Encouraging reading for pleasure and the comprehensive training for readers

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes an approach to renewing the teaching of readers how to cope with the complex demands of the information society. In this context, the role of the library in training, learning, and construction of sociability and culture requires examination; and librarianship needs to develop broadly conceived proposals that move beyond pedagogical reading models offered schools. Bildung provides guidance for the comprehensive training of readers across a variety of codes, thereby equipping trainees with reading skills needed to develop broader lexicons and other associated tools and cultural capital that are useful in the construction of knowledge. Moreover, such training enriches the subject with aesthetic experiences that have the potential to effectuate subjective transformation of citizens over the long term.

RESUMEN

En artículo tiene el objetivo de proponer elementos para renovar la formación de lectores ante la complejidad de la lectura que hoy exigen las sociedades del conocimiento. En este contexto surgen concepciones sobre la función de la biblioteca como espacio de formación, aprendizaje, cultura y construcción de sociabilidades; por ello la bibliotecología debe desarrollar una propuesta con una perspectiva de lectura más amplia que la de los modelos pedagógicos en las instituciones educativas. Se identifican en la Bildung aportaciones para una formación de lectores integral, se incorporan además una variedad de recursos que favorecen la lectura de diferentes códigos para ampliar el capital cultural y léxico que a la vez generan modalidades de lectura dirigidas al desarrollo de capacidades de pensamiento crítico y de reflexión involucradas en la construcción de conocimiento, así como para causar experiencias estéticas necesarias en la formación y transformación subjetiva de los ciudadanos a lo largo de su vida.

Si lo que uno quiere es educarse y formarse, es de fuerzas humanas de lo que se trata, y en que, sólo si lo conseguimos, sobreviviremos indemnes a la tecnología y al ser de la máquina.

Hans-Georg Gadamer

Time has turned library into school and the librarian is a teacher, at his best, and the visitor is a reader among books as a worker is among his tools.

Melvil Dewey

INTRODUCTION

Twentieth century societies require readers capable of using information and transforming it into knowledge. In this context, the librarian's duty of training readers has split into two branches: one is aimed at increasing the practice of serious and pleasure reading, which extends increasingly to groups of adults, including communities within higher education; and the other carried out in the realm of user services in the modality of education or training of users. Nowadays, faced with changing modalities of reading, access, selection and the varieties of uses of written contents, the library also demands informative abilities and literacy in conjunction with a broad range of audio-visual and hyper-text resources generated by innovations in electronic resources that entail changes in the way people read, become informed and deliver information.

The scenario of the current century requires innovation in the way librarians train readers. This task has become increasingly complex owing to the now required capacity to transform information into knowledge, which is revalued as the common denominator of current society and is considered a strategic element for driving economies, innovation, competitiveness and global interaction. The production of information, increasingly abundant and immediately available through mobile devices almost anywhere on the face of the earth, and its use are essential, because they tend to cover the vast majority of daily labor, learning, entertainment and communication activities. As such, citizens must develop reading abilities in order to potentiate the capacities within a context of global competition. Today more than ever risk factors must be resolved.

Among the problems that still persist, limiting some countries full integration with knowledge societies, are the social gaps, caused by the lack or deficiency in educational processes, illiteracy and the functional illiteracy of communities that have not enjoyed the opportunity to exercise their reading and writing abilities. To this situation, we can add reading deficiencies, identified in national and international evaluations of diverse countries, among students that have concluded their courses of basic, middle and higher education. Likewise, in the recent decades, both serious and pleasure reading have declined among young people enrolled in school. These problems affect the societies that seek to homogenize the mastery of reading and learning underpinning the informative and communicative abilities of their citizens.

In sum, the abundance of information to which one can gain access today, the opportunities offered by technologies to allow people to exploit educational resources, labor and productive activities, and ongoing education, even while they offer opportunities for social advancement, can become adverse in communities that suffer reading, informational and communication weaknesses. The matter previously stated is not limited to underprivileged communities, but also extends to communities of higher education where cognitive, cultural, social and economic gaps can be exacerbated. As such, this study configures a context in which library science needs to renew training models for readers and the education of librarians in the performance librarianship, for the purpose of contributing to solutions to problems that limit opportunities to access and use the contents offered through diverse resources, not only those with utilitarian or common uses, but also for the full development of the capacities of each individual —cognitive, reflexive, critical, dialectic, creative, imaginative, affective and aesthetic. All of these abilities are involved in training throughout their lives, not only for utilitarian purposes, but also for creating citizens who participate in social changes that benefit themselves, their communities and the ecosystem and the development of a better environment. Therefore, it is necessary to transform and strengthen the library as an alternative space of appropriation of information, learning, training, recreation, construction of social skill that are not limited to the local context, but which extend to diverse points on the planet and open new multicultural modalities of sharing as part of globalization.

The librarian's duty to provide training does not mean an educational function in the pedagogical sense as practiced in school, but rather the task of creating alternatives beyond school learning in work and familial contexts, and which entail commercial interest. Therefore, we propose that the librarian's function in the training of readers potentiates reading and information in a broad sense, in terms of the variety of codes, practices and uses, that in addition to meeting the needs of students and other academic requirements and those pertaining to the workplace and daily life, also stimulate the individual's capacity required in the process of training and transformation, which implies appropriation, empowerment and ownership of the language of information, which is not ever achieved permanently, but rather requires ongoing development. Thus, each individual enjoys the option of being an actor and not the object of the written word and the discursive powers that surround us and which extend to the digital environment.

From diverse perspectives the function of training readers as part of the social duties of the librarian is announced, and especially in the panorama of societies in the current century, in which the ways of reading and receiving and issuing information are undergoing so much change. For this reason, the objective of this paper is to analyze the proposals for the educational duties of the library and identify elements for renewing the discourse and models of library science education and the practice of librarians with regard to training readers, which now must include contents in diverse codes, while broadening the ends beyond the promotion of pleasure reading and including other capacities that contribute to the development of academic literacy, informational abilities or information literacy needed by citizens of the knowledge society.

READING AND INFORMATION: AGENTS OF RISK IN TWENTIETH CENTURY SOCIETIES?

The twentieth century is oriented toward the development of knowledge societies, but also we know that in every age communities have conceived their own ways of generating information, communicating it and transforming it into knowledge. As such, civilizing processes have been achieved, but problems of underdevelopment, exclusion and social gaps have persisted. Nowlies in the shift toward a central place, while the resource on which production and supplies in the innovation systems depend, whose results consist in products, processes, organizational forms, systems or services, are applied in the solution to problems and obtaining benefits for some human group.¹ He adds that the emphasis in an authentic knowledge society should be on education and the conditions that guarantee the development of capacities for exploiting existing knowledge, in order to generate the new knowledge required to solve problems and to develop the plans of life, as well as in how there exists effective public availability to the universal archive of knowledge.²

In effect, access to the vast amounts of information and innovation is not enough. In fact, paradoxically, these things can become risk factors in communities that face weaknesses with regard to informative and communicative reading and writing, a problem found even at the level of higher education. These conditions also exhibit worrying features as expressed in the statements of the unesco and the International Federation of Library Associations (ifla), and of many other authors who have identified problems that exacerbate cognitive, social and generational gaps between countries and inside the communities in line with the following:

• •

  The cognitive gap widens between those who enjoy access to a better education, infrastructure, quality informative resources and abilities for their selection, validation, use and exploitation for the purpose of generating and innovating knowledge, resulting in better personal and work opportunities.³

• •

  The excessive use of electronic technology by youngsters can have adverse effects on the development of neurological processes associated with speaking, writing, visual cognition and maturation of motor and affective capacities. Similarly, the pedagogical models that in the earliest stages of emphasize reading speed can exert negative neural effects by demanding capacities that not every young student is ready to face, because people mature a different and progressively from reading aloud to reading in silence, through spelling and to handwriting.⁴

• •

  Excessive concentration on a display screen steals away the senses and perception needed to read the signs and extract information about the reality that surrounds us. The use of technology without limits can propitiate a growing dependence on it, which would cause a weakening of essential human capacities. As perfect as these machines are nowadays, they have not yet substituted man in the process of transforming information into knowledge, a task for which reading is indispensable.⁵

• •

  The overwhelming amount of information and its constant evolution and one's inability to discern its quality and the tendency to abandon serious reading in favor of superficial scanning leads to difficulties with reflection and assimilation.

• •

  The mass media and the internet offer entertainment and a broad array of contents, many of these quite banal, which could lead to a kind of society largely devoted to having fun. The speed and ease with which one can access a variety of information and entertainment media allows full-time communication anywhere. The overuse of mobile devices might create a complaisant, ignorant class of people completely fixated on technological devices, increasingly alienated and indifferent to other concerns, which stands in stark contrast to the expert class of productive people. With such a large mass of undereducated peoples, such a model will be economically unsustainable.⁶

• •

  Different cultures could be at risk, as their nourishing traditions, theoretical knowledge and practices vanish before the waves of innovation that ignore that knowledge societies require memory and the ability to transmit knowledge.⁷

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  Super-specialization propitiates fragmentation of knowledge, in that it largely fails to procure links between fields of knowledge, causing a narrowing of vision in which on one hand a lot is known without, on the other, any understanding of what is ignored. This can promote the adoption of “certainties” that can lead to ethical clashes, communication problems and incomprehension in general, where specialists prefer to read endogenic materials while neglecting reading from other areas that could broaden their horizons.⁸

• •

  To exclude the formation of the varied possibilities of plastic arts, photography, film, theater and music, which can aid the individual in building up a cultural legacy to think and learn about human problems and contextualize information of the specialty, in such a way that the possibilities of establishing links and mutual influences between the parties and the whole are reduced within an increasingly complex world, given that nowadays multicultural relationships are products that exert social effects on a world-wide scale.⁹

• •

  Libraries can face conflicts in order to fulfill their mission of offering free access to informative resources and reading before the model of privatization of knowledge, which can extend to the book in its traditional format and all those made possible by ict, because of book publishers’ mastery of the securement of earnings, which stands in stark contrast to the dissemination of knowledge as a public service, whose production and accessibility should be understood as part of the infrastructure that any contemporary society requires, whose existence and operation should not therefore be neglected by states or international organizations.¹⁰

These matters come in addition to the decline in sustained reading for pleasure. According to reading assessments conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment (pisa), reading for pleasure fell five points between the years 2000-2009. The report also points out that the crucial difference between students who have a good performance in reading assessment and those with poor performance is that the former read daily for pleasure, without regard to the length of time they engage in reading. This institution claims that on average students who read daily for pleasure have more than one year and a half grade level score over those who do not.¹¹ In Mexico, for example, the 2012 National Reading Survey¹² showed that rates have not changed since 2006. In the United States it was found that reading for pleasure has declined over the last twenty years, especially among young people between 18 and 24 year old; also it noted that there is a relationship between daily reading for pleasure with academic achievement, and improving reading comprehension, writing style, vocabulary, spelling and grammar.¹³

Against this background, considerations about the need to renew the role of the library arises, since the it is traditionally part of the social communication system that preserves and facilitates the articulation between the information recorded and the diverse communities. Therefore, also it tends to be revalued as part of the solution to problems of reading and access to and use of information. The formation of readers is among the contributions that our discipline can contribute to the construction of societies of this century, which forces them to innovate the paradigm of the library as a diverse training space.

THE LIBRARY: A SPACE FOR LEARNING, TRAINING, CULTURE AND SOCIALIZATION

The formation of readers as part of the functions of the library of the xxi century is embodied in proposals from different theoretical perspectives that conceive these things as matters of learning, training, socialization and development of information skills. The library is considered an alternative to reduce cognitive, social, cultural and generational gaps, while providing as options to reduce risks associated with an uninformed, uneducated and ignorant society.

In its report Towards knowledge societies, unesco reaffirms that in the twenty-first century, the development of critical thinking and the possibilities of Internet or multimedia are vital without prejudice to authentic instruments of knowledge such as the press, radio, television and school.¹⁴ Also it sees learning as a key to balance societies in terms of social, cultural, cognitive and digital gaps, so from this perspective it is considered that “libraries can become key actors in development, while favoring the reduction of the extreme polarization of our world with regard to access to cultural goods and information.”¹⁵ It also highlights the fact that, as a learning space, “the library —from the bookmobile to the great contemporary— architectural complex— will remain a pillar of the social movement of knowledge and a factor of vitality for learning networks. Indeed, cognitive and evolutionary functions make it a learning organization par excellence.”¹⁶

The idea of the library as a learning space is not new. If we go back to the societies of ancient Egypt and Pergamum, we find that their libraries were places of learning and research; likewise monastic libraries were training centers. The emergence of the public library in the nineteenth century responded to the need to provide literate citizens the possibility of continuing their self-learning. Later, in the sixties of the last century, the library is renewed and becomes meaningful as part of a conception of learning societies undergoing a paradigm shift in of learning that encouraged learning beyond the school environment or confined to a process in specific, definitive time. This outlook believed learning should be extended and undergo continuous updating, helping individual grow and enabling them to perform new activities. The 1972 unesco Faure Report stated that “education is no longer the privilege of an elite and should not be limited to a certain age group: Rather it should be coextensive at once with the entire community and the duration of the existence of the individual.¹⁷. The report stresses that it is more important “to learn how to learn, to reflect, to doubt and to adapt as quickly as possible and learn to question one's own cultural heritage while respecting consensus. These are the pillars on which knowledge societies should rest.”¹⁸

Jorge Larrosa asserts that it is the teacher's responsibility to maintain the library as a space for training, something that rarely occurs in educational institutions of our country. Therefore, the librarian must assume the dual responsibility, the first entailing training within the library and the second entailing the renewal of social ties with communities by providing innovative support for their activities and projects. The concept of reading as proposed by Larrosa includes training oriented in the sense of Bildung, which goes beyond the scope of the school-room. To the extent that individuals learn and take responsibility for their education, they build their own identities, shaping their particular humanity to become what they are.¹⁹

For Larrosa, experience offers many critical practices and possibilities for the field of education. In this light, reading experiences produce something in the individual; therefore reading is not a process that expends itself in any given lesson, but rather it serves to support understanding content, extending into an infinite space that unfolds the text in the broadest sense. It is this experience of the infinite in the training process that pulls the reader to move beyond the text. Because of information overload, Larrosa states that such experiences are increasingly difficult toachieve. Our current overdependence on informants and onmerely being informed subjects seems to cancel our chances of attaining this high level reading experience.

He adds that the information subject knows many things. He spends time searching for information and comes to know more and more;, but in this obsession with information and knowledge (not in the sense of “wisdom” but in the sense of “being informed”) he does not undergo any genuine transformation, while also running the risk of missing out on deeper reading experiences that require time to foster sensitivity in the skin, to voices, tastes and smells, to pleasure and suffering, to caresses and wounds and the human mortal condition²⁰ These reading experiences open awareness, critical thinking, reflection, imagination and creativity. This approach provides means for weighing the elements of experience, which can have a positive impact within the realm of education and the formation of reading and readers.

With regard to the library as a space for creating sociability, Roger Chartier believes that one of the purposes of “libraries of tomorrow could be to reconstitute lost sociability associated with books.”²¹ His proposal stems from his research on the history of the development of written culture and the diverse ways that reading has built social ties. Therefore, the proposal aims to reclaim reading as an option of communication, dialogue and shared moments centered on the written word, while including electronic media, because the virtual space includes diverse applications allowing sharing, discussion, exchange ideas and experiences, and the ability to raise questions. Similarly, the modalities of the blog, booktubers or social networks, where readings, comments and suggestions are shared, promote this text-centered sociability. It is interesting to contrast Chartier's proposal against the traditional libraries that have adopted the pedagogical model of solitary, quiet reading and study in their silent reading rooms that leave little room for socializing. Therefore, the author points out that “libraries should expand the opportunities and ways for readers to talk about their written intellectual and aesthetic heritage. In this way, they can build a public square based on the critical appropriation of writing”.²² He adds: “In a future that is already our present, these effects will collectively be what we know how to build. For better or worse, this is now our common responsibility”.²³

In the Tunis Declaration on libraries reading and intergenerational dialogue, signed by the Literacy and Reading Section of the International Federation of Library Associations (ifla), we find another aspect of the library as a space for building sociability. This declaration posits the role of libraries as spaces where reading is a means of social cohesion and intergenerational dialogue, solidarity and experience. Libraries also help reduce gaps between communities to the extent that the formation of readers and the information they access can promote social inclusion and integration. The document reiterates that learning is an activity occurring throughout life facilitated by reading and access to information.²⁴

From the perspective of librarianship, Alvarez Zapata and colleagues propose that the educational role of the public library is based on “a twin perspective, i.e., to serve as institutions for reading and places for expression, and as institutions that promote citizenship”.²⁵ Moreover, the authors note, the ideas of librarians who participated in the study on the relationship of the public library with reading and readers reveal “the persistence of a significant degree of the old dichotomy between library and classroom.” He adds that this occurs sometimes to differentiate library reading that is largely done of pleasure from reader training and practice that occurs in schools”.²⁶ In contrast, the other perspective views the library as an “and educational institution in itself tasked with of supporting lifelong learning and socialization”.²⁷

While the discourse regarding the library's relationship to written culture still has a way to go toward scientific consolidation, this approach nonetheless holds that, “it still contains a rich set of possible assessments allowing comprehension of the social world that often is lost or masked behind technical and administrative discourse”.²⁸ In this regard, we would add that traditional librarianship conceived the act of reading in the light of the conservative education and print media discourse that emphasizes reading of books especially for pleasure.

Another proposal on the relationship between the library, readers and reading was provided by Jose Ortega y Gasset in his inaugural speech at the Second International Congress of Librarians of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (ifla) held in Madrid the May 20, 1935, titled The Librarian's Mission, in which he offers an ontological philosophy of librarianship that emphasizes the “being” and “doing” of the profession in terms of “what every man has to do to be what he is and the professional mission”.²⁹ To this he adds: “to practice this profession, a librarian undertakes to do what society requires.”³⁰ In this regard, in one of his most noteworthy judgments, we find these invaluable words: “Now you feel the need not to search for books -that is no longer the real problem- but to encourage reading and to seek readers. And indeed, at this stage, libraries are multiplying and with them the librarian.”³¹ “The librarian of the future will have to lead the general reader through the jungle of books and be the doctor and hygienist of his reading.”³² Ortega y Gasset was concerned that readers would be lost in a “jungle” of books and the librarian would have to lead them so they would not get lost. This is still true in today's vast sea of ever growing information. Hence, Library Science programs have become increasingly focused on information literacy.

Librarianship has renewed its models of education and training of users by incorporating the development of informational abilities or information literacy emphasizing search, retrieval and use of information in diverse languages, specialties and formats. In some of these models training in critical reading is included.³³ This type of reading is essential to discriminating, choosing and using information from the overabundance and variety that exist.

In the context of the twenty-first century, proposals positing the library as a place of learning, training and socialization are conducive to renewing discussion on the practice of librarianship and its role in the formation of readers. This discussion can serve to help librarians think about and act in accord with the risks and advantages posed by the expanding universe of information; and ultimately it must include the development of capacities in which reading is a basic factor standing at the center of social development.

THE CONTRIBUTION OF BILDUNG IN TRAINING READERS IN THE AREA OF LIBRARY SCIENCE

With regard to the development of twentieth century societies, the library assumes the social duty to make innovative contributions that employ information as a factor of transformation. This scenario is conducive to renewing the paradigm of the library's educational function, not in the traditionalist sense as a complement to school, but rather with an expanded scope of intervention that transcends to meet a higher challenge, which is nothing less than the comprehensive training of readers that strives to strengthen reading of written codes and audiovisual media so readers can more fully exploit myriad information media. It is essential, then, to incorporate literacies of different types, such as digital, visual, sound, mathematical, spatial geometric, social, historical, cultural, kinesthetic; and even tactile, olfactory and gustatory literacy. These variations renew the undervalued modalities of reading and information that, because they are part of our routine reality, we assume they do not require decoding. As Roland Barthes reminds us, these are sources of information and experiences as well:

When I go down the street —or through life— and find these objects and without realizing it, I apply the same activity to all of them, which is to engage in some sort of reading. Modern man, the man of the cities, spends his time reading. First and foremost, he reads images, gestures and behaviors. This car tells me the social status of its owner; this costume indicates to me exactly the degree of conformism or eccentricity of its wearer; this appetizer (whiskey, Pernod or white wine), tells me about the lifestyle of my host. Even if it is a written text, a second message, provided between the lines of the first, is always given to us.³⁴

Because libraries assume the duty of renovating the library as a space for training, learning and socialization, they adopt the German Bildung pedagogical approach to construct a discourse on the formation of readers. This approach encourages subjects to develop diverse resources to unfold their abilities, thereby aiding them to become integrated, responsible and ethical as way of life. This approach stresses four central aspects, which E. C. Noguera takes from Klafki as follows:

• 1.

  Training for rational self-determination, in which the self-directed activity is the central embodiment of the training process, expressed by the concepts of self-determination, freedom, emancipation, autonomy, reason and self-regulation.

• 2.

  Training occurs within the context of a preceding human culture; therefore, human productions, civilization's successes in meeting the needs, knowledge about nature and human beings, political actions, system standards and ethical actions, forms of social life and aesthetic products are favored.

• 3.

  It involves a dialectical relationship between individuality and collectivity. Dialogue is necessary in the training process.

• 4.

  Human activity, which should be the goal of Bildung, consists of three activities:

  • •

    Moral activity: the practice of self-regulated moral responsibility..

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    Cognitive activity: that aims to make a link to human rational reflection on the meaning of being human and the responsibility for choices and their application. This activity requires permanent questioning as to possibilities and limits of instrumental rationality as part of the human condition.

  • •

    Aesthetic activity: that refers to the improvement of the experience of sensitivity to the phenomena of nature and human expression. Such sensitivity requires the development of the imaginative faculty, or fantasy, taste and the capacity for joy, aesthetic judgment, and includes such abilities as play and general sociability. While this may include training in appreciation of literature, theater, music and plastic arts, it also includes the aesthetic of everyday life.

These dimensions can be conceived, asserts Noguera, as comprising the general three-pronged training of human beings, i.e., the head, heart and hand. We might well add a fourth tine: multiple interests. The author also notes that in Bildung the development of the subject in the universal objective world is achieved when he reaches rationality as part of a process of appropriation of a critique of culture, an outcome that is not really a curricular objective, but rather is something that unfolds through the course of one's lifetime.³⁵

Interestingly, E. Rodriguez Moncada's conception on the term “training “or Bildung “is a recognition of one's own knowledge acquired in life experiences and actual practice, Insofar as such knowledge and skills are not acknowledged, people are not valued and they will continue considering themselves ignorant or be deemed so by others.””.³⁶ Destaca que esta formación está dentro y fuera de los espacios de educación,

This does not mean the individual ceases his learning. When he reads a book, when he converses with friends and when he enjoys a melody or film, the subject enters into a relationship with objects (distinct, apprehensible texts of reality), with which he lives, experiences and learns, thereby receiving a kind of training. In this regard the importance of informal education should also be acknowledged.³⁷

On the other hand, according to M. R. Farrow and R. Deimann, the Bildung approach leads to a participatory culture, because learning is not only cognitive, but also social and emotional, notwithstanding that the fact that these elements have been exiled from theories based on traditional learning models.³⁸ This could be because Bildung is empowering for people; since as V. Gomez Ibanez says: “while subjective appropriation of culture implies the possibility of progressive ‘enlightenment’ (Erhellung) of individual consciousness in order to enlighten society at large, the most highly enlightened individuals are, the more enlightened will be the entire social order”.³⁹

As previously mentioned, Jorge Larrosa's conceptions of reading and training incorporates elements of Bildung, by associating it to the subjectivity of the reader in terms of what the reader may know and what the reader is. It is not simply a form of entertainment or reading for learning as one might find in school. With regard to reading as training, Larrosa stresses the importance of experience, and reminds us that the experience of the training is nothing less than the appropriation of what is contained in those memorable words that are safeguarded in the library. The experience of reading is a way of relating to the text in which this appropriation is assured.⁴⁰ He adds, however, since the kind of reading experience that encourages the reader to appropriate contents is largely absent from schools, whether because of time constraints and the ever swelling flood of information available through diverse communication and entertainment media, making any degree of assimilation difficult, in that: an experience is something that fills and then empties indefinitely” as a function of the speed and amount of information.⁴¹ Experience is one of the fundamental elements of the training in Bildung. Neuroscience research acknowledges the importance of experience in the processes of neuronal renewal resulting from cells imprinted by information that exert effects on various processes involved and reflected in the production of knowledge and artistic creations.⁴²

Bildung has begun to consider alternatives in order to face current educational problems in reading, mathematics and science identified by pisa in several countries over the past ten years. Many thinkers and experts on these topics have revisited educational models in this field, including Kotthoff and Pereyra, whose see in Bildung a “guide to deal with educational changes arising from new communications technologies and virtual culture, [which are] very significant at a time of a new humanism when the identity, subjectivity and philosophy of the subject should problematized with greater scrutiny and care”.⁴³ The authors cited identified the essential aspects of Bildung after the philosopher Christina Schües updated them. Of these aspects, we emphasize the following:

• •

  Everyone is free. In this type of formative training, Schües believes that while knowledge is important, it is not everything, because aspiration, love and personal motivation should be encouraged in the same way. These factors can be applied to knowledge, but they are not necessary for knowledge to exist.

• •

  The specific field of implementation of Bildung ranges from the concept of humanity in terms of the relationships of tension to the formation of the world itself. This means being bold; and it means to broaden the horizons of information and the orientation of thought, both of which entail the ability to compare and reflect on different ways of thinking.

• •

  Establishment of doubt between the unity of rationality and the plurality of worlds, histories and cultures. Schües supports this contradiction, saying it is a self-reflection that is not subordinate to strategic thinking, but that it demonstrates a meditation (high consciousness) that leads to insight and the ability to possess carry a style of its own life responsibly, a condition that issues from empowerment.⁴⁴

In librarianship, authors such as E. Naranjo J. Verdugo have reviewed the notion of “formation” against the German concept of Bildung, identifying elements for which reading, experience, information and communication are essential⁴⁵ The discourse of library science and library practice in the formation of readers can find elements in the postulates of Bildung to guide its foundational philosophy and the work of its professionals, in that we have the responsibility to renew the librarian paradigm to strengthen the role of the library as a place for reading and to access information to support learning, training, socialization, while ensuring access to culture and its uses through the action of librarians in order to ensure that persons and the graphic record reside within a fruitful intellectual experience.⁴⁶ Thus, each person can develop creative, imaginative, emotional, contemplative and playful cognitive, reflective, critical, dialogical cognitive capacities that nurture wonderment, curiosity, free will, and intellectual and aesthetic enjoyment that is stimulated, not supplanted, by reading and information. All of these things are involved in the formation and transformation of subjectivity of knowledge and experiences, as being and knowing do not occur once and forever, but rather are tilled often through difficult efforts for the purpose of attaining wholeness.

MULTIFACETED LITERACY IN THE TRAINING OF WELL-ROUNDED READERS

The social role of the library can be enhanced in knowledge societies that require citizens to possess a higher mastery of reading in order to raise academic, work and learning performance throughout life. In response to this need, the field of library science can contribute with proposals to expand the promotion of reading to include such things as critical reading, the academy and dialogue between literature, the fine arts and sciences, thereby building sociability, multiple literacy and information skills.

Reader training programs can incorporate a wide range of resources that promote different types of reading desire to read, including pleasure reading. The resources that can be integrated into recreational reading activities offer a variety of topics from diverse fields of knowledge for critical or comparative reading, research, learning about other cultures, since multicultural training is promoted in some countries. In addition to supporting specialized topics, vocabulary is enriched and culture expands with the development of sensory experience and intellectual joy. All told, the library can expand and diversify the uses of reading, while strengthening the skills involved in deeper readings and reconstituting negative experiences that might have spoiled the reading experiences of readers in the past.

D. Masny views multiple literacy as the mastery of the multimodal variety of textualities with multiple meanings found in visual, oral, written, tactile, olfactory and digital texts. Texts in this sense include music, plastic arts, physics, mathematics and digital combinations that are fused with religion, sex, race, culture and power. These literacies are updated according to a particular temporal-spatial context in which they operate. Masny observed enriched thinking abilities and more complex associations in communities capable of reading diverse codes.⁴⁷

In conjunction with academic and literary genres, diverse reading codes can be incorporated including plastic arts, cinema, opera, theater, dance, comic books, news, radio and television broadcasts, while electronic genres offers various codes such as hypertexts, blogs and games, not to mention the resources offered by electronic technology to build sociability through reading and information media such as fanfic, social networks, booktubers and social reading. Other unique forms of texts completing this idea of the reading spectrum might include natural phenomena, architecture, nature and sports.

All of the resources listed above involve specific modalities of reading, the decoding of the language in which they are expressed. This leads to multiple literacy that extends the informational aspect toward deep, critical, comparative reading capable of unraveling things beyond those that are apparent. This can favor a hermeneutic or semiotic kind of reading that unveils symbolic elements used in film and the arts, which are conducive to research. These pathways of reading can encourage reflection, the desire to know, while eliciting pleasure through sensory experiences. The variety codes activate diverse areas of the brain associated with memory of information, experiences, feelings, joy, anger, sadness or happiness. As we have already stated, when the brain receives greater variety and novelty of information from the senses, neural activation will stimulate the expansion of human capabilities associated with the production of knowledge, invention and the arts.

Reading diverse codes also contributes to the development of the skills involved in the literacies that are part of learning the languages of diverse disciplines promoted as part of academic and informational literacy. Librarianship has developed more versatile models, such as the one proposed by the National Forum on Information Literacy by the American Library Association (ALA), which includes among its categories media literacy (visual and computational) and critical literacy (critical reading and critical thinking).⁴⁸ The Iceberg model⁴⁹ S. Kurbanoglu proposes covers skills and literacies of diverse print and audiovisual codes.⁵⁰ Dianne McKenzie's model includes diverse literacies such as reading, writing, speaking, listening, visual and cultural-historical modalities, as well as channels associated with multimedia, digitalization and mathematical and scientific knowledge, even extending to social networking, financial matters, music, graphics and kinesthetic expression.⁵¹

The diversity of written resources and a full range of audiovisual resources have been legitimized in the twenty-first century as sources of information and as objects of reading and culture. Recall that since the end of the last century, U. Eco and R. Barthes have been talking about the diverse signs existing in the social, cultural and natural world, linking sensory channels with the way people receive certain signs classified by the mind. In this way, the recipient receives signals from the sensory channels and transforms them into messages.⁵² For both of these authors, by reading the signs surrounding us we can extract information for the construction of knowledge and to serve as cultural capital for the maturation of the capabilities involved in perception. All this clarifies the information that citizens read in the elements, facts, objects or messages that make up the contexts and contribute to their training.

Today reading skills have become more complex. In this light, we propose extending library programs beyond the pursuit of pleasure per se to include promoting the desire to know, to do research, to think, to imagine, to create, and to know beyond the obvious. This is a more diverse kind of reading in which individuals take ownership of their development toward attaining a more robust, versatile cognitive, informational and cultural position, which is exactly what Bildung proposes. Thus, to the extent that a progressive enlightenment is forged among individuals, the illustration of the whole and society itself is occurring. The more enlightened the individual, the more enlightened will be the entire society and the greater with be the possibility of attaining genuine Erhellung.

In this light, the library can be place where knowledge favorable for learning from all times intersect. These information resources are conducive to training, culture, enlightenment, discovery and joy. Libraries will need to consider diversifying their collections to generate broad, diverse bibliographies to support academic programs, and cultural inurnment. But the librarian will have to cultivate a broad and varied culture. In this regard, J. Shera believes the librarian must cultivate broad culture. He also stated that such knowledge can only be understood from the point of view of the social responsibility assumed by the library. Regardless of the type of user “the interest of the librarian is the interaction of human minds communicating through the barriers of space and time, while making use of the graphic records to deliver content through the senses, sound, touch and sight. In this light, the graphic record is understood as including audible, tactile and visual modalities.”⁵³

In this regard, the author refers to a broader concept of information resources. It should be noted that for decades most modern libraries stimulate audiovisual media, unlike the traditional libraries focused on the development of print collections as sources of legitimate information. Today, however, the trend is to diversify the holdings. On the other hand, the digital culture, which is also written, has helped to renew its interaction with audiovisual codes that make up hypertext genres, while also offering a broad array of resources for diverse scientific, academic, educational, labor, productive, play, aesthetic and domestic activities, as well as communication options through the use of written and audiovisual codes.

CONCLUSION

Within the framework of knowledge societies, it is worthwhile to recall the following observations made by Jesse Shera: “The foundation of the library system is the communication of information, where information is deemed any graphic manifestation of intellectual activity. Thus, professionally the librarian must see the world as an intricate communications model.” In this connection, Shera adds: “the aptitude of the librarian consists of the ability to conceptualized a system on the basis of intellectual, emotional, social and physical world -the world that the librarian ‘serves’.”⁵⁴

Leaving aside the question of communications for the moment, a librarianship model for the societies of the twentieth century, characterized by profound shifts in the cultural model toward favoring knowledge in a global social context that requires production and innovation, articulated by electronic technology that accelerates the production and exchange of information, is needed. In this context, modalities through which citizens learn, inform, create, know, communicate, socialize, entertain themselves and use information are undergoing transformations. This information, moreover, is growing exponentially at a far greater rate than those who broadcast it from anywhere in the world. Like never before, all this opens up possibilities to generate, communicate, access and use content, ensuring the direct link between being informed and progress. The advantages of overabundance and instant availability of content, however, entails risks, because there are limits on a human being's ability to read, analyze, reflect on and assimilate knowledge, and otherwise have experiences. This situation has already come to the attention of critics, who warn of the potential of becoming societies of ignorance, misinformation and vulgarity, as the media, the information industry and technology exempt people from the need to invest time and effort in becoming properly informed.

Against this backdrop, the library can become a place where citizens choose a path other than the preferred cultural, social and educational determinisms. By appropriating reading and information, they can become citizens responsible for building knowledge societies. The library as an institution will become increasingly important in sustaining their formation or Bildung and will be comprised of written culture, arts, dialogue, social interaction, experiences, and interpersonal and social skills. But the library must make reading unfold in a variety of potentials wielded by under increasingly expert readers; thus, subjects would be trained to the extent that they enhance their capabilities and become responsible for their development and, thereby, their fates.