instead of forming employees to fit a managerial vision, social identification processes focus on issues which may well lie beyond or outside the individual organisation. One such can be professional identification. Professions which have developed over a long period of time and set a normative structure both for the organisation and behaviour among its members is of course highly relevant for librarianship. Medical doctors, solicitors and police forces are example of different forms of trades which traditionally identify with the values and codes of conduct within their respective profession rather than with the actual organisation within which they are presently working. The relation between this social identification as doctors, solicitors, police officers or librarians thus plays a major role when institutional or organisational structures change over time. In neither case does the social identification need to be homogenous. Instead we see several factors influencing, not just the identification itself, but the sense of identification in the first place. These might be hierarchical positions within the profession, certain aspects of professional practice which 'rank' higher than others, large organisations in large cities versus small organisations in small towns etc. When, for instance, two types of libraries merge into one joint-use library there is an immediate risk of conflicts in the different social identification between different types of librarians, e.g. research librarians and public librarians (Hansson, 2006; Zetterlund and Gârdén, 2007; McNicol, 2008). These groups share a basic set of norms which make them librarians, but the history of librarianship gives them different roles to play, not least in relation to each other - relations which may be difficult to handle if they are to agree on new singular managerial goals and desired norms of a library in which none of the two groups have been working before. We will extend this particular discussion later on in the book.

Within Library and Information Science little attention has been given to issues of institutional identity. Issues tangential to the ones raised in organisational psychology can be found, primarily, within political science and general organisational theory.

In this study it is not primarily 'identity' in a psychological sense which is scrutinised, but parts of this research can be used in analysing the relation between the norms, values and rules of practice of librarianship. By looking into the relationship between these concepts we can form a basis for our discussion of library identity, not the library primarily as an individual organisation, but as an institution. The distinction in this case between organisation and institution is not very clear and instead of making a purely theoretical conceptual analysis I would like to take on the task of defining them by entering a discussion about whether libraries can be treated as social institutions at all or whether they are merely organisations more or less in their individual capacities. The issue at stake thus becomes what it is that makes libraries 'social' and whether we thus can speak of the identity of libraries as a 'social' identity.

What is a library?

The term 'library' is one to which most people can easily relate. There is little doubt that the general conception has to do with a defined collection of documents, physical and/or digital, which is organised in a rational manner with the help of such tools as cataloguing rules and classification systems. This is, however, a conception which merely covers a few of the parameters which we can on a more advanced level use to define a library. How this is to be done in a more complete manner is a question to which we have no clear answer. A division which seems to be of utmost importance when talking of library identity is that between public libraries and all other forms of libraries. The public libraries in the way they were defined in the mid-nineteenth century are certainly unique in the six thousand year long history of librarianship. If we want to analyse library identity and the development of libraries it does not suffice to speak of libraries in any general sense. We must go further and not only make the distinction between public and other libraries, but focus on a temporal limitation which gives us the possibility to break down the library concept into the actual forms that we see at a certain point in time. In this investigation, the last hundred years will do well as a time limitation. The study of library identity in the twentieth century not only provides us with the broadest and most complex variety of library types that has been seen through the history of librarianship, it also provides us with the finest prerequisites for understanding the present development in early twenty-first-century librarianship.

Libraries as social institutions

The first libraries defined as social institutions were the American public libraries which at the turn of the century had grown into a kind of maturity that established them as leading the world. Public library systems in, for example, the Scandinavian countries were established in the following years, heavily inspired by the early public library movement of the USA (Torstensson, 1996).

When we speak of public libraries in the modern sense, we mean something radically different to the 'public' libraries of older periods, such as the first 'public' library collections which emerged in France in the beginning of the seventeenth century (Oliver, 2007). Those early 'public' libraries did not have a defined social role to fill - they were open to the public in an effort to show the progressive minds of their owners. Fundamentally they were what we today would define as 'academic' libraries. The most notable of these is of course the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris. Built by librarian Gabriel Naudé, destroyed by the political turmoil of the Rupture and rebuilt after the revolution, it is today one of the most treasured of European libraries.1

Public libraries were the result of a democratic movement which characterised nineteenth-century America and they were, from the very beginning in Boston in the 1850 s, regarded as important symbols for a society which differed from the European social structures against which the whole idea of the USA was defined. Not only did these libraries explicitly turn away from traditional academic contexts and out into local societies also in the national periphery, but they turned toward groups in society that earlier had not been the subject of any library activities whatsoever. Perhaps the most striking user relation was that with children, and the second that with the working class. Considering children as subjects for the interest of libraries was in every sense, political as well as professional, radical. At the same time it was one of the cornerstones of what made it possible to define the American public...