Abstract: Katie Maier-O'Shea, "The Library of Babel: Making Sense of Collection Management in a Postmodern World," Journal of Academic Librarianship 31, no. 2 (2005): 143-50.

Maier-O'Shea writes a thought provoking article about currents of change in higher education, library collection development, and publishing, showing how these are exhibit a more "postmodern" sensibility. She identifies three characteristics of postmodernism and shows how libraries fit them. These characteristics are:

1. a resistance to hierarchy and control (exhibited by increasing interdisciplinary nature of scholarship, growing lack of control over print and electronic resources);
   
2. nonlinear thinking (manifest by "hypertext", folksonomic searching and access of information in the digital age as opposed to more linear, hierarchical constructs); and
3. the blurring of boundaries (shown by the rapid increase in new, multimedia formats that are accessed in a multitude of delivery avenues).
   

Despite some interesting comments on libraries affected by forces identified as placing "postmodern" pressures on library collection management and budgeting policies, the author of this article seems to be seeing the situation with a decidedly "modernist" sensibility, presenting these pressures as difficulties with no clear solution. A "postmodern" perspective would accept the extreme unlikelihood of actually finding a solution, choosing rather to revel in the multiplicity of options available to one who rejects the notion of a "one true path" to collection development.

Unfortunately, postmodernism and science don't make good bedfellows, and trying to wholeheartedly adopt it as a way of understanding collection management in libraries could prove unfruitful. Although a "softer" science, it still is called library science because we would like to think that we can apply the scientific method and statistical analysis to enlighten our understanding of information organization, access, collection, and instruction. As long as we taxonomize, deduce, classify, and survey our collections and users, we will constantly be troubled by the unexpected, the resistance of knowledge and information to being stored, described, and used in any quantifiably measurable way. And being troubled isn't what postmodernists do; rather, they see the absurdity of the search for such knowledge, and highlight the irony that we seek the information nonetheless.

In the end, the pithiest observation of Maier-O'Shea's article comes in her conclusion: "These ideas are clearly in the formative stage... Lacking a clearly articulated vocabulary about how to build collections in a postmodern electronic environment, our conversation sounds, at times, like babbling." Clearly, her ideas are in their formative stage; so much so, that it makes the reader wonder why the article was written in the first place, given that no conclusions or truly meaningful observations were made. Is this a pure example of "postmodern" scholarship, or unintentional irony about the absurdity of attempting to write about the unknowable?