Knowledge, Reading and Culture

Studies in Information Practice

Matthew Kelly

• Publisher: De Gruyter Saur
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9783111346519
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Knowledge, Reading and Culture: Studies in Information Practice is an interdisciplinary inquiry focusing on four decades of work by the South African information scientist, Emeritus Professor Archie Dick. The edited volume brings together library, information and history specialists to engage with a number of Professor Dick's areas of research focus: the culture and philosophy of information (especially with regard to questions of epistemology); information freedom (how censorship and media concentration affects political agency); reading and publishing cultures (especially in colonial and postcolonial contexts) and focuses on how these affect information education for diverse, multicultural and cosmopolitan communities. How our understanding of true belief is justified at the level of classification, indexation, curation and publishing have become significant issues in the transition to digital environments. This work seeks to harness a range of insights relating to the modes of knowledge representation in information spaces and to uncover how these impact globally significant repertoires of agency, with a special focus on how the mediation of reading and access to public knowledge is both a site of resistance and appropriation.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Epistemology, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Knowledge
• What Do They Know Anyway?: Epistemology and Library Practice in the Age of AI
• Conformity or Complicity? An Analysis of the Discourse Around Knowledge, Reading, and Culture by Information Professionals in South Africa
• Users, Non-users, and the Community: Implications in the Institutional Context of Information Mediation
• “How Beautiful the World Is/How Beautiful the World Would Be”: Conceptions of the Library in Eco’s The Name of the Rose
• Reading Beyond Boundaries: Texts as Catalysts for Orientation, Agency, and Cultural Renewal
• Thinking Globally, Acting Nationally: Texts and Paratexts in Translation
• Fiction and Film as Both Record and Distortion: Kingsley Amis’s Novel That Uncertain Feeling (1955), the Feature Film Only Two Can Play (1962), and the Post-war Public Library in Britain
• Bibliotherapy, Well-being, and Empowerment: The Emancipatory Possibilities of Self-help Reading, and How Libraries Can Help
• Reading Our Way In: Black Women’s Book Clubs as Third Spaces for Access and Inclusion in Reading Culture
• A People’s Librarian. The Legacy of H.I.E. Dhlomo in South Africa’s Literary Landscape
• Reading Against the Grain: Herbert Dhlomo’s The Reader’s Companion
• “Concerning the Irretrievable Loss of All My Books”: One German Woman’s Books in Africa, 1936–1940
• Common Readers and Writers in Colonial Otago
• Arundel del Re and the Chelsea Book Club: A Modernist Experiment
• Shaping Knowledge: Access, Education, and Struggle
• Access to Information and the Ideals of Democracy in a Digital Age
• Academic Training in Information Science: An Integrated and Transdisciplinary Model for a Diversity of Professions in the Digital Age
• Rebuilding Knowledge: Epistemology and Knowledge Organization for Information Practice
• Notes on Contributors
• Persons and Subjects Index