Guest editorial
| Date | 03 April 2018 |
| Published date | 03 April 2018 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/CC-10-2017-0045 |
| Pages | 41-42 |
| Author | Matthew Kelly |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Collection building & management |
Guest editorial
This special issue of Collection and Cu ration on the subject of
non-fiction was motivated by a long- standing desire to
understand how public libraries prioritise selection in a civil
society context. The lack of disc ussion around fundamental
conceptual modalities that underpin our representation of
knowledge in these spaces has pr ompted this exploratory
collection of papers. The contribu tors to this issue bring a
diverse range of disciplinary view points that include
philosophy, sociology, history, co mmunication, education
and information science. The variet y of perspectives we see
here, it is hoped, will help to ensure tha t a start is made on
bringing the complexity of what we or dinarily discuss, so
easily and equanimously as non-fictio n, into a richer, more
diverse and problematised space .
This special issue is built on the idea tha t a common-sense
understanding of what we call non -fiction has a tendency to
mask some of the important considerations th at librarians
should allow for when selecting and ev aluating materials for
public and school libraries. The au thors whose work is
published in this special issue have, as you wil l see, varied
reasons for interest in non-fictio n and it is through the
articulation of these specific intere sts that we ought to be
better placed to ask collection devel opers to look again, to
revisit what underpins the apparen tly easily understood
category of non-fiction, what does it stand for in knowledge
terms and where are the tears (the weak point s) in its
conceptual fabric?
In their preface to Broadbeck, Gray an d Metzger’s
American Non-fiction,O’Connor and Hof fman (1952,p.v)
pointed out that the primary diffic ulty with non-fiction is that
it cannot be analysed as a literary form and res ists discussion
in literary terms; the sheer volu me of topics and the reticence
of authors to look to “formal patterns of a work of lite rature”,
the ephemerality of it, all make for difficult y when assessing it
as literature.O’Connor and Hoffman (1 952, p. v) indicated
that “some of it will undoubtedly continue to be meaningfulto
later generations”although this me aningfulness may be, they
say, quite different to why we migh t read such material.
Where their analysis really str ikes home though is that they
contend that it is only with hindsig ht that we might “see with
any clarity what these genres and fo rms were”. Our very
contemporariness with the “issues an d data discussed in
them”leaves us too involved to ma ke judgements on their
“staying power as literature”.O’Conn or and Hoffman (1952,
p. v) contended that while nineteent h-century essays were
often read for their “stylistic graces”al one, the twentieth-
century writer was valued for exposit ory or data-organisation
capabilities. They maintained tha t the influential twentieth-
century non-fiction writer was les s likely to have a literary
outlook than their predecessors. The changes that they
identified in twentieth-century non -fiction writing involved a
move away from the “traditional assumptio ns about the
literary essay”(p. vi). Schematic boundaries were being
broken in other ways as well, not only in biography ’schanged
relationship to “history, social th eory and literary criticism”
(p. vi) but also in terms of how literature and journalism wer e
becoming symbiotically entwin ed. O’Connor and Hoffman
(1952, p. vi) identified new genres an d forms emerging as a
result of the “enormous range of non-fictio n”topics finding
publication (even in 1952). They aske d that these various
topics not be treated uniformly:
Each subject inevitably suggests its own appropriate treatment, and it would
involve serious distortion to view all non-fiction from the same perspective
or to discuss it in the same tone (p. 7).
At the 2012 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction C onference,
Richard Rhodes highlighted the proble m of non-fiction as it
stands as both a library and a literatu re term. Only coming
across Rhodes’s critique, once al l of the papers for this issue
were finalised (and in the course of writ ing this introduction)
it was strangely satisfying to find that one is not the sole, nor
the earliest, identifier of the proble m. Rhodes prefers the term
“verity”and rankles at how non- fiction implies that its writers
and readers “dwell in the swampy depths ben eath poetry and
fiction’s golden-lit Olympus”(cited in Getschow, 2015,p.8).
While this relative prioritisat ion of what we read and what we
hold in collections is not the main focus of this is sue, it is still
worth looking to how there are deeply embeddedas sumptions
in non-academic libraries that are ye t to be properly worked
out in order that the relationship between literat ures –and
how we choose to name knowledge (or docume ntary
knowledge) in these popular libr ary settings –are reasonably
resolved.
While aspects of the search for way s to represent knowledge
and meaning take on the character ofmet aphysical inquiry we
do though, nevertheless, need to ack nowledge the practical
side of how “naming reality is, in effe ct, about its
construction”(Deodato, 2010, p. 86). To c reatively work
with Joseph Deodato’s discussion of Derrida and libraries for
just a moment, we can see how deconstructin g non-fiction is
to, in a sense, “highlight the unack nowledged assumptions
that govern descriptions of real ity and denaturalise them”and
to review the “organised form of meta physics”that takes root
when the library acts as a knowledge organis ing institution. It
is the “ostensibly neutral or objective pr actices of organising
information”that emerge as in need of con tinual critical
focus.
I would like to thank all of the authors fo r their generous
contributions to this special iss ue and to also express my
gratitude to Steve O’Connor for the op portunity to guest edit
Collection and Curation. A brief prec is of each author’s
contribution is offered below.
In Exploring engagement with non-fiction collections:
sociological perspectives, Sar ah Knudson reports on case study
research which looks at non-fiction read ing focusing on
heterogeneity in modes of reading, how non-fiction reading
cultures develop and the diverse use that works can be put to
by readers. Knudson looks at how non -fiction collections are
used and how these help to play a role in defining how
resistance to sources of power and in equality can take place,
especially in community and school con texts.
Margaret K. Merga and Saiyidi Ma t Roni, in Characteristics,
preferences and motivation of a vid non-fiction readers,focuson
what typifies avid non-fiction book readers, sp ecifically their
demographic characteristics in r elation to reading volume and
frequency. Merga and Roni asses s their comparative library
Collection and Curation
37/2 (2018) 41–42
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 2514-9326]
[DOI 10.1108/CC-10-2017-0045]
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