THE LIBRARY AS AN AGENCY OF SOCIAL COMMUNICATION
| Date | 01 April 1965 |
| Published date | 01 April 1965 |
| Pages | 241-243 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026370 |
| Author | J.H. SHERA |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
THE LIBRARY AS AN AGENCY OF SOCIAL
COMMUNICATION
J. H. SHERA
Dean,
School
of
Library
Studies,
Western Reserve
University,
Cleveland,
Ohio
THE ACT OF communicating
is,
by definition, the transmission of a mes-
sage from a communicator to a receptor. The message may be a simple sig-
nal or an extensive body of oral or recorded symbolic or pictorial represen-
tations. Communication can take place within an individual organism,
between two individuals, or among the members of an aggregate, but
always there is a mutually intelligible 'language' as well as a carrier or
medium; and while there may be multiple receptors, in any given instance
there can be only one transmitter. Just
as
in the biological organism there is
a neural communication system, so in organized societies there is a social
communication network. While the agencies which are a part of this net-
work are easily recognized, and their functions easily identified, the funda-
mental nature of the communication process within society is only imper-
fecdy understood. Students of society know lamentably little about the
ways in which knowledge and information are communicated within a
culture, even
a
primitive
culture.
For that matter, psychologists and special-
ists in the operation of the human nervous system know precious little about
the communication of information within the individual. Analogies have
been drawn with the electronic circuitry of the computer just as the com-
munication of information within a society has been likened to the spread
of epidemics in a population.
A society is, of
course,
an aggregate of individuals held together by a
complex of cultural and institutional bonds. A society can scarcely know
what is not known by any of its members, though the sum of that know-
ledge may induce in the actions of the group behaviour patterns that differ
markedly from those of the individuals that compose it. The study of the
ways in which a society achieves an understanding relationship with its en-
vironment is what Margaret Egan called 'social epistemology', and it is
fundamental to a theory of librarianship.
Graphic records are both an extension of and a check upon the accuracy
of the human mind. They
are,
in the terminology of the semanticist, 'time
binders' which span the temporal and spacial distances of our three-dimen-
sional world. The document is an extension of the human powers of com-
241
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