Editorial
The scholarship of librarianship has long been disproportionately approached from the methodologies and perspectives of the social sciences. We’ve had peer reviewers tell us, without an inkling of self-doubt, that librarianship unambiguously is a social science. But any critically-minded librarian might start asking some pointed questions: Why is this the case? Whose interests does it serve? Who or what is being excluded from these conversations, and for what reasons?
Asking humanistic questions in librarianship is important, not because we are librarians, but because we are human. Yet the intent of this journal is not to revive a faded humanism; rather, we are interested in the contemporary, salient concerns of the discipline. The humanities are not peripheral to the tasks of librarianship, but, when approached with the right tools, very frequently touch upon the exposed nerve of what makes libraries tick today.
Looking at librarianship through this lens will allow us to ask underexplored questions. Humanities approaches offer a huge range of theoretical and methodological strategies to draw upon. Many of us have an educational background in these areas. We know how to do this work. We can constructively broaden and deepen the concerns of librarianship by reconsidering the boundaries of our scholarship.
What’s most amazing to us is that, to our knowledge, other library journals today are not doing this work systematically. At present, librarians writing with humanistic methods are limited to submitting their work to a drastically curtailed set of journals. Alternately, they can shoehorn their work into a social sciences framework to make it publishable as a peer reviewed library paper. This is not a good situation. That such a huge swath of methodological choices is being excluded from our supposedly “interdisciplinary” field is a sign of a systematic failing of our discipline. We can do better.
The incoming editors of this journal have expressed their reasons for participating in this project very clearly. Some have shared statements; we have included them in their entirety. While they speak to broadening the scope of the literature of librarianship -- “through the use of humanities methodologies, we can offer scholarship beyond the ‘usual suspects’ of information literacy, bibliographic instruction, metadata, and cataloging” -- they are also specifically interested in the very human concerns of librarianship: “In a data-driven society that elevates the values of practicality, efficiency, and measurable outcomes, perspectives from the humanities offer insight into the deeper values that underlie the profession.”
As a result, our project is very personal for many of us who want to (or have to) publish in librarianship: “a publication that is open and welcoming of not-strictly-LIS subject matter and approaches is very exciting to someone [...] who may have deep interests that lie at the boundaries of LIS.” Many of us have “witnessed the challenges faced by [colleagues] applying arts-based research methods to librarianship.” While “there is a lack of a reliable publishing venue” for this type of work, thankfully we can change this. We are now starting to do this work; Humanities Methods in Librarianship looks forward to taking on this ambitious and necessary project, with all of you as our collaborators.