Keywords In and Out of Context

are the four fundamentals on which LIS is built, as I argue in Chapter 1, and yet the very complex physical components that underlie all of these abilities (sight, voice, hearing, memory) come in for almost no discussion within the field, though they obviously affect whether and how we can make use of information resources. (Libraries, in my view, are actually vast prostheses to compensate for our inability to describe, discuss, comprehend, or remember more than a tiny fraction of what any individual human being experiences in the course of a day, let alone what others may have experienced.)

For instance, I can’t think of any current study about the status of Braille literacy in the United States anywhere in the LIS literature, although this happens to be a question of considerable importance, as pointed out in “How Many Braille Readers?” in a recent issue of the Journal of Visual Impairedness and Blindness.

Similarly, the question of memory is becoming increasingly important in an aging population, and the loss of verbal fluency in even early stages of memory impairment, as eloquently noted here by retired neurologist and Alzheimer’s memoirist Daniel Gibbs (author of A Tattoo on My Brain), is something to which librarians working with adults would do well to be particularly sensitive.