Popular Culture Studies and Library Education

Abstract

A course in popular culture was offered at the School of Library and Information Science, State University of New York at Albany, for the first time in the summer of 1972. The course provided an unusual opportunity to explore certain dimensions of communications processes, librarianship, and the cultural environment of libraries that, though not necessarily new to the curriculum, needed a sharper focus. After several experimental versions, 617: Popular Culture and the Library was added to the curriculum as a regular elective course. In the school's printed catalog, it is described as follows: Lib. 617. The nature and social functions of the contemporary popular culture as disseminated by the mass media; the relationship between the popular culture and the library. Bibliographic sources, selection and acquisition problems.1 Among other things, the course asks students to seriously consider the proposition that the information transmitted by such popular culture figures as Rod McKuen, Aretha Franklin, the Beatles, Tarzan (and Jane), Archie Bunker, and Georgette Heyer is as important as the information that flows through channels serving scientists and scholars. Some of my colleagues have responded to this suggestion with interest and sympathy, others with bemused silence or stunned incredulity. The following account of some of the thinking that went into the course at Albany will try to demonstrate that popular culture is a profoundly significant part of the total informational environment in which we all live and work, and that a study of popular culture can provide a useful framework for a consideration of