Following standards: a document ethnography in Chilean University Libraries
| Date | 17 December 2024 |
| Pages | 1-17 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2024-0202 |
| Published date | 17 December 2024 |
| Author | Ola Pilerot,Fernando Bolaños Zarate,Rodrigo Donoso Vegas |
Following standards: a document
ethnography in Chilean
University Libraries
Ola Pilerot
Swedish School of Library and Information Science, University of Bor
as,
Bor
as, Sweden
Fernando Bola~
nos Zarate
Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile, and
Rodrigo Donoso Vegas
Universidad de Chile Bibliotecas, Santiago de Chile, Chile
Abstract
Purpose –The aim of this study is to contribute to extended knowledge about the role of standardization of
university library operations and its consequences.
Design/methodology/approach –This research employs a practice-theoretically oriented analysis method with
a focus on documents. The Chilean standards for universitylibraries, which are in focus, are conceptualised as a
site that encompasses those who drafted them and librarians who are expected to followthem. The study can be
termed adocument ethnography, which in this case includes the methods of interviewing and document analysis.
Findings –Whereas commonalities among libraries are in focus for the drafters, librarians are foregrounding
context-related particularities and local practices. This results in a collision between different purposes and
interests regarding how to use standards. The librarians perceive that standards are primarily intended for
management and that they provide little support for everyday work. In accordance, to librarians, the work done
by people in managerial positions regarding standards often seems opaque or obscured. Furthermore, for
librarians, even though standards are ubiquitous, they are not visible in the daily work.
Originality/value –The document ethnography as a research approach is drawn from the field of science and
technology studies and has not previously been used in library research. Standards for university libraries have
not been studied in this way before, either in Chile or elsewhere. The study has contributed to making “the dark
sides of standards” within the Chilean academic library landscape visible.
Keywords Standards, University libraries, Document analysis, Practice theory, Chile
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
We may not think about it, but many of our daily activities are related to a standard of some sort,
sitting on office furniture, surfing the Internet, driving a car or even eating an apple. There is, for
example, a standard for cold storage of apples (ISO, 1995). At the time of the writing of this article,
ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) announces that it has issued more than
25,000 “international standards covering almost all aspects of technology, management and
manufacturing” (ISO, n.d.). The overall purpose of standardization, and thus standards, is to
present a general expected level and outcome for a certain activity or arrangement. According to
Journal of
Documentation
1
© Ola Pilerot, Fernando Bola~
nos Zarate and Rodrigo Donoso Vegas. Published by Emerald Publishing
Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone
may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and
non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full
terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode
Funding: Fernando Bola~
nos Zarate would like to acknowledge the financial support from the
following funders: La Agencia Nacional de Investigaci
on y Desarrollo (ANID) de Chile (grant Fondecyt-
Postdoc 2022, No 3220299), El Centro de Modelamiento Matem
atico (CMM) de la Universidad de Chile
(grant FB210005 BASAL), N
ucleo Milenio de Desigualdades y Oportunidades Digitales NUDOS (grant
NCS2022_046) and CIAE, ANID/PIA/Fondos Basales para Centros de Excelencia FB0003.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 23 August 2024
Revised 24 October 2024
Accepted 27 October 2024
Journalof Documentation
Vol.81 No. 7, 2025
pp.1-17
EmeraldPublishing Limited
e-ISSN:1758-7379
p-ISSN:0022-0418
DOI10.1108/JD-08-2024-0202
Lampland and Star (2008, p. 10) standards serve to “streamline procedures or regulate behaviours,
to demand specific results, or to prevent harm”. They are generally perceived as “a valuable and
necessary thing to do” and, therefore rarely questioned (Lampland and Star, 2008, p. 10). In this
article we view the notion of standards and standardization in line with Timmermans and Epstein
(2010, p. 70), who characterize them as “ubiquitous but underestimated phenomena that help
regulate and calibrate social life by rendering the modern world equivalent across cultures, time,
and geography”.
Standards are necessarily normative in character. They make claims about what ought to be
the case in a certain operation. They are not neutral. Rather, they function in a context of
competing interests and ambitions. They can be seen as constituting a certain genre (Yates,
2019) that works through mobilising a kind of authority that often implies a neutral position
(Gal and Woolard, 2001). Such mobilization, however, tends to be black-boxed and thereby
hiding a range of processes during the production, implementation and use of standards; what
Cass and Shove (2018, p. 272) refer to as the “‘dark sides’ of standards in action”.
In addition to the standardization of things and processes within areas like technology,
management and manufacturing, there is also a widespread standardization related to various
professions. In the library sector, standards have been in place for a long time. In 1894, the
University of the State of New York established “minimum requirements for a proper library
standard” (Windsor, 1917, p. 135). Subsequently, in 1917, a committee withinthe American
Library Association (ALA) was formed to address “the standardization of libraries and
librarians” (Windsor, 1917, p. 135). Fifteen years later, in 1933, the ALA officially adopted the
Standards for Public Libraries (Kawasaki, 2011). There are library standards that aspire to reach
beyond national borders. For example, those issued by the International Federation of Library
Associations and Institutions (IFLA), which claim to reflect “consensus on up-to-date
principles, guidelines and best practice for a particular library or information-related activity or
service” (IFLA, n.d.). Those standards that aspire to reach beyond national borders, therefore,
can be seen as international in character. There are also those that aim at standardizing a certain
nation’s library operations. For example, the American Library Association’svariousstandards
are said to convey “policies which describe shared values and principles of performance” for
libraries in the US (American Library Association, 2023).
Independently of whether they were intentionally thought of as international, now and then
national standards find their ways across borders and influence other standards in other parts of
the world, which for example, is the case with the US Association of College and Research
Libraries’ Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (since 2015
replaced by Framework for Information Literacy). That these standards have reached beyond
national borders is clear, for example, since they are frequently referenced by libraries around the
globe. They are also translated into several languages. But standards can be influential also in
other, more subtle, ways. Standards issued in one country can serve as inspiration (or even
blueprints) for standards formulated in another country. Such is the case with the Standards for
Chilean University Libraries: Fundamental Principles (published in 2020). These standards,
which are the focus of the present study, are an explicit adaptation of the 2018 Association of
College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Standards for Libraries in Higher Education (cf.
Comisi
on Permanente Asesora de Bibliotecas y Documentaci
on, 2020, p. 3).
It is a widespread belief that standards in the library sector serve a function when it comes to,
for example, bibliography and electronic resources. It seems obvious that, for example,
cataloguing should build on a standardized set of rules for resource description. However, there
is less consensus regarding the standardization of library operations as a whole. As early as the
beginning of the 1980s, it was questioned whether the term “standards” is useful for this purpose.
The main problem identified with standards is that they rely too much on quantitative measures
and tend to overlook contextual factors: “[t]here can only be standard solutions to standard
problems, and in libraries in general [. . .] we are operating in a wide range of different
circumstances, mostly outside our own control, which demand an individual, flexible approach”
(Jones, 1982, p. 278). Instead of standards, it is suggested that libraries within a certain sector,
JD
81,7
2
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