40 - The interpretation of professional development in librarianship since 1850

Summary

‘Development’ suggests both change and progress.Change is inevitable, but for progress to be measured we must determine what would constitute progress. Is the working experience of any practitioner better than that of a librarian in the 1850s? Are we now a different set of people, doing different things in a different world from that of our predecessors? Do we do them any better? Is the abstract entity of ‘the profession’ now improved or facing a more secure or more hopeful future? Do we have means of answering such questions?

There are three interpretations of the professional condition. First, the tension and fusion of idealism and utilitarianism that Black claims informed British public librarianship between 1850 and 1914. Second, Winter's claims about models of professional life. Third, the role Stehr identifies for experts, counsellors and advisers in the information age. These offer incomplete images of the professional, so fourthly I use as models of the practitioner the icons of character of the modern age identified by MacIntyre, of aesthete, therapist or manager. These are set in the context of claims about the change from one conception of a practice to another.