Working on the Humanities Methods in Librarianship editorial recently has me wondering (in more detail than usual) why our discipline traditionally doesn’t use humanities methods when studying libraries and librarianship. I would suggest that a having purportedly “interdisciplinary” field that nonetheless largely excludes the wide swath of humanities methods is a bit peculiar.

An important question to ask when confronting puzzles such as these is: whose interests is this serving? And I think that in this case, there is an obvious answer: Managers.

Our profession is deeply managerial. Many librarians are middle- or line-mangers, and many more will be a manager at some point in their careers [1]. And these managers have a significant interest in maintaining a focus exclusively on social scientific research methods.

The first reason for this is largely positive: managers often need empirical and data-based research to design effective programs and strategies. Social scientific library scholarship very effectively fills that need. If you pick any core library function, there will be scores of empirical studies that provide examples and guidance on the topic at hand. This literature is abundant, well-elaborated and useful. Perfect for a manager.

The second reason is less positive. Managers (like most of us) do not like to be criticized. And many humanistic approaches would likely have pointedly critical things to say about library practices. I (quite plausibly) imagine some critiques that point at fundamental problems within our institutions. And managers would (quite rightly) be answerable for these. Since they are not keen on this, it is in their interest to maintain the arbitrary insistence that humanities methods are “not librarianship.”

One constructive path forward is readily at hand: we need to open our scholarship to a broader range of methods. This will inevitably open us up to new criticisms. That is, in fact, a good thing. We need to own up to the problems with our institutions and our librarianship, and humanistic criticism is one way to do that. Stop saying that the humanities are “not librarianship.”

[1] Full disclosure: I am a manager myself.