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Gatekeepers of Knowledge: A consideration of the library, the book and the scholar in the western world

Margaret Zeegers, University of Ballarat and Deirdre Barron, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

 - examines its material as analyses of significant events in the development of libraries, books, and scholarship in the western world
 - embeds those developments in significant political, economic, social and cultural fields of particular eras
 - ties scholarship to class structures and associated protocols in its treatment of scholarship as the generation of knowledge
 - explores a series of irruptions in developing protocols and practices as signal transition passages rather than as a linear, teleological representation of the past
 - the material is considered through the lens of power relations within scholarship and related fields of knowledge production.

Throughout its history, the western library has played a significant role in bringing the book into the hands of western scholars. This book analyses that history: examining constructs of librarianship, publishing, and scholarship within that history as gate keeping access to knowledge. Exploring significant events in the field from the time of the Lyceum to the present day in the development of repositories of books and their access by scholars, the book engages in an analysis of those events from a perspective that makes visible ways in which the production, storage and access of books, and scholarship itself, have been privileged, while others have been marginalised. The book examines current practice and what this may mean for knowledge production in relation to the library, the book and western scholarship in the 21st century. The book provides an invaluable resource for academics and students interested in understanding ways in which they themselves are connected with the history of their professions and the history of the book and its place in gatekeeping knowledge.

ISBN 1 84334 505 6
ISBN-13: 978 1 84334 505 3
February 2010
146 pages  234 x 156mm  paperback  
£45.00 / US$75.00 / €55.00

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About the authors

Dr Margaret Zeegers is President of the Australian National Section of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Ballarat, Victoria, Australia where she is the Coordinator of the English programs delivered in that School. Dr Deirdre Barron is the Director of the National Institute for Design Research at Swinburne University of Technology, Victoria, Australia.

Contents

From the agora to the scriptoria
 - Before the agora
 - Ancient Greece
 - The scholar of the times
 - Ancient Rome
 - The Danes
 - The scholar of the times

From the scriptoria to the printery
 - The book of the times
 - Rise of Islam
 - The scriptoria
 - The universities

From the printery to the bookshelves
 - Printed books
 - The Bible in the vernacular
 - The Protestants
 - Henry VIII
 - Sacking and triumph
 - The Enlightenment
 - Outside the universities
 - The scholar of the times

From the bookshelves to the study
 - A reading public
 - New knowledge
 - The scholar of the times

Scholars of the second millennium
 - Scenarios
 - Current technological trends
 - Research quality assessment exercises
 - Libraries of the future
 - The scholar of the times