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Those of us accustomed to availing ourselves of the services and materials provided by academic libraries tend towards a taken-for-granted approach to what is provided by them. We turn to our university libraries as a starting point for our research, perhaps to help us to detail the research proposals, to find other works that support our own findings, and to tap into the knowledge of others stored there. We as librarians, keepers of the knowledge, and/or as students, accessors of that knowledge, see ourselves as part of a long tradition of scholarship closely entwined and we endorse , extend and reinforce the connection on a daily basis. But just how long is that tradition? The ability to locate, retrieve and apply information is such an integral part of modern scholarship that it appears impossible to conceive of another style of knowledge generation except in terms of our own culture of learning. We tend to view older forms of systematic approaches to scholarship as earlier, perhaps as yet under-developed versions of our own. In the attempts to establish the continuity of the library-scholarship tradition from Classical times, some pains have even been taken in pointing to the architectural similarities of the Roman colonnade along which the papyrus rolls were stored in small boxes in a pigeon-hole arrangement, and the cloisters of the monasteries where the books were stored . Similarly, there is little heed paid to the differences in the forms of the material stored—papyrus rolls compared with codex, the massive volumes of vellum manuscripts compared with hardbound printed paper, let alone the lightweight paperback with which we are so familiar today and the plethora of the electronic forms of information storage. As easily overlooked is the type of activities involved in first of generating the materials that fill the pages of the various collections, and secondly in the use that was to be made of them in the name of scholarship. This paper will examine some of the taken-for-granted aspects of this sort of thinking. I will argue that the very words ‘scholarship’ and ‘library’ would have been most unlikely to have appeared in the same sentence before the first book was produced by a printing press, and certainly not before the concept of the getting of knowledge was freed from its association with what it meant to be a cleric in the Christian tradition.

Stream: Libraries

Paper: The Contentious Relationship between Scholarship and the Library

Dr Zeegers has considerable experience in lecturing in English language, literacy and literature in Australia and other countries in the Asia-pacific region