Collection evaluation ― theory and the search for structure
William E. McGrath · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 1985
BORROWING from Renk D u b s , urges us to think globally and act locally in developing collections, observing, "all libraries are linked in a great chain of access.''1Philosophically, a good case can be made for this point of view, while considerable empirical evidence could be gathered to support it.Just how libraries and collections are linked, however, is an open question, particularly important for its implications about how they are accessed and used.The number of ways they could be linked is very large.We could use our imaginations and create all sorts of fanciful images-chain-linked fences, sociological organisms, ecological spaces, food webs, or even galaxies and clusters of galaxies.But library theory is in sad shape when it can only bedescribed by image or metaphor-that a library is like something instead of being something.What a library really is can only be described in its own terms, its own structure.These images may have some redeeming value, though, because they hint of coherent structure.The emphasis is not so much on analogy as it is on synthesis.Atoms bind together to make a molecule, molecules a compound, compounds an organism, and so on.Everything is connected, from the minute to the massive.What binds everything together and what the whole thing looks like goes well beyond imagery.To see the whole and how the wholes are connected to make bigger wholes, and then to apply the insights discovered is the task of research, not rhetoric.