Representações sociais de bibliotecários: quando o antigo e o novo se confrontam

Abstract

This research had as objective the analysis of the social representations of librarian presented by professionals of this area who work in a private university. The investigation is supported by the assumption that social representations are constructions of concrete subjects and, as such, take form in the daily life of their relations, experiences, and interactions, integrating information, ideas, images, memories, affects that, through the screening of values, are reconstructed and organized, updating diverse relations, times and spaces. The investigation articulates the application of questionnaires to characterize the formation and experience of the subjects (N=60) and a free association of words, treated as proposed by Vergés (1992) and Flament (1981), to the thematic analysis of the texts produced by the subjects to justify the choices. The analysis of the text of free evocation of words and of the results of the text of double negation allow to apprehend the possible evolution of the librarian symbolic space that, from the limits of books and libraries, can be assuming the potentiality of information as the definer of its doing and its knowledge. Although the traditional configuration detected by the free association –books, libraries and information – persists, the test of double negation points to significant traces of a representation in change, in which the central nucleus would integrate only the element information. In this process of change, the news in circulation in the professional environment seem to be operating but, above all, the coherence and consistence of the practices adopted, focused and assumed by the subjects play the most important role. In the space of these practices, the ideas become concrete, the news materialize, that is, the process of change objectivation in articulated semantic fields and its anchorage in socially acceptable values and symbols to the belongings and reference groups are facilitated. These practices make possible the fundamental processes of construction and reconstruction of social representations of an object.