November 2007 Archives

Indulge me a bit if you will. I’ve been sick for the past week or more, and spent several days doing little more than sleeping, reading, and watching the Addams Family. I’ve had to go without solid food, caffeine, or alcohol, thus without, some might say, necessary accouterments of civilized life. To make up for that, I read some short stories and reflected upon popular versus scholarly editions.

Lately I’ve been reading Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft, and M.R. James. Most of my fiction reading is confined to vacation time and now sick time, when I want my brain to relax. That may sound like I think fiction is a lesser read, but it’s probably my reaction to several years spent studying English literature. I read more widely for fun than I did in college, but I don’t take literature as seriously as an academic subject. It took a long time before I could read fiction or poetry without trying to find something clever to say about it or applying some critical theory to it.

It’s also rare that I find anything I like. My favorite literary genre is the essay, and there’s something I find very satisfying about a good writer exploring a small subject in a thoughtful way. For popular fiction, I prefer P.G. Wodehouse and the British detective novelists of the thirties and forties (Nicholas Blake, Naigo Marsh, etc), but usually I return to the same writers again and again, especially Henry James. However, when I noticed recently that the Library of America had given its imprimatur to Dick and Lovecraft, I thought I would give them a try. To save my valuable reading time, I usually wait for authors to die and for a cultural movement to establish them before I bother reading them, and the Library of America does a great job of this usually. (I’m still hoping they publish an edition of Robert Benchley and pay me to edit it.) I’ve been an M.R. James fan for years, and I recently bought the Penguin 2-volume complete short stories of M.R. James, annotated by S.T. Joshi. They arrived just in time for sickbed reading.

With Dick, I actually began with Selected Stories, the Pantheon volume edited by Jeremy Lethem. As the the stories themselves, I thought they were okay. I don’t know how they rank as science fiction, since they might be the only science fiction I’ve ever read, but they were entertaining and thoughtful for the most part. The non-literary thing that struck me most about the stories is how bad Dick was at predicting the future. He has characters hop from their interplan rocket ships and sit down to typewriters. The future world of some stories has a victorious Soviet Union and lifelike robots, but no personal computers. This gave me another sort of pleasure, as I compared what by now is the present of some of these stories to the world around us. The unvirtual materiality of Dick’s vision interested me in a way I wouldn’t have expected. But this led to scholarly disappointment. I then wanted to know when these stories were published, preferably with dates of composition as well. Obviously these were Cold War-era stories, but the “about the texts” page was woefully inadequate, and there were no notes. I was viewing Dick as a writer who needed to be historicized, and Lethem let me down.

Contrast the LoA Lovecraft edition. All the LoA books are beautifully bound and printed, joys to hold and read, and all the ones I have are annotated more or less heavily. (The Henry James set is almost complete with 14 volumes so far. The five volumes of short stories make great Christmas gifts.) The Lovecraft edition was no exception, though the editor, Peter Straub, relied upon both the texts and the notes that S.T. Joshi had provided in three other editions of Lovecraft’s work that he edited. It makes one wonder why Joshi wasn’t asked to edit this. Straub may be more famous, but would that be relevant for someone buying the LoA edition? I wonder. Still, it had the chronology of the author, notes on the texts, and annotations I’ve come to expect. I didn’t rely on them much, expect to figure out how “Cthulhu” might be pronounced, but some were interesting to read, and they let me date the story accordingly. This isn’t as important for Lovecraft, since he seemed to be deliberately archaic, anyway. If you read both Dick and Lovecraft in tandem, you would probably be struck by the dichotomy of styles. Dick’s prose is spare and lean and he’s often trying to understand what it is to be human. Lovecraft never met an adverb he didn’t like, or a foreigner he did. He certainly can evoke a mood of horror, but I’ve never read anyone so incapable of empathy. Still, the edition was perfect.

Then comes the James edition annotated by Joshi. This would seem to be my sort of edition, heavily annotated, semi-scholarly introductions with bibliography, appendices with juvenilia. But what I found instead was that the scholarly apparatus crushed the delicate stories. The introductions strained to be scholarly, but had little to work with. The annotations provided historical tidbits on people and places real and fictitious, but none of this helped illuminate the stories for me at all. Joshi seems to have made a career of editing and writing about the better popular fiction of the twentieth century, and I’m not maligning his work. It just seemed so unnecessary in this case. Unlike Dick, where I wanted to place the stories in their historical context because of the odd future expectations, and unlike Lovecraft, where some explanation of broader themes that apparently evolve in scattered works help illuminate slightly the stories, the James scholarly apparatus added nothing. The stories stood by themselves. Except for a couple of added stories, my old Wordsworth Classics M.R. James Collected Ghost Stories (available used for $1.99) was just as good.

Maybe I’m being uncharitable to both Lethem and Joshi, though. I probably shouldn’t have been evaluating scholarly editions on an empty stomach.

The NYT reported on a new study from the National Endowment of the Arts demonstrating that people who don’t read don’t do well on reading tests. I’m glad we have the NEA around to point these things out to us.

While the reading news nationally may be discouraging, I will give thanks as we move to Thanksgiving that my own child seems to have the right environment for academic success. I wrote earlier how I believe just having books around encourages reading and thinking. Even math seems to improve, which surprised me some. According to the NYT article:

“In examining the average 2005 math scores of 12th graders who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books, an analysis of federal Education Department statistics found that those students scored much lower than those who lived in homes with more than 100 books. Although some of those results could be attributed to income gaps, Mr. Iyengar noted that students who lived in homes with more than 100 books but whose parents only completed high school scored higher on math tests than those students whose parents held college degrees (and were therefore likely to earn higher incomes) but who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books.”

With a few master’s degrees and 2-3000 books around the house, maybe my daughter’s math scores will even be good.

This news is relevant to higher education for obvious reasons, since students who read and do math well will probably succeed in college, but what should also be obvious to us all is that reading ability is necessary for all sorts of jobs, especially jobs that pay enough to eek out a middle class existence. 75% of those employing people with 2 years of college, and 90% of those employing people with 4 years of college said reading comprehension was very important for their workers.

The article notes that reading better means more money. “In an analysis of Education Department statistics looking at eight weekly income brackets, the data showed that 7 percent of full-time workers who scored at levels deemed “below basic” on reading tests earned $850 to $1,149 a week, the fourth-highest income bracket, while 20 percent of workers who had scored at reading levels deemed “proficient” earned such wages.”

However, I assume that is an average, because I know of a lot of people with PhDs, who presumably can read well, who don’t earn $1,149 per week. The Times also reported this week that non-tenure-track adjuncts outnumber tenure-track faculty at colleges and universities nationwide now. This trend hasn’t been news to anyone in academia for years. The story profiles one adjunct teaching six courses at four different schools. With that schedule, I hope she earns $1,149 a week, but I doubt it.

This leads to a different question about reading ability and jobs. It puzzles me why so many people, especially in the humanities, are willing to work for years on a PhD knowing their chance of a tenure-track job at a decent school is very slim. Here are thousands of presumably well educated people who end up working for several schools teaching courses for a couple thousand dollars each per semester. The Times article quotes a lot of people complaining about the lack of tenure track jobs, and how students who take more classes with adjuncts don’t do as well because the adjuncts aren’t around for them since they teach several classes a semester. I don’t think the problem is with the lack of tenure so much as the treatment of adjuncts, which is deplorable in most places. I was discussing this at lunch with a friend of mine, and his opinion was that the two-tiered class system created by the miserable treatment of adjuncts was worse than the lack of tenure, and I agree. It’s not the absence of tenure, it’s the absence of decent treatment and pay of adjuncts that rankles the most.

On the other hand, it still puzzles me why people are willing to put up with that treatment. Scholarship and teaching is often seen as a vocation, and understandably so, but teaching 5-6 courses a semester to make half of what a tenure-track professor might make and never having any job security can hardly be considered a vocation. Based on the people I know, it seems that after 5-10 years of grad school people seem unable to think of doing anything else, and living like a grad student for the rest of their life seems more noble than trying to work for a corporation. Regardless, with the glut of PhDs willing to work for peanuts, there’s no financial incentive to create more tenure-track jobs, and the situation at most schools is unlikely to change in the adjuncts favor. I like teaching a lot, but I think I’d rather be a librarian at Princeton than a professor at most other schools or an adjunct anywhere at all. I always thought I might be willing to sell my soul to some corporation for a ton of money, but it turns out no rich corporations are interested in my soul, so I’ll probably stay a librarian. I’ll just be thankful I’m a librarian with a good job and not an adjunct teaching 10-12 classes a year to stay alive. Sometimes life is good.

If you were reading around in the library blogs today, it was hard to escape at least one discussion of the Kindle, the new ebook reader from Amazon profiled in Newsweek.

I skimmed the Newsweek article and listened the accompanying video review. The Kindle does look like it’s slightly better than some previous efforts, but I don’t think I’ll be buying one.

This isn’t because I’m anti-ebook. Far from it. I became an enthusiastic devotee of ebooks three years ago when I loaded Mobipocket onto my then new Dell Axim. The convenience and portability are great, and I love the Mobipocket interface. I also like the ability to create Mobipocket files from Word or text documents, so I can essentially take any text content I find on the web and turn it into a uniform ebook file. Since I don’t buy a lot of new books, it works very well for me. I can download and read plenty of classics from Project Gutenberg and create my own files if I find something I like. This past summer I got a Samsung Blackjack and loaded Mobipocket on it as well, and still love the convenience. Being able to carry several hundred books in my pocket at all times means I never have to be without something good to read.

But I wouldn’t buy the Kindle (or the Sony reader either) for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t want a separate tool. I like my Mobipocket because I have the ebook reader along with the email, calender, feed reader, browser, chess program, camera, and everything else fitting nicely in my pocket. If the iPhone ever holds enough music, I’d be willing to add in the iPod as well, but I want fewer devices that do more rather than a separate device for everything. It seems like the things the Kindle can do, I can do now on my phone, and even though the screen might be smaller, the text is very clear.

It also bothers me how rigidly controlled commercial ebooks are. Ebook readers want to try to emulate the book, but only in the reading experience. Ebook readers and publishers are trying to stop many of the other ways people use books. In general, I don’t like the way digital rights issues interfere with ebooks in a way they don’t with paper books. I might be willing to buy a book, since I buy books now, but after I buy the book I want to do with it what I please. If I want to lend it to a friend, regift it to an acquaintance, donate it to a library, or sell it to a used bookstore, I want the freedom to do that. Publishers naturally want to keep me from doing that, though they never could with paper books, and paper books have long sold even though libraries, used bookstores, and reading friends exist.

The stranglehold on information will be difficult to maintain, but as long as it will be illegal for me to do with digital books what I now do with print books, I’ll resist buying them. I have bought a few, mostly reference works, but my ereading is mostly confined to those texts I can get and trade for free. What that means for publishing, I have no idea, but if ebooks are restricted in the way that paper books aren’t, then they’re not as much good to me. I’m surprised publishers don’t start suing used bookstores for reselling their books. One could argue that iTunes does the same thing with music, and one would of course be right. However, even with my iPod I prefer to copy my own CDs rather than buy from iTunes whenever possible. Regardless, as long as I can buy used CDs or legally obtain free music, then I can legally still control what I purchase in a way I can’t with iTunes purchases.

With the Kindle, one can also subscribe to newspapers and blogs for a fee, but again, I can read these things on my phone for free. The idea of paying to subscribe to a blog is bizarre, and perhaps I read that part wrong.

Anyway, I hope for a day when I can do with ebooks all the things I can do with paper books now, but I know that won’t be the case if publishers have their way. If we have ebooks without the freedom to lend, give, resell, or donate them, then in many ways we’ll have a bleaker book future than we could have. This isn’t a complaint against ebooks, as much as I like traditional print books, but it is a complaint against the commercial restrictions that may dominate the future of copyrighted books.

I should add one more reason. 400 bucks? What, are they kidding me?

Last week was very busy, which explains the lack of posting. It was one of those weeks when working two jobs starts to take its toll. In addition to a lot of student conferences and consultations and instruction sessions, I ended the week twisting my knee somehow so that I had to spend a couple of days with my leg elevated and an icepack on my knee, so traumatized by the whole thing that I couldn’t do anything but sit in the den playing with Legos and watching hours of the Addams Family on DVD with my daughter. It will probably be weeks before that theme song leaves my head.

The most bothersome and even embarrassing part of last week were the instruction sessions, especially the portion devoted to finding books. I’ve just grown more and more irritated by OPACs over the years. I know that for our library the OPAC is still the best way to verify if we own something. It used to be the case that when teaching freshmen, as I was last week, I relied exclusively upon the OPAC to teach the students to find books. Why should I complicate the information world any more than I need to? This year I’ve finally given up the ruse of simplicity, and teach Worldcat and Google Books along with the catalog. Inevitably, when we do identical keyword searches in the OPAC and Worldcat, Worldcat has roughly 10 times what our library has, and Princeton, as you might imagine, has a good sized library. That, however, isn’t the bothersome part, since we deliberately don’t buy lots of material out there. The more bothersome part is that at least twice as many titles as found in our OPAC show up in Worldcat as being owned by Princeton, typically because the Worldcat catalog records contain more information, and thus are more likely to show up in keyword results.

I’m less impressed by what the Google Books searches bring up except for more esoteric topics, but I can imagine a more refined Google search with tens of millions of digitized books and slightly more subject control being far superior to any current catalog.

I know there are slightly more sophisticated catalogs out there right now, but we don’t have one. Three were recently demonstrated, but none met with enough approval for adoption. That might be just as well. The effort and expense necessary to move from a barely adequate present to a imperfect, experimental present might not have been worth it. No wonder people used to better search engines balk at OPACs, where you have to spell exactly, put searches in the right word order for the best results, know how to think like a librarian to get the most out of them. I tell the students that to use the catalog effectively, they’ll need to think like a librarian, and that I feel their pain but it’s the way the world works here for a while to come.

In the meantime, I can’t help but recall one of my favorite bits of doggerel every time I have to show some clueless student how to navigate the muddy waters of the catalog. You might remember the halcyon days of Saturday Night Live, back when a young Joe Piscopo taught us how to laugh. In those days SNL would host one of my favorite poets, the inimitable Tyrone Green. How he feels about his landlord is how I often feel about my OPAC. Thus, I leave you with a bit of poetry for the day.

IMAGES by Tyrone Green

Dark and lonely on a summer night
Kill my landlord, kill my landlord
The watchdog barkin’, do he bite?
Kill my landlord, kill my landlord
I slip in the window
I break his neck
Then his house I start to wreck.
Got no reason, what the heck.
Kill my landlord, kill my landlord.
C-I-L-L my landlord.

It’s Children’s Book Week, something we don’t celebrate in academia, but the kind of thing that helps to build the scholars of the future, even the guitar hero scholars. We’re librarians, we all know the importance not just of literacy, but of lots of active reading.

This recalls my family’s struggles with our child’s reading ability. Last year my daughter Libby was in first grade at a private Catholic girls school that was supposed to focus on academics. We decided on an all girls school to avoid the distraction boys sometimes bring to the classroom and the occasional occurrence in later grades of girls paying more attention to boys than to studies.

She had gotten along okay in kindergarten, but the first grade teacher had a serious problem with my daughter’s reading habits. The problem? Libby read too many books at too high a level, which meant she was ahead of most of the other children in a lot of subjects and also meant she was bored out of her mind during classes that seemed to her to still be teaching kindergarten skills. In the Fall before her 7th birthday (she was born on Epiphany), she read, both with her mother and on her own, the entire Harry Potter series up to that point. She hasn’t met a book series from Captain Underpants to Harry Potter that she hasn’t devoured. (Current obsession: Edgar and Ellen).

Incredibly, the teacher was opposed to Libby’s reading so much, though, and by extension to the reading habits we’ve instilled in her mostly through example. Finally, when the teacher more or less told us that Libby should stop reading so many books, we came to a crisis. Imagine, too much reading causing a classroom crisis. Since the school wouldn’t give her extra work or promote her, we finally pulled her out 3/4 of the way through the year and put her in a school with a more rigorous curriculum. She also skipped a grade.

Now she’s in the 3rd grade at the Princeton Latin Academy, where her current third grade report card lists the following graded subjects: Latin, Greek, World History, Arithmetic, Literature, Writing, Syntax, Science, Spelling, Geography, and Art. Music isn’t graded, but they have that as well. They have a poetry recitation day, and every spring the lower school students write and perform an opera based on a classic work of literature. They start learning rhetoric and philosophy in the 7th grade. Lest it sounds too much of a grind, the school is also in the middle of the woods on a summer campground that isn’t used during the year. So they also spend a lot of time playing in the woods where they get quasi property deeds that they then trade and combine, and make houses and things on the “props.” Now all the kids are like her, so she’s not such a freak because she reads a lot, as avid readers were in the previous school. (She’s good at other things, and is tall and athletic as well. I’d show you a picture, but you’d just get jealous that your own children weren’t as attractive.)

Still, I think the reading begins at home. I just can’t understand parents who claim to worry that their children aren’t reading or reading poorly, but then never read anything themselves. The format varies from print to electronic, but reading is a frequent occurrence at our house. Libby has even picked up her parent’s and grandparent’s habit of reading over meals. Every day I find the piles of books and magazines consumed with the daily breakfast. If we didn’t consciously have family dinners every night, we’d probably all three sit at the dinner table reading to ourselves while eating.

My parents were avid readers, but not of anything worth remembering, just whatever paperbacks might come their way. Avid, but not discriminatory. But the substance doesn’t matter for children so much as the habit. I now read all sorts of scholarly books and articles for enjoyment that my parents would have balked at, but it’s because the long habit has made them relatively easy. It helps, though, to have books around. I missed out on that as a child, since my parents weren’t particularly well educated and didn’t value books as such. While they bought me books and took me to the library, books weren’t much of a presence in the house. The paperbacks came and went. I decided I would change that for my daughter. Here’s a view of most of my home library and some of hers next to her little workspace. (The home library used to be larger, but I sold a couple thousand books last time I moved. I got tired of having books stuffed into every nook at cranny of my house.) I like Children’s Book Week and similar projects because they promote the presence of books.

The sheer physicality of the books helps against the other distractions. We also spend a lot of time on our computers, reading and playing games. My daughter spends a lot of time on our desktop computer, mostly either reading Garfield comics or playing on a sort of junior games and social networking site called Webkinz. I can’t say I particularly like her playing games like “Supermodel,” where the point is to pick the most fashionable outfit, which seems to be the one with the most Webkinz logos, but it’s safe. We don’t allow Barbies in the house, so she has to get her gender oppression kick somewhere, I suppose. The computer presence is bound to increase when she gets her “One Laptop per Child” laptop for Christmas. Add to that all the DVDs and other games and the distractions mount up. Having books around and frequently reading shows that these things are enjoyable, too. DVDs and Internet games complement the traditional, not just replace it.

It’s too bad every week isn’t children’s book week. I think we need an adult book week as well.

By the way, I got a few minutes to write this because my wife’s reading The Wright 3 to Libby. Now it’s time for me to do daddy duty, which goes on even during Children’s Book Week.

ACRLog had a thought provoking post yesterday on creating library leaders for the future, asking what libraries are doing to create those leaders. A commenter wrote: “As a library administrator who tries to be intentional about nurturing the leadership skills of my staff, I have to admit that the thought of conflating “leadership” with “administration” gives me the willies.” I didn’t get the willies, but the post does tend to conflate administration with leadership. This conflation is evident in the following question: “Ask newer members of the profession if they plan to seek an administrative position and too often the answer is ‘no.’ Are there good models this profession could follow for developing its future leaders?”

I would have to agree with the commenter that leadership isn’t the same as administration. If it were, then all administrators would be leaders and all leaders administrators, which we know not to be the case. Library administrators might lead, but they can be just as effective in recognizing and supporting the talents of others and letting them lead change. According to my extensive research on leadership, one way to look at the difference between management and leadership is that “management involves power by position” while “leadership involves power by influence.” When position and influence coincide, one has a great manager, but there will always still be leaders who influence others regardless of their position, for both good and bad reasons. Scandalmongers and gossips might lead a library into decay. Creative innovators and collaborators might lead it into glory. But neither need to be administrators. I once had a terrible experience with an administrator who could neither administrate nor lead very well, and as I look around the profession these days, the people influencing how I think about libraries and where I think they should be going aren’t necessarily administrators, but frontline librarians trying to find new and creative ways to solve old problems.

Still, what struck me most about the post was the assertion that if we “ask newer members of the profession if they plan to seek an administrative position and too often the answer is ‘no.’” I don’t usually ask newer members of the profession this, but I can understand the “no.” I’m not sure if I’m a newer member of the profession anymore (I’ve been a librarian for 8 years, which seems long to me sometimes, but is considerably less than many of my colleagues), but I can speculate on some reasons why librarians wouldn’t want to be administrators.

First, job satisfaction. A lot of academic librarians like the academic part of academic librarianship. I like being involved, however tangentially, with the intellectual and scholarly life of the university. I like developing the collection as well as using it myself, and I like helping students use it as well. Last week I had a research consultation with a student I’ve worked with before, and at the end he said he thought I had a great job. I asked why, and he said because I got to learn so many different things especially during the research consultations, and he was right. In many ways I do have a great job, and one of the things I like most is the preparatory research before consultations, where I study whatever the students are working on so that I can give them the best help. I’m intellectually interested in philosophy and religion, and doing my job well means I read philosophy and religion books and articles, which I would be doing anyway.

Like a lot of people, I became a librarian after I’d done some other things. To give you an idea of the other things, I sold out to become a librarian. In library school, I talked to a lot of librarians and decided that initially at least the best library job for me would be a reference/bibliographer position working with philosophy and religion at a research university, preferably not at a state university because I wanted to avoid the tenure-track hoops I saw so many librarians going through (and have since seen so many old friends from library school go through). Two years out of library school, I had that job and liked it. If I moved into an administrative job, a lot of what I like doing would go away, and I’m not sure how I’d feel about that. Administrators should be there to support the work of others, not do that work, but I like doing the work. A professor who’d given up being a dean once told me he went back to being a professor because he wanted to be out doing the sorts of projects he was helping to support as a dean. There’s an administrative position open at a fine university nearby, a head of reference sort of position I’ve been tempted to apply for. I don’t know how competitive I would be, but I think I could be great at the job. But I hesitate because I like so much of what I do now, and I fear the loss of good things.

Another reason might be the expectations of libraries. I see a lot of job ads for department heads that expect the applicants to already have several years of supervisory experience before they consider the person qualified. I’ve talked to librarians frustrated by this old Catch-22. Many libraries seem unwilling to take a chance on someone who has the capacity for good management but not the experience. There seems to be the assumption that because someone has supervised before, that they must be good at it, and that unless they have supervised before they are a completely unknown quantity. I don’t know how accurate those assumptions are, but it seems to me that some libraries are better at rewarding degrees or experience than talent. Based on how many open administrative searches there seem to be right now in academic libraries, I think libraries are either going to have to change their expectations for some of these jobs. Notice I didn’t say “lower” their expectations. But for the reference librarian who wants to be a head of reference, how does that person break through the “supervisory experience required.” And at what point does one just give up seeking such jobs?

Some people might also want to avoid administrative positions because of the lack of financial incentive. Good managers aren’t compensated as well in libraries as they would be in the private sector. One might say that no academic librarians are compensated as well as they might be in the private sector, but that argument only goes so far. For example, I can’t do what I do with a large academic library. What I do isn’t just finding information, but has an integral relationship with information in specific fields communicated in specific ways that I also have an intellectual interest in. But management is a more universal trade. One can be a good administrator without knowing much about the specifics of much of the work. Good library directors don’t necessarily know how to catalog or answer reference questions or select materials any more. Management has some claim to being an art and science of its own. But out in the world good management is compensated, whereas in libraries one gets the burdens of administration without as many of the financial benefits. Some schools are worse than others, but not too long ago I talked to someone on a search committee for an AUL position at a university library in a major east coast city who said they planned to offer a salary in the mid-50s, which is the same or less than a lot of non-administrative academic librarians make already, especially on the east coast. That was an extreme, but I have noticed in those job ads that post salary ranges that the salaries for administrative positions aren’t significantly higher than the position just below it. For someone reluctant to apply for an administrative job, would the possibility of a few extra thousand a year (before taxes) be much of an incentive? Probably not. They’d have to want to be in charge.

But what makes people want to be in charge? If they’re good leaders already and they have power through influence, they might already be getting things done they want to get done. Why take on the hassle of performance reviews and solving people’s problems when one can instead work collaboratively and yet still somewhat independently to get things done?

Unfortunately, I suspect that the best reason might be because of already existing bad administrators, administrators who aren’t interested in recognizing their talented employees and supporting their efforts. I know some librarians who want to be in charge because they believe the people in charge at their libraries are just doing a terrible job, and they want to take over and set things right. Setting things right is a powerful incentive.

Finally, though, I wonder whether this is even a problem. If the management vacuum that seems to be emerging continues as more librarians retire, libraries will have to either flatten their organizations and promote creativity and initiative in their frontline staff, or they will have to take chances on people who might not have had the traditional preparation, but who still might make great department heads and directors. Or they may just promote incompetents, but let’s hope that doesn’t happen often.

There’s at least one other possibility as well, a faint hope or a daring dream. Libraries will always have leaders, but there may come a time when they have very few administrators. Thoreau wrote that that government is best which governs least, and concludes that if this is true then that government is best which governs not at all, and that when people are prepared for it, that will be the sort of government they will have. As power disperses and communication changes and librarians are more empowered because their jobs demand creativity and flexibility and initiative, less library administration might be not just a necessity brought on by circumstance, but a good thing. A library of motivated, dedicated librarians with creativity and initiative who lead and exert power through influence might need no administration at all.

Fortunately Stephanie the CogSci Librarian commented on a post of mine last week, or I wouldn’t have discovered the debate regarding better instruction or better interfaces that was going on within Facebook last week. Maybe I should hop onto the Facebook bandwagon and try to make more Facebook librarian friends. On the other hand, while the debate was going on I was helping prepare a Halloween party for my daughter. When it comes to an interesting library discussions versus party planning, I’m not sure where my loyalties lie.

My own preference would be for better interfaces, but it seems we have so little control over them. The world of information is so chaotic these days that sometimes I don’t even think better instruction will work well. A couple of weeks ago I gave research introductions to some juniors as they prepare to begin researching their independent junior papers, and unfortunately I had to acquaint them with the chaos without providing much order. I’m not cynical enough to think they all want to search nothing but Google, because I don’t find that to be the case with students I talk to. They perhaps all want to search Proquest and JSTOR, but even then they’ve moved beyond thinking that everything is on the free Web. Then I had to bring them back to the Web to show them how to find what we couldn’t find with traditional tools.

Teaching the traditional tools doesn’t bother me, either. Librarians for decades have tried to bring order to chaos, and scholars are familiar with catalogs, subject headings, and other standard library fare. The traditional tools still work up to a point, and they have to be taught, because otherwise much will be missed. In the world of printed books, still of great importance in the humanities, catalogs still serve a useful function unlikely to be usurped anytime soon. The structure of traditional indexes still works to some advantage. As painful as it might be for students, and I share their pain, to find some resources efficiently it’s still necessary to think like a librarian.

Add to this all the other useful ways to find books and scholarly information, from web-searching to footnote-chasing, and it’s easy to understand why students may be overwhelmed and want simpler, better, more powerful interfaces that organize information more effective. I do, too. I just don’t see how that can come about for a long time, if ever, what with so much undigitized information, so much proprietary information, so much expensive information, so much information, period.

It was typical that in a demonstrative search on one of the juniors’ topics we found a great article indexed in Worldwide Political Science Abstracts that wasn’t in full-text, and that the library didn’t subscribe to, and that didn’t show up in Google Scholar, but which did show up in Google and turned out to be in an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal. What lesson does this teach us?

The only hope might be more and better instruction, and even then the battle might be a losing one, because to thoroughly search these days requires becoming a Juke Box Hero, not a Guitar Hero, and who besides the serious scholars have the stamina for that? Most students have no desire to be serious scholars, and they never will be. I don’t think we can blame them for that. Try as we might, there’s only so much of the chaos we can teach students to control. That’s not a reason to get rid of instruction, just because it’s not perfect, but it might be a consolation for our inevitable failure to turn everyone into a human search engine.

As a postmodern librarian might say, or might have said back before we gave up postmodernism for whatever we have now, the grand librarian narrative that made sense of information has collapsed, and we live among the wreckage. One of the few useful terms I picked up from my mostly wasted years of studying postmodern theory was the concept of bricolage. Here’s the definition from the Wikipedia, which might be as good as any:

“Bricolage … is a term used in several disciplines…to refer to:

• the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things which happen to be available;
• a work created by such a process.

It is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler - equivalent to the English “do-it-yourself”, the core meaning in French being, however, ‘fiddle, tinker’ and, by extension, ‘make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand (regardless of their original purpose).’

Bricolage as a design approach - in the sense of building by trial and error - is often contrasted to engineering: theory-based construction.

A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur: someone who invents his or her own strategies for using existing materials in a creative, resourceful, and original way.”

We are the postmodern, or perhaps post-postmodern, librarians. Of necessity we are bricoleurs. We use what tools we can and build where we are able, putting pieces of the information universe haphazardly together for each research project, organizing the chaos where we can, inventing our own strategies in creative and resourceful ways because we no longer have the safety of using only the old, known ways. Despite improving interfaces, my suspicion—neither a fear nor a hope—is that this will be true for a long time to come, until the World Brain digests and organizes all knowledge.

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Bricoleurs can be artists practicing a useful trade or creating masterpieces. But it does mean giving up some amount of authority and control, which is alien to the librarian mindset. We like authority and control over information, but if such authority and control are these days necessarily limited, it does us no good to bemoan the fact. Rather than nostalgia for the days when we could master (or pretend to master) the information universe, instead we can get satisfaction from our bricolage, knowing that we’re doing what we can.