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

society should also be visited for libraries to check their role critically in
global information society building. Aside from increasing the power
of media companies, information content, and economic globalization
(Webster, 2002), it is also necessary to promote discourse development in
information society. Critical theory as a tool is needed to examine techno-
capitalism phenomena arising in information society (Kellner, 1989).
The anthology edited by Leckie, Buschman, & Given, (2010)
largely explores critical theory ideas for analyzing curriculums, research,
and practices in library and information science that deserve attention,
especially new opportunities that should be reviewed as a new direction
of library development in the millennial era. In today’s digital era, it is no
longer relevant for librarians and libraries to strive to survive by relying
only on reading collections and library staffers’ friendliness in serving
users as was the case tens of years past. Times have changed, and users
of library services are much different from those in preceding eras. What
librarians are facing and have to serve today is the millennial generation
with reading behaviors and information access capabilities much unlike
those of previous generations (Dresang, 2005, 2009; Kilian, Hennigs, &
Langner, 2012; Koh, 2011, 2015). The millennial generation, Z generation,
and alpha generation, is users who have starkly different characteristics
and habits (Buhedji, 2018; Morin, 2018). They are the generation who
can independently find information the instance the need for it arises
with the aid of gadget and access to internet network. This clearly proves
that millennials have utterly different characteristics from those of baby
boomers whose needs used to be served by librarians a few decades ago
(Sweeney, 2005). Reading, for millennials, is a cultural activity that is
influenced by lifestyle, prestige, and varying patterns of leisure time usage
(Sugihartati, 2018). From where millennials stand, libraries take the form
of not only physical buildings, but also a virtual, borderless digital space
(Gardner & Eng, 2005).
In response to post-modern societal development where the economics
of information if flourishing, the field of librarianship should also build
a critical frame of mind on how the principles of democracy and equity
are enacted (Buschman & Brosio, 2006). In their writing, Buschman and
Brosio point out that the most significant challenge faced by librarianship is
capitalism’s hegemonic power, and it is instrumental for librarians to move
beyond post-modernist conceptions that are trapped within the cultural
skin of global market capitalism. As stated in librarianship literature,
technology is a treatment acquired from postmodernism but hardly ever
be criticized. In the post-modern era wherein computerization plays a key
role in temporal/spatial compression and web holds a pivotal position in

Rahma Sugihartati 35