Jennifer Macaulay ILS503 - Foundations of Librarianship Biographical Research Report March 13, 2006 Robert S. Taylor During a 1974 symposium, Robert S. Taylor spoke to his colleagues by writing “. . . that we in the information professions are in the midst of a change to a radically different information environment” (Taylor, 1974). While many would agree that new technologies are dramatically changing the face of libraries, Taylor wrote these words over 30 years ago. Throughout his varied and lengthy career, Taylor continually tried define and redefine his notions of information use. His prophetic conclusions about information and its use have had a far-reaching impact on information dissemination, libraries and even library education. Taylor’s “. . . attempt to develop and understand some basic ideas about the information profession and what it does” (Taylor, 1992/1993) has been a life long quest. Robert Saxton Taylor was born in 1918 in Ithaca, New York. He attended Cornell University and graduated in 1940 with a degree in history. After spending an additional year in graduate school, Taylor got an advertising job with a small-town newspaper in west. He also wrote sports stories, occasionally did radio broadcasts of local football games and even did some investigative reporting. In November 1942, nine months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Taylor was drafted by the U.S. Army. After fighting through the Battle of the Bulge, Taylor was recruited by the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) (Taylor, 2005).

In January of 1945, Taylor was assigned to a CIC unit in Germany that entered German towns and secured Nazi communications facilities. By late May, Taylor had been promoted to operations officer in CIC’s Munich Region. During this period, Taylor began recruiting former Nazis to work for the CIC. He developed a large spy network that included Kurt Merk and the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. Merk had suggested that Taylor recruit Barbie, and Taylor trusted Merk enough to take his advice. In writing about the Barbie affair, Tom Bower commented that Kurt Merk and Taylor had become close friends and that this friendship probably clouded Taylor’s judgment in the matter. Merk served as the only witness when Taylor married a German artist named Leni Reichenberger during his time in Germany (Bower, 1984). After Taylor’s return home in August of 1947, he went to Cornell University’s library school and graduated in 1950. He formally began his career as a librarian at Lehigh University. It was during this time at Lehigh that Taylor had rather pivotal conversation with a friend while working at the reference desk. Taylor described this momentous conversation after accepting the 1992 American Society for Information Science’s highest award, the Award of Merit, by saying that “I had been at various times a newspaper reporter, sports editor, intelligence agent, freelance writer (unsuccessful) and now a librarian. I began to realize that in all of my adult life, I had been doing the same things: gathering, organizing, analyzing and communicating information“ (Taylor, 1992/1993). Thus began Taylor’s formal quest to figure out how people use information and the mechanics of the information transfer process.

In April of 1962, Lehigh University created a new division of its library called the Center for the Information Sciences and named Taylor its director. The center offered undergraduate and graduate courses in the information sciences. In a 1963 article, Taylor described how libraries might fit into this new developing field of information sciences: “the image of the library . . . must be changed from that of a sophisticated but passive warehouse, to a more dynamic institution” (Taylor, 1963). During the late 1960s, Taylor took on the unique responsibility of becoming the director of a library that had yet to be built at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Taylor worked with the college’s president to plan from the ground up an innovative library that would fit in with the new and experimental college. The Hampshire College Library Center opened in 1970 when the college admitted its first students. Taylor’s hope was that the library would merge “. . . the best of the traditional library with a readiness to make maximum use of innovation in communication technology” (Taylor, 1971). In many ways, the library was ahead of its time incorporating the college bookstore, the computer center, display areas and the Information Transfer Center. Taylor’s intent was to create a library that was a fluid and dynamic environment and that played a critical role in both the teaching and learning processes (Taylor, 1971, p.358-359). Taylor detailed the entire process of planning and designing the Hampshire Library Center in a book entitled The Making of a Library which won the American Society for Information Science’s Best Book award in 1972.

While at Hampshire, one of Taylor’s most important works was published. The 1968 article entitled Question-Negotiation and Information Seeking in Libraries is “ . . . easily of the most influential and cited works in the library literature, and describes four levels of question formulation (visceral, conscious, formalized and compromised needs) and the five filters that librarians used to help understand information needs (determination of subject, objective and motivation, personal characteristics of inquiries, relationship of inquiry to file organization, anticipated or acceptable answers)” (Janes, 2003, p.14). To Taylor, the question-negotiation process is one of the most important ways that users and librarians interact. He asserted that it is through this process that users begin to truly understand their information problems and as such, their information needs (Taylor, 1968, p.194). In 1972, Taylor accepted the position of Dean of the School of Library Science at Syracuse University. While there, he presided over a dramatic change in which the library school changed its name to the School of Information Studies. This name change was not merely cosmetic, “. . . but a recognition that many of the activities the School engages in can no longer be called library science. More important is the recognition that libraries are only a part of a large and extremely dynamic process of information transfer” (Taylor, 1974, August/September, p.16). Taylor stepped down as dean in 1981, but continued to teach for several years. Currently, Taylor still holds Professor Emeritus status at Syracuse University (Van der Veer Martins, 1991).

In a 1986 book, Taylor examined the concept of the information use environment and the value-added/user driven model as a means for describing the benefits and costs of the information use environment within the human context. Taylor examined the various ways in which value is added to information. It is critical to note that it is only the user who assigns and judges the value of information. “In Taylor’s model, individuals work in information environments and part of those information environments are the problemsolving or wrestling with problems and questions that naturally occur” (Gapen, n.d.). Robert Saxton Taylor has made a career of trying to understand the ways in which people seek and use information. His ideas have helped to transform libraries, information systems and library education. From his groundbreaking work describing the importance of the question-negotiation process to his work on the value-added model of information-use environments to his inclusion of information science in library education, Taylor has always put the user first and has relegated libraries to a peripheral position in the information spectrum. He had a prescient view of the impact that technology would have on the landscape of the library as a physical space. In his 1992 acceptance speech for the ASIS Award of Merit, Taylor said of those in the information professions “we are a unique and critical profession, perhaps the critical profession for the next century. But we will only be this when we truly encompass the total context of systems – a triad of technology, context and people, people on both sides of the interface”

(Taylor, 1992). Taylor has reminded librarians at every opportunity that without the user there is no need for information or libraries.

Bibliography Bower,Tom. (1984). Klaus Barbie: The Butcher of Lyons. New York: Pantheon Books. Gapen, D. Kaye. (n.d.) The Library As Mind. Retrieved January 30, 2006, from http://www.arl.org/symp3/gapen.html. Janes, Joseph & Silverstein, Joanne. (2003, February) Question Negotiation and the Technological Environment. D-Lib Magazine, 9(2). Retrieved Febrary 7, 2006, from http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online.cite6.html. Taylor, Robert S. (1992/1993). Chance, Change and the Future in the Information Profession. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, 19(2), 16-18. Taylor, Robert S. (1963). The Information Sciences. Library Journal, 87, 41614163. Taylor, Robert S. (1974, August/September). Inside Information: Education. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, 1(2), 16-17. Taylor, Robert S. (2005). Intelligence Work and the Information Professions. In Robert V. Williams & Ben-Ami Lipets (Eds.), Covert and Overt: Recollecting and Connecting Intelligence Service and Information Science (pp. 7-13). Medford, NJ: Information Today. Taylor, Robert S. (1974). Introduction. In Robert S. Taylor (Ed.), Economics of Information Dissemination: A Symposium (pp.5-6). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, School of Library Science. Taylor, Robert S. (1972). The Making of a Library: The Academic Library in Transition. New York: Wiley-Becker-Hayes. Taylor, Robert S. (1971, July-October). Orienting the Library to the User at Hampshire College. Drexel Library Quarterly, 7(3-4), 3-4. Taylor, Robert S. (1968). Question-Negotiation and Information Seeking in Libraries. College & Research Libraries, 29, 178-194. Taylor. Robert S. (1986). Value-Added Processes in Information Systems. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation. Van der Veer Martens, Betsy. (1999, October). Biographical Note – Robert S. Taylor. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(12), 1109-1110.