Los horizontes del giro visual en la bibliotecología: La lectura de imágenes y los enfoques no representacionales

The so-called “visual turn” has been the result of the exponential growth in the production and use of images in many spaces of human endeavor, especially in recent years. Added to this is the fact that Library Science has advanced as a discipline towards its maturity in this same period, so that both developments appear as notable trajectories towards an epistemological leap that is intertwined: on the one hand, that of the phase of constitution of Library Science and, on the other, that of image reading. This raises the imminence of a hermeneutic clash, which begins in the figure of the librarian and later moves to the position of the reader. This "shock" is not necessarily negative if it is conceived as a cognitive conflict, which would imply the problematization of the textual dimension against the visual dimension. The image (in its different modalities) should serve the librarian as a reminder of the multidimensionality of the information with which he works on a daily basis. This implies that the librarian must have a highly developed capacity in his hermeneutic dimension, not only as a reader, but as a translator of that content. Without this capacity in the primary organization process, it will be difficult to carry out other processes such as user training or the promotion of image reading, which is essentially a deep act that involves various cognitive and emotional operations at various levels.