Academic Librarian

I don’t normally discuss books on the blog, mainly because I rarely read books with any relationship to libraries. Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws or Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars (to name two books I’m currently reading) seem to be of little relevance to librarianship, though I suppose the same could be said of Aristotle’s ethical theory and Rawls’ political philosophy and I’ve managed to draw connections between them and reference service and collection development.

This week I did read a book of some library interest, or at least I think it might be: True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008). I ran across it because someone mentioned it in a comment on this blog (thanks, John!).

It’s a quick read, though perhaps a bit depressing. Mostly it’s about the way that the Web and other modern communication technology and trends are exacerbating a problem inherent in the human psyche. We have a tendency to see what we want to see or believe things that reinforce what we already believe rather than challenging ourselves or seeing another’s point of view. We tend to believe what we want to be true. The book mentions several psychological experiments that seem to confirm this. With what the author calls the splitting of reality, it’s easier than ever to get just the news and views we want, which tend to be the ones that confirm what we already think it true. Of necessity, we act as if what we believe is true, which implies that we all think people who disagree with us are wrong. With the Internet and niche television, we can now insulate ourselves from the Other. A mission of higher education should be to challenge our own thinking and make us more able to empathize with others. In the last post I wrote that if we can’t understand why people would hold political views very different from our own, then the problem is our own lack of knowledge and imagination. True Enough is in one sense an examination of willful ignorance and an absence of empathetic imagination. There are chapters on the swift-boating of John Kerry, 9/11 conspiracies, and the “stolen” presidential election of 2004 that investigate why people seem to believe things that have by any reasonable standard been unproven. Some people just want to believe that John Kerry was a bad soldier or that he really won the 2004 election or that the US government blew up the World Trade Center, despite the lack of real evidence.

The chapter on 9/11 conspiracies resonated the most with me because I’ve watched a lot of the conspiracy videos (such as Loose Change, which Manjoo discusses) and seen a lot of the websites in my exploration of this bizarre shadow world. In my writing seminar I use a 9/11 conspiracy website and the 9/11 Commission Report in an exercise on evaluating sources. How does one debunk conspiracy theories, since the people holding them are apparently incapable of seeing any evidence that doesn’t affirm what they already believe? If True Enough is true enough, then one doesn’t debunk them for the true believers.

There was even a Princeton connection, which I’m sure will be fascinating for the three of my readers at Princeton. The author describes different perspectives on a 1951 Princeton-Dartmouth football game that Princeton won despite what some Princetonians claimed was Dartmouth’s dirty playing. Princetonians watched the game and saw Dartmouth playing dirty. Dartmouthians (is that the right word? probably not) watched the game and just saw a rough game. The point is that everyone sees the same thing going on, but processes it according to their own biased perspective. We see what we want to see, and perhaps more importantly don’t see what we don’t want to believe. We all witnessed the news in the months leading up to war in Iraq. Some of us saw a compelling case for going to war with an evil dictator who had attacked the US on 9/11 and who had weapons of mass destruction he was just itching to use on America, while others of us waited in vain for any substantial case for war and wondered why other people were gullible enough to believe the unjustified lies daily emanating from the White House. Reality is what we want it to be.

We’re in the business of information, and how information is manipulated and propagated is probably of interest to a lot of us. I’d recommend True Enough as a good quick read about some ways information is now disseminated in society. I’ll conclude with a quote from the book:

“Propagandists have become experts at mining the vulnerabilities of the many-media world … . They’ve adopted a range of methods to exploit the current conditions—some are as benign as the covert placement of products in films and TV shows, but others are more questionable, such as planting VNRs [video news releases] on the news, or buying up pundits, or spreading their messages anonymously and “virally” through blogs, videos, and photos on the Web.

Technically, what these operatives aim to do is capture one or many of the forces I’ve discussed so far: selective exposure, in which we indulge information that pleases us and cocoon ourselves among others who think as we do; selective perception, in which we interpret documentary proof according to our long-held beliefs; peripheral processing, which produces a swarm of phony experts: and the hostile media phenomenon, which pushes the news away from objectivity and toward the sort of drivel one sees on cable.

In practice, what propagandists are doing is simpler to describe: they’ve mastered a new way to lie.”

By now some of you might have heard of this strange story. An instructor of introductory writing classes at Dartmouth threatened for a while to sue Dartmouth and several of her students because they resisted her ideas, or something like that. The story looks complicated, and based on her own statements and those of students it seemed the instructor had a number of problems that had nothing to do with unruly students. (Follow the various links in the story.) Some have interpreted this controversy as the typical result of the relativist absurdity run amok in the humanities. While there is plenty of absurdity in the humanities these days, a more mundane interpretation might be that this instructor just wasn’t a very good teacher. Specifically, it seems to me she failed in at least three ways: she tried to base her authority on her degree rather than her abilities (based on student comments); she treated her students with disrespect; and she mistakenly thought her job was to teach French theory and something called “science studies” when in fact her job was to teach them college writing. Generally, though, she was unable to establish a proper ethos in the classroom, in part because of a failure of logos. All teachers can learn lessons from this.

Ethos and logos are two of the three standard appeals in classical rhetoric, the third being pathos. Logos is the appeal to reason. Ethos is the appeal based upon the character of the speaker. Both of these are crucial for establishing authority in classrooms, at least in classrooms of intelligent college students. Both our intellectual abilities and our characters affect how students view us.

Our writing instructor blamed the students for being resistant to French theory, among other things. If she was a product of the same sort of English department I toiled in, she had probably been surrounded for years by people who were unable or unwilling to challenge the theories propounded by their professors. Once one leaves the intellectual hothouse of graduate school, one necessarily meets people for whom the phrases “Foucault says” or “according to Lacan” carry no argumentative weight whatsoever, and some graduate students aren’t prepared to respond to the normal reaction to such a statement, which is “So?” Lacan may be like a god to radical psychoanalysts, but nothing he says is likely to be accepted by critical people without a lot of argumentation. Unfortunately too many academics take a hagiographic approach to too much French theory. French theory is so alien to Anglo-American intellectual traditions that to use if effectively, one needs to start at the beginning and build the necessary base upon which one can later erect the extravagant superstructure. One cannot rely upon the claim that one’s graduate training proves one is correct. One has to be able to make arguments and overcome objections. The problem is that these so-called “theories” are hardly self-evident and rarely subject to verification or falsification, which makes them difficult to prove. Nevertheless, regardless of their validity or lack thereof, or even whether they would implicitly deny their own validity and render moot why anyone would accept them, it is still necessary and possible to provide arguments for why anyone would even find these thinkers compelling.

This is logos in the classroom. At eighteen college students may be immature in various ways, but they’re rarely stupid, at least ones at places like Dartmouth or Princeton. The students I teach are usually very intelligent and also very critical. To treat them as babes who should sit at the feet of their French masters and accept everything told to them without argument is disrespectful both of them and of the common activity of learning in which we should all be engaged. Nothing I read made it sound like the students were just rowdies, at least until their criticisms had been ignored. The students were critical and challenged ideas. That’s what college students should do, though never in a belligerent way. If teachers cannot respond effectively to legitimate criticism of their ideas, then it’s clear that either their ideas are faulty or that they have insufficient grasp of them. Either way, the fault is in the teacher.

I had little sympathy for the teacher in this situation because she seemed to place an inordinate amount of importance on her degree rather than her abilities, as if this is enough to establish intellectual authority. We’ve probably all known plenty of people with PhDs who were nevertheless intellectual lightweights. I’ve taught several writing seminars at Princeton similar to the one at Dartmouth. I didn’t go to an Ivy League university and I don’t have a PhD, but I’ve never had any trouble establishing my intellectual authority with students or responding to their criticisms. I’ve also not had any trouble with students resisting my readings, whether those readings are liberal, socialist, feminist, or conservative. Almost any reasonable arguments can be made compelling if taught properly.

I think the main reason students don’t challenge me belligerently is because I deliberately try to cultivate an ethos based both on logos and on mutual respect. First, logos. I assume that every reading in my class is up for argument, and indeed choose sources that argue with each other. They might all be wrong, but they can’t all be right. Logos in a class such as this requires taking both sides with equal rigor. The best way to appreciate any argumentative text is to read it three times. First, as sympathetically as possible, trying to get into the mindset of the writer and understand why such an argument would be appealing and making the best possible case for the reading at hand, whatever it may be. Second, as contrarily as possible, subjecting every statement to as rigorous and hostile critique as possible. Only after these two approaches is it possible to approach an argument open-mindedly, understanding both its merits and faults. The assumption is always that people make their arguments in good faith and have justifiable reasons to believe as they do, even if I think they’re absolutely mistaken. But what I think doesn’t matter. Learning to write academic essays shouldn’t be about learning to regurgitate what the instructor thinks about an issue or to parrot the party line, but instead learning to enter critically into a scholarly conversation on a particular issue.

This technique is shunned by zealots who think they’re absolutely right and everyone else is absolutely wrong. The zealots rarely engage counterarguments and surround themselves with the like-minded. Unfortunately this unwillingness to engage counterarguments makes them intellectually slack until they reach the point they cannot defend their ideas against criticism and instead try to dismiss their critics without bothering to reason with them. Hence, assumptions such as that people who don’t agree with you are just evil or stupid or ignorant or intellectually resistant whatever. That might be the case for some people, but pretty much any theoretical point of view has articulate defenders somewhere. If you can’t understand why someone would believe other than you do about an issue, then you just don’t understand the issue. For example, if you can’t understand the appeals of liberalism, conservatism, socialism, feminism, libertarianism, republicanism, communitarianism, communism or whatever ism has attracted articulate followers in the past century or so, then that usually shows an lack of knowledge and imagination on your part.

Despite the neglect of the zealots, it’s remarkable how effective this approach is in the classroom, both for teaching students how to think critically and challenge their own dull and often unsupported ideas and for teaching an ethic of respect that should carry on into classroom discussion. Such a discussion makes it clear to students that we are all fallible human beings who argue and disagree but that it’s possible to come together in an intellectual endeavor, even if just for the brief period of the seminar. While avoiding the easy relativism of saying there’s no right and no wrong and I’m okay and you’re okay, I still try to convey the undeniable fact that when discussing politics and rhetoric there is room for healthy and considerate disagreement. Such is the case with French theory as well. The way to handle objections from students isn’t to assert your alleged intellectual authority, but to establish that authority in their minds by meeting their objections with better counterarguments while still showing you respect them as interlocutors. Classroom discussion is a rhetorical activity. In the humanities, at least, teachers have to persuade, not just dictate, if they want to be taken seriously by serious students. It’s not that hard if you know what you’re talking about.

Yesterday’s post got something of an odd comment. The first part of the comment wasn’t so odd, but it ended thusly:

“I don’t know how serious you are with this idea, but I am not at all certain that the average person would care what a librarian tells them. Librarians are all communists, anyway.”

As for being serious, since my suggestion was to assign a research librarian to every twelve Americans, it’s probably obvious I was just having a little fun during the political season. It could be amusing to consider what this plan would really look like, but I’ll let someone else do the considering.

It’s the second sentence that struck me as odd. “Librarians are all communists, anyway.” Even if that were true, I don’t see how it would be relevant to the discussion, but I’m wondering what motivates the statement at all. Have I been surrounded by Reds in the stacks all along and just haven’t noticed? That might add some excitement to my ordinarily quiet library. Most of the intrigues where I work are quite banal and none are likely to lead to the abolition of capitalism. Of course, 160 years of communism hasn’t led to that, either, so what do I know.

Just speaking personally, I’m a librarian and I’m pretty sure I’m not a communist, which is a pity because I look good in red. I don’t think I’ve ever associated with any known communist librarians, and considering my past experience with self-professed communists (I was a literature student for several years, after all) I’d probably know if I did. Communists tend to be aggressively evangelical and eager to share the economic and political wisdom they have gained from, for example, teaching American literature. I don’t think any of my colleagues are communists, though I guess they might be. In general, I doubt Princeton would be the sort of place to attract communist librarians. I don’t think they’d feel comfortable around all those rich students. And it would be very hypocritical for my communist colleagues to contribute to TIAA-CREF.

I suppose a number of the librarians in the SRRT consider themselves communists, and I must have worked with some librarians from SRRT before, though none of them have ever tried to get me to join the CPUSA or anything. Perhaps I worked with the democratic socialists instead of the communists. Maybe this group of librarians have convinced my commenter that all librarians are communists, just because they’re so vocal, but if we assume that most communist librarians belong to the SRRT (not an outrageous assumption), and couple that with the fact that most librarians don’t belong to the SRRT, this at least suggests that most librarians are not communists.

I’m not even sure I’ve ever been in a political discussion with any librarians where anyone supported communism. I think being vocally pro-same sex marriage is probably as close as anyone’s come, and that’s not very close. Now it could be that I just don’t hang out in the right librarian circles (or the left librarian circles, as the case may be), in which case I’ll probably never get to know the communist librarians. Also, I instinctively recoil from anyone who wants to proselytize passionately on behalf of their cause, whether that cause is political, religious, or professional, so I’d probably steer clear of the communo-evangelists, just as I would from a librarian wearing one of those Adam Smith ties and crowing about the magic of the market. (Hey, it could happen.) It could also be that most of my interaction with librarians is purely professional, and a library committee meeting is hardly the place to discuss the dictatorship of the proletariat, unless it were, I suppose, a committee for the Communist Party Library, if such exists. But even among my librarian friends, I’ve never heard anyone say, “hey, wouldn’t a communist revolution be a great idea” or “that capitalism thing is pretty bad; let’s abolish it.”

It seems safe to conclude that most librarians are probably left of whatever counts as the political center at any given time in America, but one hardly has to advocate state ownership of all productive property or the abolition of capital to be left of the American center. Just thinking homosexuals shouldn’t be openly mocked or insisting that the rule of law applies to everyone, including the President, seems to be enough. This political labeling is always tricky, though. I know a number of Jewish librarians who are very pro-Israel, and such sentiments anger many on the left, though these librarians are mostly leftish. Even what is considered definitive of left or right is so simplistic at times. You could support social and economic equality, expanded social programs, universal health care, more civic participation, fewer aggressive wars, stronger international diplomatic efforts, increased environmental protections, the legalization of marijuana, and an end to capital punishment, but if it doesn’t bother you that law-abiding citizens own firearms, then you’re hopelessly reactionary in some people’s political ledgers.

Maybe it’s just the nature of libraries. Some people seem to think that libraries in general are communistic, or at least socialistic endeavors. Obviously we’re talking about public libraries here, not academic, and certainly not private academic libraries like mine. The stolid Presbyterians who founded Princeton wouldn’t have liked that idea at all. Were this the case, though, it seems unlikely that Andrew Carnegie, capitalist extraordinaire, would have supported them so much. If support for any publicly funded public goods marks one as a communist, then just about all Americans except the libertarian fringe are communists. That doesn’t seem very likely. There are all sorts of traditional liberal or republican reasons to support libraries and other public goods.

Maybe it’s that open access movement or the copyright issues. Those librarians who want open access to publicly funded research or who argue that current copyright laws are egregiously excessive do seem a bit pinkish in the right light. Or maybe they do. I don’t really know. I’m unfamiliar with the communist position on intellectual property.

This comment couldn’t be based on the the common stereotypes of librarians. No one thinks the little old woman with the bun shushes people because it’s too noisy for her to read the Grundrisse in peace. So it must be based on a librarian’s perception, and presumably a librarian who isn’t in fact a communist, possibly making this something of a paradox as well. I’m just wondering what led to that particular perception, because I just don’t see it. But then again, I’m probably a victim of false consciousness or something.

I hear there’s a presidential campaign on, so I’m feeling a bit political. I just can’t help myself. With all the policy suggestions going around, I wanted to offer one of my own.

There’s an intellectual breakthrough that comes when one begins to understand that merely stating opinions, no matter how forcefully they are stated, doesn’t impress intelligent people. Politicians, of course, rarely go out of their way to impress intelligent people, and thus sometimes never reach this point, at least in public. College students accomplish this breakthrough when they realize that assertions need argument and evidence and that evidence needs analysis and evaluation. Librarians play a crucial role in this discovery. Along with the instructors, they help students not only find sources for an argument, but help them learn how to analyze and evaluate these sources. It is part of our mission to educate people in the intelligent discovery and use of information. As I survey the state of the republic, sometimes I think everyone in the country needs a librarian. I recommend this as a new public policy. Perhaps the candidates could add this to their stump speeches.

Yesterday afternoon I heard a Fresh Air interview with Al Gore marking the occasion of the paperback publication of The Assault on Reason, his book from last year decrying the disappearance of reason and logic from public discourse. (I didn’t read the book, since I usually don’t read popular books that I think I’ll most likely agree with, but I read the excerpt here.) He noted in the interview and in the book that, for example, at the time of the vote to authorize the war in Iraq, 75% of the American public believed that the war was a retaliation against Saddam Hussein because of his responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. These were people immune from evidence, analysis, logic, and reason. They all needed their own librarians to help them find sources and evaluate their veracity and worth. Then there are those people who believe Senator Obama is a Muslim. Yep, they need librarians, too.

Or let us take the “gas tax holiday” being touted by Senators McCain and Clinton as a way to provide relief to those of us feeling financial pain at the pump. I’m pretty sure there are some sources in the library that would point out that reducing prices (as a tax holiday would do) stimulates demand. Increasing demand for oil will only drive up prices more in the long run as well as increase rather than decrease American dependence on foreign oil. One of the senators thinks the lost government revenue would be made up by taxing oil companies. There are probably some good sources somewhere in the library that point out that businesses make profits by passing their overhead on to consumers. I think those people in Congress have their own librarians, but other devotees of the “gas tax holiday” need their own librarian, too, someone to help them find, analyze, and evaluate sources.

Al Gore talks about the problems of having political discourse governed by 30-second television ads and television newscasters spending the vast majority of their time giving us constantly updated coverage of the banal and insubstantial while not providing coverage of any political debate (I’m paraphrasing). I’ll have to take his word for it, because I quit watching television over 20 years ago. (I do sometimes watch some TV shows on DVD, but I’ve hardly watched a commercial television show or news broadcast during just about my entire adult life.) He rightly notes that the Internet, if it’s kept neutral, can be a great way to bring information to people, and much better than television because it’s an interactive and hot medium. To some extent that’s certainly true. Despite the ravings of Andrew Keen and Tara Brabazon, there is in fact a tremendous amount of thoughtful political analysis on the Internet if one ventures beyond the opinion pages of the newspapers.

However, we could get rid of television entirely, and that wouldn’t help the problem of irrational political discourse. For every thoughtful bit of policy analysis, there are thousands of stories about Britney Spears and the like. Pornography and celebrity news make up such a large and popular portion of the Internet because that’s what people like. Researching and reasoning about difficult issues that will have enormous impacts on their lives is much more difficult than looking at Britney flashing her pudenda to the paparazzi. With cringing trepidation, I just checked the Google entertainment news. The top story was something about Britney Spears, naturally. The second story was about somebody convicted of something to do with stalking Uma Thurman (okay, that one was a little more interesting because he was a U. of Chicago grad school dropout. I wonder if Regenstein drove him to it!). And the third story was on some celebrity engagement. I give the lead paragraph in full: “Following the news that Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds have gotten engaged, friends are speaking out to offer heartfelt congratulations on the pairs’ next step.” I found that sentence fascinating in a number of different ways that had little to do with its literal meaning, but still, it’s fluffy stuff, and very easy to digest mentally.

Gore argues that “the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response,” and that “the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework.” I agree, but I have a further suggestion. In addition, everyone needs a librarian to help them do research on important topics and learn how to analyze and evaluate the information they find, just like academic librarians do with students now. Some public librarians might argue that almost everyone does now in fact have a librarian, but fails to take advantage of this valuable resource. This just isn’t enough!

This should be done more the way we work with our writing program. Every class of twelve students is assigned a librarian, who teaches a bit about research and often meets individually with students. I propose everyone in the country be assigned a librarian, or perhaps every twelve persons. That’s the only way this thing’s going to work. The “Everyone Needs a Librarian” campaign assumes that what should be a prerequisite for engagement in democratic politics is in fact woefully lacking in this country, and proposes a solution to fix this problem. I think the ALA needs to get involved. The ALA has an Office of Intellectual Freedom. Perhaps they could also open an Office of Intellectual Rigor to address this issue. They could start on a committee. I’ll serve on it. Heck, I’ll even chair it.

This is sort of a follow up to But What If I Don’t Want it All, except I’ve decided to bring the personal to the professional, not because I like to expose myself, so to speak, but just to show what I think about when I think about moving up to another job. I don’t know how typical I am, but we’ll see. The discussion in that post was a presentation of arguments about why bright people might not want to be library directors. Here I’m talking mostly about myself and about a good job I didn’t apply for and some of the reasons why. The deadline for applications ended last week, so I feel safe talking about it. The temptation is over.

First, I should say that like a lot of librarians I’m somewhat geographically limited. My wife has a good and somewhat unusual job at ETS and we (sort of) own a house in New Jersey that we most likely couldn’t sell in this market. (But make me a good offer and we’ll talk!) Because of spousal and housing issues, debt, an uncertain economy, and my own risk averseness, the only way I could afford to just pick up and move out of the region would be a library job that essentially doubled my salary, an unlikely circumstance for a job one step up.

Which is why I paid particular attention to an ad for a job in the area. Very few jobs I see are even remotely tempting for me, but I came very close to applying for the job of Assistant Director of Research and Instructional Services at Penn. However, I didn’t apply. Believe me, it wasn’t them. It was me. I’m certainly not saying I would have been an ideal or even attractive candidate for this job, only that were I interested in moving up this would be the sort of job I’d apply for. Those are very different propositions.

For all I know it looks like a great job. I heard very nice things about both the department and the person this position would report to, and this from someone who actually works there. It’s also a large private research university, which is where I feel most comfortable. The job would be a natural next step in a career toward a directorship someday if that were my goal. In addition, a new job with more responsibility would bring new challenges and experiences, and that would be good for me professionally. Plus, I live two miles from a station with a train that would drop me off right in front of campus. Looking good so far.

I looked very closely at the job requirements, and thought I looked pretty good for everything except “effective supervisory experience.” I could possibly make a case that based on other experience and abilities I have the talent and capacity to be an effective supervisor, but that’s definitely missing from my resume and definitely a requirement, and possibly the most important one. The lack might have just gotten me tossed from the pile, but it’s possible that I’d have gotten a second look. Never hurts to try.

So why didn’t I apply? The possibility of getting thrown out of the pile because I haven’t supervised librarians was part of it, certainly. Nobody likes rejection, and why waste everyone’s time. In addition, there was the tally I did of the pros and cons of getting the job versus staying in my own.

I’ve listed the pros, but then I thought of the cons. First and foremost, I like my job. I like the library, I like the students, I like the departments, and I like a lot of my colleagues. I like collection development. I also like the fact that I get to teach a class each year. All this brings a variety to my work that I enjoy. I also have a lot of flexibility and autonomy in my work, which could disappear in an administrative job. And just in general I feel like my work and opinions are respected. Variety, flexibility, autonomy, respect. These are not job attributes to be dismissed lightly. I calculated how high an offer would have to be to make it worth my while to give up known goods and compensate for unknown burdens, and it seemed to me highly unlikely based on the statistics that Penn or anyplace else would pay that much for this particular position, especially for someone without “effective supervisory experience.”

About the only things I don’t like are my commute (which would actually be a bit longer to Penn) and the fact that my office has no window. When you think about it, this isn’t much to dislike, and both things are tangential to the job itself. I never dread work. I never get that Sunday evening panic some people get, though that’s possibly because I do chat reference most Sunday evenings. I won’t say it’s stress free, because it is sometimes stressful, but it’s never stress in that bad way where one sinks into a severe work-related depression and contemplates killing oneself or others.

Why am I writing about this? Because I see the questions come up. Why aren’t more people applying for what look like good jobs? Why is it so hard to find librarians for management jobs, especially AUL and director positions? Are there just too few people experienced enough? Have libraries not been grooming managers? This is probably part of the case. Or are our standards unreasonable? This could also be. I do think libraries are going to have to take chances on talent in the future, and realize that being younger than the average librarian doesn’t necessarily mean one can’t effectively supervise other librarians.

Or are people just unwilling to make certain sacrifices, as Steven’s post hinted? Though there are librarians who have a contempt for management as such or think particular jobs would be too much work, I suspect that a lot of the reasons have more to do with an inability to make sacrifices rather than an unwillingness. Sometimes it’s a work/life balance issue, but also people are entrenched for various reasons, and the longer one stays the harder it becomes to leave. Spouses have jobs. Children are in school. Parents are in retirement homes. People like their jobs. Friends of 10, 20, 30 years live in the area. Moving is disruptive and stressful. Starting a new job is stressful. For some librarians it’s probably not that they’d mind working later or taking the responsibility, it’s just that they don’t want to totally disrupt their lives and those of their families for such jobs. Or it could be that libraries in general don’t pay enough to make many librarians consider uprooting their families. How much might it take to uproot the rooted? Companies paying their salespeople $250K/year never seem to have trouble relocating those people.

Other than economics, it seems to me the other motivating factors are desperation and desire. If I hated my job or were very dissatisfied, I’d be constantly on the market and be more willing to relocate or move on. The other factor is desire. If I really, really, really wanted to move up into administration, then perhaps other issues wouldn’t have as important a place in calculation. Spouse has a job? She can find another one! Salary not that much better than my current one, all things considered? Think of the satisfactions of having more responsibility and a more exalted job title and being a step further up the ladder! Reduced flexibility and added responsibility would be a big burden on the family? Hey, what’s more important, my family or my career! But would the benefits of this overcome the burdens and offset the loss of current goods? It’s hard to say. With every change comes loss of something, and sometimes we just don’t want to lose those things.

The people have spoken, the results are in, and it turns out I’m both a loser and a winner in my RUSA elections. I did win my election to be the RUSA CODES Member-at-Large. Thanks RUSA CODES people! On the other hand, I got throughly stomped in my election for RUSA RSS Vice-Chair/ Chair-Elect, but thanks anyway to the people who voted for me. I’d like to congratulate my opponent on waging a clean, fair, and generous campaign, and express regret that I won’t be able to continue my fight to take RSS power away from the lobbyists and special interests and give it back to the people. Since this is the fourth year in a row I’ve lost an RSS election, I’m starting to think they don’t like me very much. I’m tempted to say, “You won’t have Bivens-Tatum to kick around anymore, because this is my last blog post!” (I hope you get that allusion.) The silliest thing about the whole situation is that I didn’t much want to run in the first place, wasn’t at all sure I wanted to win (LOTS of work), and yet I feel bad losing. Humans are such absurd creatures.

Steve Lawson left a comment on my Some Things Don’t Change post that I tried to respond to in another comment, but the comment started to get away from me, so I decided to make it a post. As you’ve no doubt noticed, I have trouble writing briefly. Sorry about that. Thanks for reading anyway.

The comment:

“I agree with many of the things you say, especially about not simply assuming that students are different and that they humanities must change to accommodate their perceived characteristics.

But, like Dan Cohen, I feel like digital collections and tools will make humanities scholarship different in the future, at least for some scholars. (An important difference is that Dan Cohen is actually helping this to come about, while I’m mostly looking on from the sidelines.) Do you not think that humanities scholarship will change significantly? Or do you think that such scholarship won’t be truly humanistic?”

First, thanks for introducing me to a new blog that could be interesting.

Regarding digital collections and tools, I definitely believe they are already changing the practices of some scholars. One thing I’ve been thinking about is the relative ease of collaborative work now and whether that will ever have much of an effect on scholarship, since humanists tend to discuss in public but write alone. The pirate post was discussing how the practice of the historian might have to change to accommodate some digital collections, but I don’t see it is a huge change in the underlying mission of historians. It’s still trying to interpret texts to understand and tell a story about the past. If digital tools increase our ability to do that, so much the better. The result will still be a modern and humanist sort of history that considers texts in context and as part of a linear history, unlike the medieval historical worldview and more like the break with it that came with events like proving the Donation of Constantine bogus.

Things I see as essential to the humanities that haven’t changed since the Renaissance: a concern with texts and arguments trying to understand the human condition and guide us to appropriate behavior; an understanding of history as a linear development; a commitment to the development of individual character, rationality, capacity, etc; and a belief in the centrality of language to what makes us thinking beings.

There are now and have always been large swaths of human belief that go against this. There are, paradoxically, anti-humanist humans. Just confining ourselves to America, there are apparently huge numbers of people who believe in a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis and that the earth is about 6,000 years old. I don’t actually know any of these people, but the fear they seem to inspire in others seems to indicate that such people must exist somewhere. These pre-modernists still have the theologico-historical worldview that began to disappear from intellectual discourse about 500 years ago. They see the world more like Augustine saw it than like any modern thinker would. For them, texts are not part of contexts and history is linear only to the extent that it moves from creation to apocalypse.

Obviously, there also exist trends and behaviors that go against the individuality inherent in the humanities. Humanists have always valued developing the capacity of individual human beings—their critical thought, their artistic abilities, etc. The goal has always been to create intelligent and thoughtful individuals, and not to immerse the individual into the group. The renaissance man, as it were. We still respect this goal, and are rightly impressed with people who are accomplished in many areas. A concern with humanity and the larger world is always part of this education, but not the whole of it. However, there are many who believe that the goal of education should be to produce competent and compliant workers, or compliant subjects of a particular political regime, or something like this. Such indoctrination (one hesitates to call it education) is at odds with the individualism inherent in the humanities, which should strive to create individuals who maximize their own potential while understanding themselves as beings in the world. There are all sorts of collectivist notions that are unremittingly anti-humanistic.

Some writers argue that children today are growing up in a visual culture that is at odds with the traditions of humanistic education. These kids, we are told, spend all their time playing video games, watching television, texting their friends, posting photos to Facebook, and all at the same time. They don’t read. They don’t write. That’s just not important anymore. However, the mass of humanity has always been like this (as in not reading or writing, rather than playing video games and Facebooking). If you want to see a great example of a visual culture with little literacy, take a look at the Middle Ages. The extravagant windows and carvings of medieval cathedrals are the medieval equivalent of the television documentary, a way to deliver a message to people who won’t or can’t read. Illiteracy (either inability or unwillingness to read or write) has always characterized the greater part of humanity. We’re no different today except that we have more distractions that move more quickly. But the humanist contends that to think critically, to understand ourselves and the world we inhabit, to communicate with each other meaningfully, to merge our shared understandings of existence in fruitful ways, will always require language and writing. There’s only so far one’s thoughts can progress without some sort of language, whether this is ordinary human language for most things, or a specialized mathematical language for others.

So, to make a short comment long, I think that as long as people are trying to understand and interpret texts in context, focus on the development of the individual person within the larger world, and communicate their ideas through language and writing, then they will be practicing humanistic scholarship. Obviously there are all sorts of other worthwhile human endeavors, but if the humanities disappear completely the world will be a darker place.

I looked at my stats today and noticed that a lot of readers this week have been coming from the University of Chicago domain and entering on my post about the Regenstein and Harold Washington libraries. While I always welcome new readers, it’ll be 10 clicks in a row from different IP addresses, as if someone sent out an email saying, “hey, did you see what this jerk said about our library!”

I would just like to say that I still feel the same way about the library, but it’s nothing personal, just in case you were sensitive enough to take it personally. Unless you were the architect, which is highly unlikely, nothing I said about the library is a comment upon anything other than perhaps your aesthetic sense, and in that we’ll just have to agree to disagree. De gustibus non est disputandum, after all. However, I thought I would say some nice things as well. While I didn’t like Regenstein, I like the University of Chicago, precisely because it’s the place where fun goes to die and has a surfeit of intellectual students. I’m sure the librarians there are all great. I have a friend from library school who works there, and I like and respect her (Hi, B!). It’s one of the few universities that could possibly ever attract me back to the Midwest, and I like the Midwest. I had lunch today with someone who was a professor there for many years, and after I described my daughter’s school and some of her interests, he said it sounded like she might be the kind of kid who’d be happy at Chicago someday, which would be fine with me if I could afford it. And, by the way, he likes Regenstein.

While I’m at it, I’ll mention another library very close to Chicago, the main library at Northwestern (Hi, M!), the one that looks like a turtle. You know what? I don’t like that one, either, and I think it won some sort of architecture award. Which reminds me, the library at Gettysburg College (where I worked for two years) also won an award. It looks funny and is entirely too dark on the inside, plus there aren’t enough restrooms. These libraries always win awards, but the awards are always from architects and not librarians.The Dickinson College Library has a nice entrance, but weird service points if I recall correctly.

The old stacks at the Main Library at UIUC is the scariest library space I’ve ever been in. My entire first year in grad school I was afraid to go in them because I was afraid I’d get lost and they’d find me a month later dead in a corner somewhere. In addition, they were absolutely opposed to my plan to spread breadcrumbs behind myself so I could find my way out. They were afraid the breadcrumbs would attract too many starving humanities grad students and the place would be chaos. Helluva library, though.

What can I say, I have high standards for library buildings. I like entrances to be grand. I was impressed the first time I walked into the main New York Public Library on 42nd St. No books, but what a staircase! Felt the same way when I walked into the Widener Library at Harvard. Loved all that marble. Then I walked into Lamont and it brought me back down. And when I get inside them, I like light evenly spread throughout the room. No dark shadows. No sickly florescent glow like the opening scenes of Joe Versus the Volcano. Add in concerns about weird uses of space and not enough comfy seats and dark stacks, and very few library buildings impress me.

And Firestone Library? Well, I like the outside, the reference room, and the atrium. It’s probably not politic to talk about the rest, though it will finally be renovated over the next few years and we’ll see. As for our branches, we’ve got a beautiful Art Library. We’ve got another branch library, Not the Art Library, that always stirs thoughts of suicide in sensitive souls. Criticize away. I won’t take it personally.

If you keep track of library blogs (and if you’re reading this you probably do), then you’re no doubt aware of the many devoted to change and innovation. Sometimes these blogs come across as pessimistic meditations on how libraries will fade away if we don’t change quickly (I find those tedious), and sometimes they’re more cheerful and want to bring good things to librarians and library users (though sometimes a bit too fluffy for me, these are the ones I usually learn something from). There’s a similar thread in the library literature, and I have a small pile of articles on my desk urging librarians to adapt quickly to changing circumstances and savvy patrons—in the case of academic libraries, especially “millennial” patrons who are supposedly so tech-savvy and advanced. I’ve written before that I’m not at all sure our younger users are really ahead of us (or at least me) technologically, which is why studies showing that students aren’t particularly “web wise” don’t surprise me. I also resist the gloomy librarians who think that libraries are nearly extinct. Libraries are far from dead, which to me implies that the urgency of change rhetoric is a bit overblown. Another signal that the change rhetoric may be too hyperbolic is that some things haven’t changed at all and probably won’t for a very long time.

Just to put things in some perspective, I want to discuss something that hasn’t changed much: humanistic study. I work in the humanities, and humanists have been doing roughly the same sort of work for 500 years and show little sign of stopping. 500 years. Think about that. Since the late 15th century in Italy, when humanists began to define themselves against the reigning scholasticism of the universities and study classical literature from a secular perspective, their activity has been more or less the same. They read, write, edit, and respond to texts through texts, especially the treatise and the essay, genres still going strong today among humanists. They write on topics relevant to the human condition. One can read the philosophy or history from that period on and recognize it as something distinctively modern, and as something that we still more or less do, sometimes better and sometimes worse. The subtitle of this blog recalls the topics of the Renaissance era studia humanitatis: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy. These are among the liberal arts, so called because they were and are by many still believed to be appropriate studies for the development of free persons.

Technology changes. Nations rise and fall. Scholarly languages go in and out of fashion. Attitudes and values shift. The humanities remain the same, a living tradition of the best that has been thought and said the world over, a scholarly conversation begun in the Renaissance that continues today.

Certainly, the humanities have evolved. Our standards of historical evidence and philosophical argument have grown much more rigorous, for example, and the classical focus has waned. However, even as the humanities have evolved, they have remained recognizably the same sort of thing. Though no longer the central part of humanistic education, the classics continue to engage us. Some fortunate remnant of every new generation inevitably rediscovers Plato, Aristotle, Homer, or Virgil and reinterprets those writers for contemporary needs. Students still study Greek and Latin and gain something by that study. Even though the classics no longer remain central to humanistic study, the topics and techniques are remarkably the same. Humanists write treatises and essays explicating, interpreting, or arguing with other treatises and essays about topics of human interest. They write literary criticism. They edit and translate new editions. They learn foreign languages to enjoy foreign literature or read the work of foreign scholars. They depend on libraries to supply the books and essays they need for their work, and now they can easily acquire almost anything they need rather than scour old monasteries and attics for undiscovered treasures.

Several blogs I follow talk about the need to innovate, or they’ll say, “for those interested in innovation” or something like that, or perhaps they’ll link to that inflated list of 100 bad excuses not to innovate. Since I’m not worried about being considered a luddite or a technophobe or hostile to change (which it should be clear I’m not), I will say I’m not the least interested in innovation. Mere change means nothing to me. Innovation as an end in itself seems to be what some people mean when they embrace the concept, and this seems to me oriented too much toward commercial culture and the constant need to tempt the masses with shiny new objects so they will spend, spend, spend and drive our consumer economy. Such a focus is at odds with the goal of humanistic study, and one could argue also at odds with the attitude appropriate for free human beings. Humanistic study, and to some extent the entire mission of the university and the university library, has a constancy of method that has hardly changed at all, especially since the rise of the research university.

In the humanities, we do have shiny new ideas, but the are embodied in the same old textual discourse of the past 500 years. I’m interested in acquiring appropriate collections and making sure scholars can find and use them. Any innovation that helps in that mission is a good thing. Any other innovation is irrelevant to my needs. But in the humanities, the technological innovations tend to be obvious electronic replacements for traditional tools. Now we have ebooks, ejournals, email, all just e-versions of things we have had for centuries. We have even, if you believe such things, survived the paradigm shift from modern to postmodern thought with no radical changes in the substance of communication, only the means. The rise of new communication technology has been an enormous boon to the humanities and we should all embrace it, but it has only served to aid very traditional methods. We’ve exchanged print for online, broadsides for blogs, but we haven’t exchanged language for grunts (if you except the output of some French poststructuralists).

A lot of the innovation obsession concerns processes. Are we doing things as well as we could be doing them? I have no problem with this. As much as anyone I dislike the we’ve-always-dunit-this-way attitude. I want to know the reason you’ve always done it that way, which isn’t always easy to articulate (probably another blog post there). Regardless, I find senseless resistance to change as foolish as obsession with constant and radical change. If you want constant or radical change, I also want a reason, and the reason can’t be “because we’ve never done it this way.” What’s missing from many discussions are the reasons for innovation.

Not always, however. Sometimes the reason given is that people are changing. There’s a lot of talk of the changing tastes and needs of younger library users, much no doubt accurate. However, it’s not always our mission to adapt ourselves to new users as to adapt new scholars in the humanities to the 500-year-old tradition of humanistic scholarship. We should definitely make it as easy as possible for all scholars, the new and the old, to be able to find and retrieve their necessary books and essays as quickly and efficiently as possible, and in this respect we should innovate as necessary. But we should always keep in mind our mission. In the humanities, the mission isn’t to assume that students don’t read, for example, and adapt to their needs. They have to read, a lot, and well. There’s no other choice in humanistic scholarship.

The humanities are about reading and thinking through language and texts. We can’t assume that they inhabit a “visual culture” and there’s an end on it. There’s almost no visual culture in the humanities outside of art or film criticism. Humanistic scholars read, write, discuss, argue. They don’t make collages or Youtube videos, at least not as a central part of their scholarship. They might record a lecture, but that’s usually much more boring than reading an essay. I don’t know why we sometimes assume that the newest generation is somehow too slow or shallow to be able to adapt themselves to this scholarly tradition. They play video games, and they read books. They make videos, and they write essays. The liberal arts, the studies proper to free and rational human beings, are alive and well. That they aren’t the stuff of reality TV or celebrity websites means nothing, because they have always been the domain of the relative few who seek to question or reflect upon the world around them. Higher education in America gives us the opportunity to expand the benefits of the humanities, not assume that such study is irrelevant to the desires of today’s youth while we desperately flail around trying to seem relevant.

For better or worse, we have to acknowledge that the humanities have in many ways hardly changed for half a millennium and that they aren’t changing now. I rarely work outside the humanities, so I won’t try to extend this argument further afield, though I think it also probably applies to many areas of the social sciences. I’m just putting forth one reason why I don’t feel the urgency or anxiety about innovation or change that many other librarians seem to. I feel comfortable using any new technology or adopting any new service model that comes along as long as I also feel confident that such change serves the living tradition of scholarship in the humanities.

Steven Bell has a typically thought-provoking blog post at the ACRLog entitled Sorry But You Can’t Have it All. I don’t really know Steven, but since we did meet once years ago I’ll be informal and call him Steven. Before I begin discussing this post, I want to note two things for the record. First, I often disagree with either the substance or the tone of Steven’s blog posts, though not necessarily this time. Second, in terms of raising and framing issues of interest to academic librarians, discussing them intelligently, and provoking response, I think he is one of the best library writers around right now. He riles me up in a good way, and I’m thankful for it. Though I rarely do it, when I read one of his posts I often want to write one of my own in response, if only to argue the point. This time I am responding, but unfortunately to something within the post rather than the argument of the post itself.

In the post, he discusses a talk he gave to a group of library directors called “The Search for Tomorrow’s Library Leaders in A ‘Dissin’ the Director’ Landscape,” as well as some of their responses to his arguments. He points out that many Gen-X and Gen-Y librarians are critical of library directors and unwilling to sacrifice their personal lives to achieve a library directorship. These cohorts want a better work-life balance than library directors appear to have. He also argues that part of the problem is that they don’t see the potential rewards, and that the current generation of library directors should do a better job of communicating with the younger librarians, teaching them about leadership, setting good examples of leadership, and cultivating the next generation of library directors. And the goal isn’t to get just any library directors, but to attract the best and the brightest to the directorship.

And notice I’m saying “directors,” though he often uses the term “leaders.” I’ve written before about my disagreement with Steven’s conflation of the terms library leader, director, administrator, etc. The person in charge isn’t necessarily a leader, and to conflate the terms unnecessarily both aggrandizes the incompetent directors and leaves us without a way to praise those directors who are great leaders as well as acknowledge those librarians who are in fact leaders and not directors. For some reason, he doesn’t want these terms parsed, but that’s neither here nor there.

I don’t necessarily disagree with him in this post, and indeed think he makes a compelling argument, though I was struck by some of the comments to his speech, in particular this one: “One director said this was all well and good but that the current generation of directors needed to give their nextgen colleagues a dose of reality. Getting the job done, said the director, requires certain personal sacrifices, and that a work-life imbalance, staying late, working weekends, getting emergency calls in the middle of the night, is occasionally necessary. Bottom line: you can’t have it all.” This comment seems to have inspired the title of Steven’s post, but it inspired me with irritation. Thus, I’m responding more to this comment than to the general argument of the post. I am hardly a voice for my generation (that would be Gen-X), but at the same time I’m not necessarily responding with personal arguments. I’m just putting forth some plausible reasons why bright people might not want to be library directors based on librarians of all ages I know.

Since I dislike these generational and “class” wars, I want to state my opinion of library directors up front. I’m not in the camp of “dissin’ the director,” and in fact just cringed when writing the word “dissin’,” though perhaps that’s more because of my concern for the English language than any concern for directors. I’ve gotten along just fine with every library director I’ve worked for, even when I disagreed with them. If we extend this to library managers in general, the same applies. Early in my career I did have a horrendous experience with a library (mis)manager, but instead of developing a suspicion of management in general, I instead took my issues straight to the library director, whom I liked very much and with whom I got on quite well. And I suppose it’s just barely possible I’ll be a library director someday myself, and I wouldn’t want to be a hypocrite.

Back to the comment. I was particularly irritated by the notion that library directors need to give us mere librarians a “dose of reality.” The arrogance of that statement took me aback. We Gen-X and -Y librarians work in libraries. We know what reality is, thank you very much. Personal sacrifices, work-life imbalance, staying late, working weekends: many of us do that without either the title or salary of “director,” and to imply otherwise itself shows a disconnect from reality. The generational difference, if indeed there is one, is that perhaps the younger generation doesn’t see this sort of sacrifice as a badge of honor so much as a road to unhappiness and burnout.

This tough talk reminds me of people who brag about how hard they work and how little sleep they get, as if I’m supposed to be impressed by them ruining their health and running themselves into the ground for what is most likely an enterprise of dubious value. That these sacrifices are “sometimes” necessary is one thing. It seems that the larger issue is that lots of younger librarians see these sacrifices as always necessary for library management, and they’re not willing to make the sacrifices. Perhaps they have more fulfilling personal lives than this particular library director. Perhaps they have a young child, as I do. Perhaps they have hobbies or interests that transcend their jobs.

And then the inevitable platitude: you can’t have it all. But what if you don’t want it all? Isn’t that exactly what the younger librarians “dissin’ the director” have said? They don’t want it all, and now they’re being criticized for not being able to have something that they never wanted in the first place. Steven’s concern is to show the best and the brightest of these younger librarians the benefits of directorship, and not just the burdens. I don’t know if I would be included in his “best and brightest” category of librarians, though I’m no slouch, but I would like to posit some reasons why librarians might not want to become library directors that haven’t anything to do with “dissin’” anyone.

For example, a lot of academic librarians identify as much or more with the “academic” as with the “librarian.” For whatever reason, they’re more interested in being a librarian for a particular field than in just being a librarian or they identify more with the professors than the library administrators, and some of them have a horror of ever being identified as a “manager.” Management is what those commercial folk do. Being engaged in the teaching and learning of a university is enjoyable. Spending time reading widely and trying to understand a particular field or the entire world compels many librarians. A lot of librarians have wide-ranging intellectual interests that have little to do with librarianship, though they might need libraries to fulfill their intellectual needs. They might be interested in literature or history or politics or even books, but not in management, and they’re not interested in the hassles they see library managers burdened with. They’ve had a “dose of reality,” and they know they’d rather work with scholars and build collections and follow their interests than deal with these burdens.

Take, for example, the necessity to deal with people’s personal problems, which managers and directors sometimes have to do. They probably don’t like it, either, but it comes with the job. While making exceptions for emergencies of various kinds, some librarians think people should keep their personal problems and their work separate. Being professional means we do our jobs, and being decent human beings means we take into consideration external problems and opportunities that happen to us all but interfere with work and make allowances for them. But then there are the petty squabbles, the gossipy scandal-mongers, the perennial layabouts, the needy, the whiners and the pouters, the offensive and the offended that sometimes in some places take up inordinate amounts of time for some managers.

One might respond that directors usually have their middle managers to deal with this stuff. Well, that’s another issue. Even some librarians who might be interested in being library directors have no interest in spending ten to twenty years working through middle-management positions to get there. They might be brilliant visionaries, and don’t want to spend years making sure a service point gets staffed or the student workers show up or writing gobs of performance reviews. They don’t want years of being pressured from above and below. Having a vision and trying to make that vision a reality? That’s one thing. But decades of middle management might crush their vision and their spirit. One might respond that this trip through what some librarians consider the purgatory of middle management is necessary for seasoning a director. After all, people have to “pay their dues” (which goes along nicely with the banal cliché about a “dose of reality”). But the point is that a lot of librarians—smart, talented, capable, even passionate librarians—believe, rightly or wrongly, that these dues are just too high. The opportunity costs are disproportionate to the rewards.

There could be many other reasons why talented librarians aren’t very interested in being directors, and some of them might indeed have to do with a certain hostility to library administrators in general. The venom that some librarians have toward the powers that be can be potent stuff. These librarians seem to believe that stepping over the line into administration is like stepping over to the dark side, that the goal of all library administrators is to manipulate their underlings and destroy the library. It seems to me the people who think this way may have been the victims of especially incompetent directors, of managers who don’t know how to manage and may have been promoted by default, as was my horrendous (mis)manager. If this is the case, then Steven’s overall goal is even more compelling, because the way to prevent default administration by incompetents is to persuade the talented to step up and wrestle for control.

But for other librarians, the problem could just be they think being a library director carries too many burdens and not enough benefits, and that the dues paid along the way are just too high. Can those librarians be persuaded to become library directors? I’m not sure. However, I am sure that those librarians aren’t going to be persuaded by some library director’s version of tough love. They’re not impressed by the tough, and they don’t want the love.

I just got back from a four-day spree with an old friend in Chicago, and finally visited two major libraries there I’d been meaning to see for years. (Apologies to friends in Chicago I didn’t see; I was a bit rushed while there, what with all the eating, drinking, and museum visiting.) I’m not one of those librarians who has to see every library in every city I visit. I took a great library buildings class at Illinois, and after our tour of libraries I was library-buildinged out, so now I approach them sparingly. However, on Saturday I was on the UC campus to visit the Seminary Coop Bookstore and decided that it was silly not to stop by the Regenstein Library since I was close. I don’t know what I was expecting, but not that. Not being a huge fan of bludgeony modernist architecture, the outside put me off quite a bit before I stepped inside, but it certainly prepared me for the inside, which I also didn’t like. I saw only the reference room, but it didn’t make me want to go further. For some reason I found the waffled ceiling and the lighting oppressive. I probably missed the attractive spaces by not venturing further afield, but the entry didn’t pull me in at all.

Tagging along with another friend on a Monday mission, I found myself in the Harold Washington Library downtown. I’d also never been there, and all I can say is “wow.” The exterior is lovely, but the interior, especially the Winter Garden on the ninth floor, was outstanding. If only Firestone Library were that attractive. The Winter Garden might have been one of the most attractive library spaces I’ve ever been in. The light airiness of the interior drew me all the way to the ninth floor.

There’s really no point to this other than to report my own shock at how vastly different were two libraries in the same city. I expected the Harold Washington Library to be reasonably attractive, as main public libraries in major cities often are. Still, for some reason I expected the Regenstein Library to be impressive rather than just imposing, and I don’t know why.

This evaluation is no doubt entirely subjective, and I will allow for the fact that I saw very little of Regenstein, but the contrast was definitely an object lesson on how library buildings can be more or less inviting spaces. Public libraries want to be attractive because people don’t have to use them. Academic libraries often have captive audiences, but still it’s a nice surprise to go into one and be awed at the space.

As many public services librarians do, I give a lot of demonstrations, mostly to students, but sometimes to fellow librarians and even occasionally to the general public. I’ve been teaching a lot of instruction sessions the past month, all of which have demonstrations as part of their content. Last Saturday I presented a demonstration on Google tools to a community group at a NJ public library (which was great, especially since I didn’t know what to expect). Next week I’m giving workshops / demonstrations on Google tools and Internet searching beyond Google (does such exist anymore in the public mind?) to groups of public and school librarians. Then I’ll be giving a demo on some new resources to library staff here. I’m quite shy, which people who know me deny, but which causes me to be a little nervous when I speak in front of groups. Hundreds of hours teaching and presenting has done little to eliminate the queasy feeling I get in the ten minutes before beginning a class or presentation. Still, I’m a passable public speaker, and I don’t at all mind speaking in public for a good cause. Good causes include: it’s part of my job, sharing information with colleagues, and money. As I said, I don’t mind giving presentations and demonstrations, but I very much dislike being on the receiving end of one. I give demonstrations, it just puzzled me for a long time why anyone would go to one.

My problem is being wrapped up inside my own head (that sounds painful, doesn’t it?), and not thinking about the way other people learn. I know how I learn. I learn new things either by reading or doing. If it’s an intellectual subject, I’ll read a few books and articles. If it’s some sort of software or technical skill, I learn by just messing around with it until I’ve figured out how it works. I’ve even been known to combine these things and read the help pages if I can’t figure something out, and it puzzles me why so many people have an aversion to F1. This is why I don’t attend preconferences and avoid demonstrations about most things that I need to know about. Sometimes I attend demos as moral support, but I’m far more likely to go to a presentation about something of marginal use for me, just because I’m curious. For example, our economics librarian recently gave a fantastic two-part presentation on finance and finance resources. I don’t work with financial data and am highly unlikely ever to, but I found the talk interesting and informative. I learned a lot about something that I’ll probably never need to use, which incidentally characterizes most of my educational career.

However, when it comes to tools I might use, I would almost never go to a demo if I could avoid it. By the time someone gets around to giving a demonstration about something that might be of interest to me, it’s almost always the case that I’ve already read about it somewhere and if it seemed potentially useful played around with it already. Often, I feel that I could probably give the demonstration myself. And if it’s a demonstration of something like a new database, the demonstrator almost never covers what I want to cover at the pace I want to cover it.

Part of this is because I learn best on my own by doing, but I suspect part of it might have other motivations. Consider this old joke: a man staying in a boarding house sneaks a horse into the bathroom one night. The next morning the evidence is obvious: overturned furniture, hoof marks on the carpet and on the stairs, dents in the walls. The place is a mess. The landlord asked the man why he did it. The man says, “So the next morning when someone says, ‘There’s a horse in the bathroom!’ I could say, ‘Yes, I know.’” When some librarian says “You can do X with Y!” I like to be able to say, “Yes, I know.” Though I hardly think of myself as a faddist innovator desperately clinging to the bleeding edge, I also don’t want to be the person in the room saying I’ve never heard of some current subject or tool before. Also, for me it’s not enough just to have heard about it, I want to know more about it or how to use it, at least as a novice. I could just lie and say, “Yes, I know all about that,” but that would be dishonest. Plus, I might get questioned more and then have to resort to my standard technique for leaving awful meetings, which is to pretend I’m having a back spasm and leave the room never to return, which both gets me out of the awkward situation and gains me sympathy the next time I see people. (“How’s your back doing, you poor thing?”)

I’ve long since come to understand that other people want demonstrations because that’s how they learn best, by having someone speak to them and show them how things work. Still, I wonder if the people who learn best by watching demonstrations of, for example, new tools are the ones least likely to give such demonstrations themselves, and the people most likely to be giving the demonstrations are the least likely to have learned what they know by watching other demonstrations. This seems to be the case for some of the demonstrations I give, especially the ones off campus. This is the central irony that emerges whenever anyone asks, “but how did you learn about all this stuff?” Well, I just learned. There sometimes seems to be an assumption that such knowledge just comes naturally somehow, which is of course untrue. Perhaps the learning how to learn on my own comes naturally, which makes it different though not necessarily superior to learning from others. After all, people who attend demonstrations are there to learn something new. These days, it’s the people who don’t bother learning anything new at all who worry me.

A couple of weeks ago an Annoyed Librarian post addressed the issue of whether an MLS was a requirement to call oneself a librarian. As is often the case, a long discussion ensued with much argument either way, and while I didn’t participate in the discussion, it did provoke my thoughts on the issue. I think I tend to agree with her position to some extent that the distinction is in the work done rather than the degree proper. However, even if we agree that the MLS is a necessary requirement to be considered a professional librarian, it’s not in my opinion a sufficient requirement. There’s a case to be made that more than an MLS and a job with the title of librarian is required to put the professional in “professional librarian.” What might this more be? Here are a handful of suggestions, but please suggest more (or critique my own suggestions).

First, I think it requires an engagement with the profession qua profession, rather than an exclusive concern with your own job and your own library. This engagement can take many forms, from writing or speaking to library audiences to attending conferences and participating in professional organizations to simply reading what others are writing or listening to what they are saying. This engagement should be active rather than passive, though, and involve seeking out opportunities rather than waiting for someone to summarize everything for you during a brief post-conference presentation. Librarians with absolutely no curiosity about larger issues in the profession or awareness even of trends that directly affect them are not acting very professionally.

Related to this would be keeping up with what’s going on in the broader library world, even if it doesn’t directly affect your job. This can only go so far, of course. For example, I follow some debates about institutional repositories or digitization of collections, but I don’t have enough mastery of the subjects to participate as meaningfully in the debates as those in the thick of the action. Still, even knowing a bit about a debate and that it exists is helpful both to understand references other librarians might make or to know where to go to increase my knowledge should the need ever arise. Knowing that librarians are doing things is sometimes as important as knowing how to do them.

These days one would need to add keeping up with technological trends as well, which doesn’t necessarily mean knowing how to tinker with the latest tools as knowing that the latest tools exist and how you might use them if you needed them. I, for example, have more or less given up trying to keep up with the latest trends in web design, though I used to be pretty competent and I can still create web pages that look okay. As I grew more specialized, it just became necessary that I depend on other specialists to do that work, while I consider perhaps how web design might be used to communicate more effectively with library patrons. As for the social software that is all the rage right now, I personally know quite a bit about it and I know what I like and don’t like, but I don’t think every librarian needs to write a blog or have a profile on Facebook, though they should know what all these things are and how they might be useful.

The key is knowing what’s going on and how it might relate to libraries. This requires considering a broad picture of the profession. How professional is a librarian who is completely unaware of professional trends or issues, or who has failed to keep up with even the most widespread trends? I recently was told about some reference librarians who through ignorance and lack of interest never used the Internet for anything except searching the online catalog, and one assumes that’s only because this library got rid of the card catalog. (I can’t imagine such a thing happening here; this was a very different library.) Considering the overwhelming impact of the Internet on contemporary communications and research, how can we consider such behavior at all professional? What’s more, this broad picture must consider professional issues to be broader than the profession itself. Trends in society and economics and communications technology are not library-specific issues, but awareness of them and some consideration of how they might affect libraries is important. For an academic librarian, we would have to add trends in academia as well.

The MLS may be necessary, but can’t be sufficient to be considered a professional librarian, because of necessity what one learns in library school becomes stale. Theoretical or ethical concerns may remain the same, but the practices and debates current in the profession inevitably affect what is taught at any given time, and these practices and debates evolve over time. Part of being a professional isn’t just stopping with what one learned in library school and then focusing exclusively on whatever job you happen to have, but continuing that learning and developing over time. In a sense, for the professional librarian, library school never ends (boy, that was painful to write), because the same behavior of discovery and awareness that should have been part of the library school experience has to remain. Professionalism requires seeing ourselves in our library but also in The Library, and seeing The Library in the world.

I don’t think I’m doing this blogging thing right. First of all, I’m in no danger of dying from blogging, which is what sort of happened to a couple of prominent bloggers I’ve never heard of. No anxiety or lost sleep if I don’t post. Also, I don’t have anything to sell you or a cause for you to join. I don’t have a mission to preach or an agenda for change. I know that there are some readers out there and I hope you’re occasionally pleased, but except for my journal this is probably the space where I pay the least attention to audience in the sense of trying to attract readers or please editors. The audience I think most about here is me, and the kind of library writing I’d like to read. And I sure don’t make any money from it. In fact, since the blog is hosted on the university blog service, I don’t think I’m even allowed to make money with it. I don’t even promote myself as a potential consultant or speaker or anything.

So just from that I figure I’m not much of a blogger, and then I ran across some blog post with 10 questions every blogger should ask, and I hardly ask any of them.

For example, there’s question #1: “How quickly can my readers understand what my post is about?”

Probably not very quickly, and I’m assuming this isn’t a good thing. Sometimes I finish writing a post, and I’m not quite sure what my post is about. “Libraries” is about the best I can do, except when it’s not.

“2. Does my blog offer something novel or unexpected?”

That’s a tough one. I guess it depends on what you expect. If you expect something concise and topical like Library Stuff, then no. Nothing on the blog seems novel to me, so it’s hard to answer. This is just stuff I think about.

“3. How helpful is my content?”

What am I supposed to help you do? Reflect? Sometimes I might help with that, I guess. Certainly nothing practical. That’s always been my problem as a library writer. Definitely not practical enough for a very practical profession.

“4. Why should my readers trust me?”

I guess “because I say so” doesn’t work well as an answer. Because I can write coherent paragraphs? Because I work in a library? Do I care if you trust me? After all, I’m not trying to sell you insurance or anything.

“5. Does my content speak to people on a human level?”

Something tells me the answer to this question is “no,” especially since the writer interprets “human” as “emotional.” I think if you read all the posts, you’d get some idea of my personality, but I don’t push it, probably because I don’t have much of a personality. Sometimes I talk about myself, but usually not, and rarely about my emotions. If I start going on about my emotions, you’ll know the breakdown is eminent.

“6. Is my post easy to read and scroll through?”

Well, the writing’s pretty clear, if that’s what you mean, at least I think it is. It’s grammatical, and that’s something these days. I don’t know about being easy to scroll through. That probably depends more on your browser than my blog.

“7. Does my content cover what needs to be discussed or answered?”

Probably not, because hardly anything I write about really needs to be discussed or answered.

“8. Am I revealing enough information about my topic?”

I probably reveal too much information about my topic.

“9. Am I fulfilling my readers’ expectations?”

I’m not sure if my readers, such that they are, even have expectations, so I don’t know. This is bad, isn’t it.

“10. Am I reaching out for support?”

Not really, but I’ve always been something of a loner. The exposition continues, “Writing content with their interests in mind, as well as the interests of your readers, can help boost your blogging authority if said experts find your articles useful.” I doubt I have much of a blogging authority, though I suppose I’m sort of an authority about something library-related, but probably not any more so than most of my readers, who are, after all, librarians.

“You should always have an active interest in the social networking community and be willing to express it in your posts - either by explicitly mentioning other blogging/bookmarking talents or by editing your content so that it is more bookmark friendly.” I don’t do much of that, either, do I, and I’m not sure I could because I cringe when “talent” is used as a noun to describe a person. I always think of the line from Groundhog Day: “Did he just call himself ‘the talent’?” I don’t even link out to other blogs very often, even though I follow a lot of them. It’s nothing personal. I’m just not seeking “link love” or whatever it’s called.

I definitely don’t have an active interest in the social networking community. I ran across the blog post above via Walt at Random and the AL Direct, which apparently thought it worth reading for library bloggers. That’s about the best I can do to link out to the “blogging talent.”

Also, I don’t even understand the “bookmark friendly” advice, so I know I’m not doing it right. I use Google bookmarks, and I can bookmark anything on the web, which doesn’t require any special skills as far as I can tell. Is there something besides having each post as a separate url that makes it any easier to bookmark? I don’t know, and the sad thing for my professional blogging career is that I don’t really care.

For some reason I can’t fathom, a lot of librarians seem to resent or resist the young, and by young I mean anyone under 50. Recently I heard of a criticism of a candidate for a high level library job at another university. The criticism? She’s 35. That was it. So a person is old enough to be the President of the United States, but much too young to be the head of a library department. The thing is, I’ve heard or read this sort of thing often. There’s a lot of concern about the future of library leadership these days. Steven Bell blogs frequently about it at ACRLog, the ALA has talked of a crisis of library leadership, and Walt Crawford is working on the Palinet Leadership Network. It’s just possible that part of the crisis is a resistance to talent not accompanied by decades of experience. In my experience, those two things are not necessarily related.

It’s true that the absolute worst supervisor I ever saw was relatively young (30 at the time). She destroyed a good library department by driving off all the librarians. However, her incompetence stemmed from her stupidity, ignorance, and malignancy, not her age. I think we can all agree that stupidity, ignorance, and malignancy are hardly confined to the young. On the other hand, we can also probably think of plenty of examples of experienced librarians over fifty, including some in leadership positions, who are just terrible. My point is not to promote the young or deride the old, but merely to show that talent and age/experience aren’t necessarily connected.

The few times I’ve been considered y