Adult Learning and Library Helping

HELPINGDESIGNED FOR adult learners in libraries is more than a task or a duty; it is an idea, an act of the imagination. True, both the helper and the person helped are present in time and space, but they are also part of an intangible act that occurs far beyond immediate needs and words, an act of reaching out to touch the pervasive continuities of adult intellec-tual life. “Helping, ” as i t is used in these pages, is much like family touching and friendship, especially those affective conversations of inquiry and response that inform our lives, shaping them by invisible actions and silent messages. These intangible acts occur hundreds of thousands of times each day between strangers in public rooms, in the presence of informing tools and educative processes. It is not useful to complicate, mystify or over-rationalize these acts, but i t is valuable to speculate about the meanings and conditions of the library helping process. Helping is a common, and yet remarkable, communicative, prosocial act, having dimensions, metaphors, obstacles, and continuities. Clearly, to discuss these aspects of library helping is to go beyond standard discourse having to do with public service. T o serve and to help are different acts, or different conceptions of agency, in the library. The first may be seen as reactive, the second as proactive. Understanding the difference between serving and helping has deep implications for all library inter-actions with adult learners and for all librarians who choose to be helpers