International Librariansh ip and Its Impact on t h e P rofession
by Diann Rusch-Feja
Abstract
This paper is adapted from a presentation at the SLAAnnual Conferences, SLAEducation
Division, June 11, 1996 in Boston. It focuses on time aspects of international librarianship
and its impact on the profession: language and the national imbedment of certain
information sources, especially that of the education field as part of the social sciences in
general; cooperation (international, national, regional) for gathering and evaluating relevant
Internet resources; and a demonstration of the German Educational Resources Server as
an example of what could be done theoretically.
I. Introduction
How do we define "international" librarianship? What is
"internationalism?" What is "international librarianship?"
Without taking Webster in hand, I would like to define
"internationalism" as "the ability to identify or create a common
understanding between different nationalities and different
cultures." This involves both recognition of the cultural
similarities, but more importantly the differences and distinctions.
Within the "leveling" effect of becoming "international" -
assimilating in several cultures - there is a precedence to maintain
respect and separatedness for the individuality of the individual
nations and peoples. Taking the word literally in its etymological
stem, we mean we are being between nations, joining the
common parts, but recognizing the non-overlapping aspects as
being larger and just as important, as well as understanding them.
So what is "intemational librarianship?" It is not enough to
understand the language, or see the similarities or differences
between various countries, nations or populations. lt is defining
and moving in those professional realms where common ground
and interests form essential, universal goals shared by all within
the periphery of distinctly individual social customs, laws,
educational and work systems, mentalities, economic standards,
etc. In librarianship, these essential, universal goals are easy to
list and define. Usually the introductory library school courses
deal with them, although pethaps their impact is not revealed
until one truly deals with internationalism in librarianship. These
include preserving the freedom of expression, the freedom of
Education Libreriea • Vol 20, No. 1/2
access to information, the right - not the privilege - of learning
to read, and the right to protection from discrimination, injustice,
persecution, etc., for actively protecting these other rights and
freedoms. These can be applied to the local, national and
international level: on the international level, the UAP (Universal
Availability of Publications) Program and other IFLA Core
Program activities help to fulfil these goals.
Impact on the Profession
Internationalism has great impact on the profession. The
creation of the IFLA (International Federation of Library
Associations) is an indication of this impact and the profession's
attempt to bridge international gaps and successfully plan and
carry out international projects and programs to further the
supranational goals , those going beyond the power and
jurisdiction of the individual countries. Librarians' exchanges,
such as the ALA Fellows program, create the chance to share
professional experiences intensively, especially in countries
where inter-national-ism was carefully defined and confihed to
interaction between countries with similar political structures.
Student exchanges offer great opportunities for learning about the
internal structures of libraries and librarianship, as do consulting
work by professionals, international training seminars and
workshops, etc. So for our profession, internationalism is not only
based on common, universal goals, or understanding differences,
but also being able to apply methods from one culture in another
effectively or to use exchange and input from several to create
new methods of solving problems and maintaining the above goals.
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This paper will touch on three aspects of international
librarianship and its impact on the profession. These are:
1. language and the national imbedment of certain information
sources, especially that of the educational field as part of
the social sciences in general,
2. cooperation (international, national, regional) for gathering
and evaluating relevant Internet resources, i.e. the aspect of
internationality which Internet has brought to all areas, but
especially to information provision professions, and
3. a demonstration of the German Educational Resources
Server as an example of what could theoretically be done,
including the experience drawn upon for international
cooperation among educational libraries. It is hoped that
the experiences related here could encourage or maybe even
inspire more efforts at international cooperation in
librarianship to make a positive impact on the profession.
ll. 1. Language and the National Imbedment of Certain
Information Sources, especially in the field of Education
Language is a product of cultural, sociologically imbedment
phenomena. Language skills show direct correlations to cognitive
skills and development. There is also research which indicates
that a national language itself is a product of certain aspects of a
"national" mentality, religion or philosophy. Some people ev�n
believe linguistic characteristics of a language could be related
to geographical phenomena, etc. This may be taking the
hypothesis too far, but I do believe there are definite relationships
between a language, its structure, its composition of words, and
its environment, i.e. , the social structure of the country, the
mythology or "collective unconscious" of a people. This also
poses the chicken and the egg question: is language a process of
thought, does cognitive mapping of the environment also
prescribe how linguistic structures are built? Similar questions
could continue, but must be dealt with by more competent
anthropological linguists and perhaps even then, there is no
definitive answer.
However, the results of divergent linguistic structures (ways
of describing things, ways of categorizing and thinking about
things), as well as the structures themselves belong to national
qualities which provide distinction. Translation from one
language does not always establish the common ground to talk
about the subject at hand. Incompatibilities arise when directly
comparing or even verbally describing social systems of various
countries. I The problems begin at the linguistic level of verbal
descriptors. This can extend from difficulties in the translation
or description of the terms and their meaning. For example,
compare the meanings of the German words "Kindergarten" and
"Vorschule" to the American equivalents "kindergarten" and
"pre-school." Even many people who understand German and
English are tempted to see the similarities of these words and
translate them accordingly. However, one must be acquainted
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with the educational and social structures i n which these words
are imbedded. The German "Kindergarten" can only be translated
into English as "pre-school" or "nursery school" and the German
"Vorschule" is actually the equivalent of the level of the American
"Kindergarten." (Did Carl Schurz and his wife reckon with this
one hundred and forty years ago when in 1856 Mrs. Schurz
started the first Kindergarten in Watertown Wisconsin and shortly
thereafter her husband pleaded in Congress for German and the
national language?)
But the incompatibilities of language, understanding, and
socially imbedded structures do not end there. Because the
structure and content of many of the social sciences are closely
interrelated with the social systems of the individual country
(educational system, societal practices, parliamentary and legal
system, social services structures and other contextual aspects
of human life), the organization and representation ofthe content
often remains very individual, distinctly non-international and
sometimes even contradictory. Consequently, the ways of
describing their information collections also hide certain
incompatibilities. Some international similarities cab be
distinguished - some can also in part be attributed to the impact
of new technology in both the field itself and in information
worlc, especially the work of attempting to define internationally
valid descriptors and equally valid classification systems. But if
one talked about key issues in the German educational system,
for instance, the "Zweiter Bildungsweg" or the "Duales System,"
and translated them as "second way to education" and "dual
system," nobody would have any idea of what was meant? Can
these concepts be related to practices in other countries? And
even if not, is there an indication of what is meant by these terms?
These examples show that the sociological structures of a
country determine how we talk and conceptualize about them.
Thus, the high proportion of both content and linguistic
individuality of a nation remains to challenge librarians who
want to step beyond the home language bounds towards
internationality.
The increased use of the Internet presents an analogous
situation and thus creates subject-oriented challenges to the
librarian. This affects not only the methods and instruments used
for information retrieval and acquisition, but also the
development of v alue- added services which can place
appropriate information in the correct context and also provide
targeted information in a vastly expanding field. To be more
concrete, a German descriptor might not get many hits from a
query using a particular search engine. This may indicate a lack
of materials on the Internet in the German language which is
still a definite fact. But, even using a translation into English
combined with "German" or "Germany", the results, when
looked at more closely, may also indicate that the translation for
this word or concept is focused on the basis of a structure in one
linguistic world which, however, does not exist in the language
used for the search or in the selection of documents used as the
basis for the particular search engine. This is a phenomenon
which holds true for many non-English sources, not just
pertaining to those in the German language. Whether this means
Education Librariea • Vol 20, No. 1/2
that non-English producers of Internet documents should create
them in English or at least create parallel editions to the native
language documents is a question which may have to be decided
on individually. Many disciplines have already agreed upon
English as the language of scientific communication, but others
- especially in the social sciences - have not.
Also the matter of language - or more precisely not using
the native language - is often a very political matter in a country,
and is looked at differently in various countries. Some smaller
countries use English extensively, even for entire university or
technical college courses to prepare their graduates for
international work. Here the libraries function totally in English
and their collection has about 90% English language texts. In
other countries, there is a latent fear that if the native language
is not used in key situations, it will be lost or die out, or the
country will not remain authoritative in the particular scientific
community. So there is a very strong emphasis on publishing in
both the native language and in English. One solution to this
problem would be the creation of metadata for Internet sources
in English for foreign language documents which would at least
enable searching. 2 This creates content accessibility, but still does
not overcome the language problem per se. Furthermore, English
equivalents of foreign concepts for metadata may not completely
correspond to the concepts or structures being described the
translation is either "empty" of meaning, or even more critical,
the English concept may be used as the translation or equivalent
for concepts in various countries which do not correspond to
each other at all.
In the field of education, increased use of the English
language as a communications means among educational
researchers, especially as a publication language, a conference
language, and the language of resources in the Internet may
relieve some of the jncompatibilities of meaning between the
translation and the original concept. But, as mentioned above,
translations may not always be completely accurate because of
the limitations of the English language or the limitations of
comparing two completely different sociopolitical structures.
There is an internationalizing effect of working with the
Internet. For foreign librarians with international clientele and
for their own attempts to keep up with the developments in other
outstanding countries, the Internet offers a variety of means to
improve communication, create access to new sources and
strengthen the foreigners' knowledge of the English language.
For instance, being a participant in several international
discussion lists, can serve as a "current awareness" alert to new
developments, identify people with similar problems or interests,
and easily create contacts. It can also be used as a sort of
continuing education substitute for increasing familiarity with
the English terms for a foreign staff. Especially in international
institutions with a high ratio of foreign guest researchers, post
docs and doctoral candidates where English becomes the lingua
franca, each member of the foreign library staff must be able to
speak, understand and work in the English language. For
instance, in our Institute library, we currently have nine non
German language researchers, four native English language
secretaries of the directors, and one native English speaker as
Education Libreriea • Vol 20, No. 1/2
editor of the Berlin Aging Study publications. So a flair of
internationality prevails in the Institute, which is evident in many
of the 66 Max Planck Institutes and approximately 30 Research
Groups affiliated with and temporarily financed by the Max
Planck Society. The library provides monthly library tours and
ad-hoc introductions for Institute staff in German, English and
French. Many of the staff are fluent in English and can answer
reference questions in English. This means the librarianship is
practiced in a basically international background. Similar aspects
of internationality can be found in many research institutions all
over the world, as well as in institutions with large international
markets, political and social influence, etc.
However, the real aspects of international librarianship arise
through contact with librarians in similar special libraries in other
countries. This is especially true for the one-person-libraries in
very specialized institutions. Here, despite the isolation of these
"solo librarians" in their own country, the contact facet of
international librarianship can play an important role in
supporting the daily work of the one-person-library.
2. cooperation (international, national, regional) for gathering
and evaluating networked (Internet) resources, i.e. the aspect
of internationality which Internet has brought to all areas,
but especially to information provision professions
The basic role of international librarianship is harnessing
multinational efforts for cooperative projects which could not
otherwise be carried out. The IFLA is a prime example for this,
as is the Conference of National Librarians. International
cooperation will be more library type or subject oriented.
Important aspects are concerned with information access and
provision beyond the international borders and the restrictions
of languages. Cooperative agreements are well known in these
areas (exchange agreements for official and government
publications, international interlibrary lending, etc.).3
Similar to the traditional fields of international cooperation,
now the massive opening of access to even more information
resources in the Internet creates an even greater need for
cooperation among librarians and information specialists than
ever before. Subject specialists even in a single country cannot
keep up with finding, evaluating and classifying Internet
resources in their field. Ideally, this could be achieved more
satisfactorily if the concept of"distributed information systems"
which is the basis for World Wide Web clearinghouses, virtual
libraries, subject gateways, subject trees, and other similar
collective information resources sites, could be coordinated
internationally. This may be analogous to the many attempts at
international databases and bibliographies for certain subject
fields in the past. However, the Internet offers extended access
to information in the Internet to virtually anyone, unrestricted
publication possibilities (i.e., not having to be published in an
indexed journal), and currency which contribute to making such
an undertaking as "indexing the Web" paramount to a Sisyphus
task impossible to be achieved by a single person, group or
company. This was evident again to me when looking at what
Deborah S. Garson has accomplished with her Web site at the
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Harvard Gutman Library site and what we have experienced in
setting up our Web site.4 Especially during the efforts to set up a
Clearinghouse for Project-oriented Networked Information, we
have searched the Internet, collected and evaluated sites for their
informational value for the researchers in the Institute and
structured them into several web pages - resource pages for
general or more project-specific pages. (Examples of the
Clearinghouse entry page and a Resource Page for Educational
Resources (General) are included here as Figures 1 and 2). The
Institute also has about 6 major cross-national research projects,
for instance the Third International Mathematics and Science
Study which focuses on empirical data from classroom
observation of mathematics and science teaching in the U.S.,
Germany and Japan (see Figure 3). The Institute is also involved
in multinational studies for the study of teaching ethics in school,
as well as several projects on changes in schools, social structures
and work situations in the former Socialist countries in
comparison with Western countries. One of the psychology
department's studies looks at empirical data on children 's
scholastic achievement in relationship to their self-appraisal and
control beliefs in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Moscow, and Berlin. These
projects require collecting a great deal of background information
for these researchers, some of which have been collected using
the Internet. In addition, these areas will continued to be
maintained in a Web site at our Institute with a link from the
Internet coordinator at the major psychological special subject
library in Germany, the Center for Psychological Information
and Documentation in Trier. Similarly, resource pages referripg
to subject information in the Internet pertinent to some of our
sociological research projects will be linked from the
Information Center for the Social Sciences in Bonn in
coordination with their efforts so that a minimum of duplicated
effort occurs.
Certain national efforts to organize subject-oriented
collection and indexing of Internet resources exist in Germany.
. More encompassing national programs are underway in Great
Britain (BUBL5, NISS, ROADS6, 0MNJ7, SOSICJ8 etc.) and
Au.stralia (ANU WWW VIrtual Library Information Servers9).
It would be a worthwhile contribution to international
librarianship if librarians in other countries could be instrumental
in achieving similar structures.
Another example of international cooperation which will
increase in importance in the future is the exchange of ideas and
opinions on information quality concerning resources on the
Internet. Since April of this year, an e-mail discussion group on
information quality has been created and the interaction on this
list has been very active. A Web site on Information Quality has
been created by the list moderator T. Matthew Ciolekto (in
Australia). This includes a section in which he collected various
criteria for defining information quality on the Internet. Other
participants contributed greatly, so that already this Web site is
a rich source of thought, literature, and preliminary standards
(for instance citation standards for citing netwotked information)
on this topic. This is a prime example of cooperative efforts
which achieve the goals of international librarianship.
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3. The German Educational Resources Server, an example of
how national cooperation can flourish and where
international cooperation among educational libraries could
contribute even more to making a positive impact on the
profession.
In Germany, a Web-site is just being created for German
Educational Resources" on the basis of cooperation between
the 16 German states or Lander, various professional societies
for educationalists and education researchers, subject librarians
responsible for collections focusing on various aspects of
education, schools and teacher training institutions, teachers, and
even subgroups of other professional societies involved with
the didactics of teaching their particular subject area. They are
submitting materials to the Deutscher Bildungs-Server I German
Educational Resources Server which is being coordinated by
Professor Peter Diepold at the Humboldt University in Berlin
with initial support by the German Research Network (Deutsches
Forschungsnetz) and financed by the German Federal Ministry
of Education and Research (BMBF). The English language home
page of this server is included here as Figure 4; Figure 5 shows
the menu page for one of the four sections, "Resources." In
addition, Professor Diepold has developed a set of metadata
indicators which will be filled in by the person submitting a
HTML document to be linked to from this server. Thus, the
person who is familiar with the content of the document will
also index it. It is hoped that this practice will increase accuracy
of the indexing terms. This will also bring more specific hits
when searched by search engines. It should also reduce time
delays in including links to documents which would be caused
by submitting documents to editorial boards for indexing and
cataloging. English-language terms will also be assigned by
researchers who are familiar with the difficulties in translating
German and English educational terms and relating the various
German educational and vocational systems to those in other
national structures. As part of the team which has conceived
this site, we are looking forward to comments and to further
expanding this site with links to other national educational Web
sites.
Despite the difficulties in translating and transforming
nationally imbedded concepts and structures in the educational
field, similar efforts a:t the international level could produce very
important contributions to understanding different educational
structures and supporting information access. Surely similar
efforts can be seen in the Web site of the National Library of
Education. Theoretically, these experiences could be drawn upon
for international cooperation among educational libraries,
including both more exchange on their activities and perhaps
informal coordinapon of cooperative efforts. The reduction of
complexity of communications means and of the spatial
restrictions of the past could result in more efforts at international
cooperation in the field.
In the Anglophile countries (the U.S . , Great Britain,
Australia), special libraries have a more solid, higher standing
than in many non-English speaking countries. This is due to the
Education Ubrariea • Vol 20, No. 1/2
fact that English serves as the international language of
librarianship, thus making it possible to expand these prime
examples of international cooperation, particularly for the
libraries in the SLA Education Division. More international
contact, cooperation and joint results would certainly have a very
positive impact on the profession, especially in those countries
which are looking at the United States, Great Britain and Australia
for leadership.
1 See Peter Wagner, Bjorn Wittrock ( 1 99 1 ) : S tates,
Institutions, and Discourses: A comparative Perspective on the
Structuration of the Social Sciences. In: Discourses on Society,
The Shaping of the Social Science Disciplines. Vol. XV. Eds.
Peter Wagner, Bjorn Wittrock, Richard Whitley. Dordrecht etc. :
Kiuwer, 1991, pp.331-357
2 This is often done in Scandinavian countries.
3 These are delineated in Anne Galler's paper from this same
session.
4 The Web site for the Max Planck Institute for Human
Development and Education is currently being set up, but should
be available under the following address by the end of August
1996: http://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/
Education Ubreriea • Vol 20, No. 1/2
s
6
7
s
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1o
[13 May 1996]
1 1 (Click on the underlined title
"German Educational Resources" to obtain the English-language
pages of this site.) A description of the server concept and
database can be found at
Diann Rusch-Feja is the Director of Library and Research
Documentation at the M ax Planch I nstitute for Human
Development and Education. Berlin, Germany. Prior to
this, she has taught at universities and colleges in the
Un ited States and Germany and is also a specialist in
Computer Systems for I nformation Systems.
email: ruschfeja@mpib-berlin.mpg.de
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