Guest editorial

Date03 April 2018
Published date03 April 2018
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/CC-10-2017-0045
Pages41-42
AuthorMatthew Kelly
Subject MatterLibrary & information science,Collection building & management
Guest editorial
This special issue of Collection and Cu ration on the subject of
non-ction 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-ctio 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 -ction 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-ctio n and it is through the
articulation of these specic 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-ction, 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 Metzgers
American Non-ction,OConnor and Hof fman (1952,p.v)
pointed out that the primary difc ulty with non-ction 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 difcult y when assessing it
as literature.OConnor and Hoffman (1 952, p. v) indicated
that some of it will undoubtedly continue to be meaningfulto
later generationsalthough 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
themleaves us too involved to ma ke judgements on their
staying power as literature.OConn or and Hoffman (1952,
p. v) contended that while nineteent h-century essays were
often read for their stylistic gracesal one, the twentieth-
century writer was valued for exposit ory or data-organisation
capabilities. They maintained tha t the inuential twentieth-
century non-ction writer was les s likely to have a literary
outlook than their predecessors. The changes that they
identied in twentieth-century non -ction 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. OConnor and Hoffman
(1952, p. vi) identied new genres an d forms emerging as a
result of the enormous range of non-ctio ntopics nding
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-ction from the same perspective
or to discuss it in the same tone (p. 7).
At the 2012 Mayborn Literary Nonction C onference,
Richard Rhodes highlighted the proble m of non-ction as it
stands as both a library and a literatu re term. Only coming
across Rhodess critique, once al l of the papers for this issue
were nalised (and in the course of writ ing this introduction)
it was strangely satisfying to nd that one is not the sole, nor
the earliest, identier of the proble m. Rhodes prefers the term
verityand rankles at how non- ction implies that its writers
and readers dwell in the swampy depths ben eath poetry and
ctions 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 Deodatos discussion of Derrida and libraries for
just a moment, we can see how deconstructin g non-ction is
to, in a sense, highlight the unack nowledged assumptions
that govern descriptions of real ity and denaturalise themand
to review the organised form of meta physicsthat takes root
when the library acts as a knowledge organis ing institution. It
is the ostensibly neutral or objective pr actices of organising
informationthat 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 OConnor for the op portunity to guest edit
Collection and Curation. A brief prec is of each authors
contribution is offered below.
In Exploring engagement with non-ction collections:
sociological perspectives, Sar ah Knudson reports on case study
research which looks at non-ction read ing focusing on
heterogeneity in modes of reading, how non-ction reading
cultures develop and the diverse use that works can be put to
by readers. Knudson looks at how non -ction collections are
used and how these help to play a role in dening 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-ction readers,focuson
what typies avid non-ction book readers, sp ecically 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) 4142
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 2514-9326]
[DOI 10.1108/CC-10-2017-0045]
41

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