EXTENDING THE TECHNOLOGICAL, DISCURSIVE, AND RHETORICAL HORIZONS OF ACADEMIC RESEARCH LIBRARIES’ INFORMATION ARCHITECTURES: AN ANALYSIS OF NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY’S JAMES B. HUNT JR.

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes how North Carolina State University's (NCSU) James B. Hunt Jr. Library extends the ways in which the information architectures of academic research libraries can function as a technology, as discourse, and as rhetoric. The starting point for the analysis is the libraries of antiquity, which functioned technologically as a means through which rhetors extended their recollective powers from the memories in their individual minds to the aggregate contents of library collections. As libraries evolved over many centuries, this technological functionality was joined by another such functionality: the capacity to extend users' powers of invention by providing information architectures for reading, reflection, and browsing. Through their capacities to extend users' recollective and inventive powers, libraries have become recognized as symbols of knowledge, and this discursive power has been leveraged by libraries and their controlling organizations for the purposes of rhetoric; in other words, the symbolic import of libraries has been drawn on by rhetors as an available means of persuasion. In the current information ecosystem of networked computing, the relevance of libraries in providing these functionalities is being thrown into question, and, as a result, libraries are staking out new roles and meanings. In this context, NCSU's Hunt Library constitutes a bold re-envisionment of libraries' traditional functionalities. Opened in 2013 and situated on NCSU's Centennial Campus, this library has an information architecture designed around technology-infused collaboration. Although a large collection of print materials is still present in the library, most of these materials are warehoused in a high-density shelving facilitate that is only accessible through an automated retrieval system. The dissertation's analysis of this information architecture shows that the Hunt Library reimagines the traditional functionalities of libraries as a technology, discourse, and rhetoric while opening significant new horizons for the operations and meanings of libraries.