Dear friend,

I got up early today (earlier than I normally would on a Sunday) and since the Sunday paper hadn't arrived, I read some interesting biographical materials. The first was an article by Charles T. Meadow in JASIS (46: 217-24) about his life in information science from the beginning in 1954 to the present; the second an article by Edward Shils in the American Scholar (64: 221-35), his memoir of Karl Mannheim.

The first item was fascinating in the way a set of ideas, mostly related to mathematics and computer capabilities, came together such that Meadow could show how they integrated everything he had worked at professionally--in this case a multitude of jobs and achievements in information science. Meadow's work also had considerable influence on the re-creation of librarianship as the field called Library and Information Science. The article also reminded me how much our field has been affected by people who had no original connection with it, who in many cases had little sympathy for or awareness of its ethos, who came into it as mathematicians, physicists, etc., working on Department of Defense contracts, and the like, and who, having learned early on to use main-frame computers, spoke of all information issues and problems solely against the backdrop of computer technology.

(Though Meadow does not do so here, many of these same people also greatly deprecated librarianship as the province of technological Neanderthals. I remember this so well when I began teaching during the early 70s. For a long period of time I often found myself attempting to frame an "apologia" for librarianship to show why it was not reasonable to expect it to be at the forefront of computer technology and why it did not need to conceptualize all of its work as a function of the mathematically-based processing of computerized data. I concluded that it was simply unfair to criticize a field this way, especially considering that many of the protagonists who did so were essentially ignorant about the field and its genesis.)

Mannheim, one of the most important figures in the modern sociology of knowledge, came out of Nazi Germany to England in the early 30s. Shils was a graduate student in the early 30s when he first struggled to learn German. Eventually he became the translator of two of Mannheim's works, Ideology and Utopia and Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction and came to know the man reasonably well.

What most struck me about Mannheim was his insecurity and even bitterness. When he went to England he was appointed to the position of "Lecturer" in Sociology at the London School of Economics. That was a blow to him because he had previously had the status of "Professor" in Germany and was in fact very celebrated there. At the London School, however, there was to be only one professor per field (except Economics, which had two) and since Morris Ginsberg held that post in Sociology and did not like Mannheim's ideas anyway, Mannheim had little opportunity to improve his position. Later Mannheim became Professor of Education at the Institute of Education of the University of London, but apparently they did not delve into more encompassing sociological ideas there so that he was rather isolated in that position. At one point he also apparently entertained the idea of pursuing a career in the U.S. and would quiz Shils on how his ideas were being "received" in the U.S. Shils avoided telling him that Americans barely paid any attention to his ideas at all, having their own idea leaders to pursue.

Poor man--so stressed out about his lack of "status," status that came with propounding the ideas for which he lived. Shils said that Mannheim ultimately desired "a large following and beyond that a larger public," and that he "wanted to be a great intellectual figure on the level of Kant." He even became somewhat paranoid that other notable scholars were conspiring against his ideas. It is true, of course, that Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, two such notables, did not like his ideas about the "situational dependence of knowledge." This is interesting because since then the idea that ideas generated in society are situationally dependent has become widely accepted.

Other contemporary scholars plainly ignored him. Perhaps the saddest vignette in the article occurred upon Mannheim's death in 1947. Shils was riding in a taxi in London, taking Michael Polanyi to the train station, and upon mentioning that Mannheim had died, he recalled, "Polanyi made no reply at all. He was probably thinking of one of his philosophical conundrums and there was no clear category for Mannheim." So much for a person's "big ideas."

Reading these articles caused me to reflect about my own work and my own investment in ideas. I have been teaching and writing in Library and Information Science for 23 years now and the pursuit of ideas, the teaching of them, has been central for me. In fact, engaging ideas centrally was true for me even prior to Library and Information Science when I was in college and then, afterward, when I studied theology. I cannot remember a time when I did not conceive of my work this way. Working with ideas has been for me like the work of a cabinetmaker who creates finely wrought furniture. To borrow different metaphors (borrowed from Michel Foucault) I have considered my work an expression of the "archeology of knowledge" in which I wrestle with the "order of things," all so that I could create (discover?, fabricate?, engineer?, manufacture?) ideas that when turned over slowly like some artifact would cause delight when seen with the inner eye.

Through the years I have occasionally reflected on this feature of my work. But, recently, I have done so more than ever, perhaps a sign of age. These articles simply brought many of my reflective thoughts to the surface again. Together they cause me to ask that most basic question--Does it really matter much at all, ultimately, what thoughts, ideas, and the like, especially what "big ideas" one has and tries to convey to others?