Page 54 - PERPUSTAKAAN UNIVERSITAS AIRLANGGA

Kajian Dalam Bidang Ilmu Perpustakaan dan Informasi: Filosofi, Teori, dan Praktik

knowledge. An advanced conception for library and what is developed in
library experience is embracing the spirit of joy, serendipity, and adventure
such that contained in Foucauldian concept of Heterotopia. This way of
seeing libraries as attractive and colorful is an engaging idea running
counter the main stream which has always slipped our mind as many
librarians treat libraries more as a sacred, cold, and undisturbed place,
all of which are in need of deconstruction. Library desecration is a new
starting point for librarians to design improvement programs more relevant
to changes in users’ characteristics.
As stated by Buschman (2007), Michel Foucault (1926–1984) is a
prominent thinker who has provided a critical theory reference for library
and information science (LIS) or librarianship. Buchman states that
Foucauldian thoughts are widely cited and adapted in a great number of
writings focused on forms of power and discourse in LIS. Librarianship
has also largely explored his works, and it is about time to develop the
implications of the thoughts by Foucault, Derrida, as well as other Post-
Structuralists as a basis for critical theories in the effort to develop LIS.
Critical theories for LIS/librarianship should refer to the effort to explore
varied theoretical and philosophical positions in a challenging critical
spirit, reveal and expose latent assumptions, and direct practices, studies,
and research that are based on critique against positivism. In his writing,
Buschman (2007) also inferred that library and information science
development from Foucauldian perspective will be able to set a claim by
basing on major analyses and bring librarians and library far past their
traditional domain. The millennial era is when librarians deconstruct
old roles and reconstruct new ones to face a contemporary civilization.
We know that libraries hitherto tend to fall within power and knowledge
systems which constitute a discourse and institution preserved in Western
civilization. Leaving libraries to remain in old-fashioned, conventional
services model will put them at risk of being abandoned by their patrons
as they have gained an access to other more recent sources of information.
In the digital era, the use of critical perspectives as a basis for
analyses of librarians’ role and library services improvement is growing
in relevance, especially in the face of greater, more complex challenges.
Pyati (2007) in his dissertation, for example, drew on critical theory
when analyzing library technologies in the context of information society.
Indeed, the role of information and communication technologies is an
undisputable positive reality in library. Transformation into “automated
library”, “electronic library”, and “digital library” receives influence from
these very information and communication technologies. However, the
influence of global capitalist ideologies (techno-capitalism) on information

34 Decontruction And Recontruction of The Roles of Librarians ...