If Europeans want us to buy more books, they really should do something about that euro. That thing has gone up 78% against the dollar since I started this job. One begins to think, hmm, if there's any philosophy in French or German worth getting, it'd probably be translated and published in America. Right?
Not that I'm much of a one for nostalgia anyway, but I definitely wouldn't have wanted to be a librarian before Excel.
Procrastination: Complete.]]>
They could get worse, too, if the current generation of students is as bad as some claim. I haven't read Mark Bauerlein's new book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, though I remember reading this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education a couple of years ago that's obviously building up to the book. From the reviews, it sounds like a depressing read, and I gather from the title the problem is with the digital age. Perhaps it's not just a problem with these kids today, though. Maybe the digital age is making us all stupid, as Nicholas Carr opines in the Atlantic. Maybe we're turning (have turned?) into a culture of distracted skimmers without the attention necessary to read a book anymore. Perhaps channel-(or web) surfing is an accurate metaphor for our mental lives these days. Is it just our students who come to college as ignorant mouthbreathers panting for the next Facebook status update, or are we all like this now? It seems every week I read yet another article on how stupid we're all becoming because we revel in distraction. Some naysayers go so far as to point a critical finger at blogs. (Disclaimer: you are now reading a blog. Blogs may be hazardous to your mind. Read at you're own peril!)
Things may really be as bad as they seem, but somehow I can't share in the gloom about the kids today, no matter how few of them can identify the Speaker of the House or how many of them know more about American Idol than Nathaniel Hawthorne. I might be more gloomy if I couldn't remember the state of my own self when I was eighteen. It pains me now to think how woefully ignorant I was, how few books I'd read, how little I knew about all the subjects that I now love knowing about. Wait, no it doesn't. This occurs to me because I have a birthday this week (don't bother with presents, just send cash). If turning eighteen is the beginning of adulthood, I have been an adult for almost twenty-one years now.
How ignorant that eighteen-year-old was about all the subjects we claim are important! Perhaps most critics of the younger generation were always brilliant, erudite high achievers, even when young, like some of the wunderkind I see coming to Princeton. Not me. "Underachieving" was a label frequently applied to my meager efforts in school. Though now I have two college degrees in English literature, I'm not sure I ever managed to finish a book I was assigned to read in high school, and I vaguely remember sleeping through a number of my English classes. (My high school English teacher recently befriended me on Facebook, and I'm sure she'd be able to verify my scholastic inadequacies.) I was a lackadaisical student with little interest in learning what all my no doubt well intentioned teachers thought I should be learning. I wasn't letting my schooling get in the way of my education.
My teachers seemed to like me for the most part, though, so I guess they didn't take it personally. Well, except for that geography teacher I used to openly mock because of her incompetence. She didn't like me very much and even had the nerve to call my parents and complain that I wasn't taking her class seriously, as evidenced by the fact that I'd filled in deliberately fake answers on a quiz. (Trees that lose their leaves are not deciduous, for example, they are merely careless.) Also, I just remembered, the principal considered me a discipline problem because I frequently ignored the school dress code and kept my shirt untucked. Ahh, the simpler pre-Columbine days.
Certainly I learned things, and I read a lot. Though there weren't many books in my house, I spent hours at the public library. I consumed books and articles on architecture, photography, and blues music, for example, because after a couple of years of photography and journalism classes in high school, I wanted to be a photojournalist. No, wait, after a couple of years of drafting class I wanted to be an architect. I'm sorry, I meant that I really wanted to be Eric Clapton, and I even have a black and white Strat just like he had back in the day. I probably couldn't have told you who the Speaker of the House was in 1987. Tip O'Neill, perhaps? I could Google it to make sure. And politics? Why would anyone be interested in politics when there was so much architecture and photography around? And if you can play the blues, does it really matter if you can't name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?
Oh, and television. I watched a ton of it. I've watched almost no commercial television since I turned eighteen, but that's because I'd consumed a lifetime's supply by then. I planned my life around Thursday nights on NBC. I wanted to go drinking at Cheers and then end up in Night Court, because I had crushes on both Shelley Long and Markie Post. I remember endless childhood Sunday afternoons watching old westerns on KXTX. We got cable TV when I was about six, and it was my friend and boon companion until I graduated from high school and gave up the habit.
And when I wasn't blowing off my schoolwork, playing guitar, taking photos, or watching television, I was out with friends: going to parties, drinking, hanging out at the mall. It's hard to believe that there were times when I and my friends had whole weekends with nothing "better" to do than sit around at someone's house chatting and watching videos. Why wasn't I reading the politics section of the newspaper? Why wasn't I informing myself about the world? Why wasn't I being a good, concerned citizen and steeping myself in my culture? Huh! I ask you that!
Despite all this, I seem to have come out okay, or at least I think so. The child is not always father of the man, it seems. I made it through college and two graduate programs with excellent grades. I've got a pretty good job, a loving family, a decent house. Despite almost completely ignoring my studies until college, I'm what most people would probably consider well read. I keep up on current events. I have a smartphone, an iPod, a laptop, and a blog, I email and IM and text message, but somehow I still manage to read a book or two a week on average. I'm now more than twice the age of our incoming college students, yet I don't feel particularly old. I know almost nothing about contemporary youth culture and I certainly wouldn't celebrate it, but I can't bring myself to fault teenagers for doing the things kids do.
Perhaps all of us really are getting stupider, and this blog post is longer than most of us can read. Somehow, I just can't get that concerned about it. I suppose I should be concerned as a citizen in a democracy, but I'm not convinced our politics are particularly democratic now, so a higher percentage of ignoramuses in a generation probably won't have much of an effect. It might be that culture is always carried on by a remnant, and there are always bright and passionate people in every generation who manage to carry on and contribute to our knowledge of the world despite the odds.
A friend of mine mentioned he'd seen a recent clip of Roger Daltrey (now in his mid-sixties) singing "My Generation." We saw him sing it live during The Who's twenty-fifth reunion tour in 1989, and it seemed to me that he was old then, though he was just a few years older than I am now. It might seem ironic, his singing "I hope I die before I get old," but maybe it depends on what it means to be old. Are we old when we can no longer understand these kids today? When we think it's like they're from another planet, as I recently heard a librarian say? Are we old when we judge the inadequacies of college students by our matured standards? When we no longer remember what unformed youths most of us were? When we actually believe that it's more important for a teenager to know who the Speaker of the House is than to know the latest television shows? If that's the case, I don't want to get old. ]]>
So far I like the book, though it manifests the typical ideological conformity of most cultural studies writing I've read. Anything "marginalized," "subversive," "radical," "disruptive," or "resistant" is good and worthy of our attention; anything "legitimate" or "official" suspect. It's not that I mind; it's just that the attitude of such politicized scholarship is so predictable in its assumption that things are marginalized because of some reason other than they're stupid or useless, as if marginal were in itself interesting and subversive always beneficial, regardless of what is being subverted. This sentence sums up a lot of that attitude: "There is a risk that the aestheticization of conspiracy theory only serves to depolitize any challenging or radical potential it might have (we could, however, think this is a good thing in relation to right wing Militia groups)" (41). I'm happy to take that risk.
However, while reading it I decided to do a bit more research on some conspiracy theories. As I've written before, conspiracy theories are a minor hobby of mine. I find them fascinating as objects of study. In particular I was going to follow up on my favorite conspiracy theorist, David Icke. He's the one who claims that many world leaders are actually half human / half alien reptiles that allow them to shape-shift and pose as humans as they implement the fascistic new world order on behalf of the Illuminati. Needless to say, he's a lot of fun. He's also a dynamic and amusing speaker. Search Google Video for -- david icke freedom fascism -- to see a six hour presentation of his on conspiracies. As an example of his style, in the second video of three he criticizes Bush for continuing to read a children's book about a pet goat after Andrew Card has informed him that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. "Okay, Andy. After I find out what happens to this goat, I'll be right out."
Icke's written a lot of books on his conspiracy theories, but the latest one seems to sum up his past books, so I thought it would be a good place to start: The David Icke Guide to the Global Conspiracy (and How to End It). I don't know why I found it surprising, but according to Worldcat, of the 45 copies in American libraries, none are owned by academic libraries. Based on a very cursory glance through the holdings list on several other of his books, that's for the most part true of his other books as well. Here and there an academic library may have one of the books, but almost all of them are held by public libraries, which means that eventually almost all of them will be weeded when they have passed their popularity date.
The question for research libraries is, does this matter? These books are part of what Birchall calls "popular knowledge." They are decidedly not part of what we would call scholarly knowledge, which is typically what we buy. It's obvious to me why few academic libraries ever buy these books. They're books by kooks, right? We don't buy those. We librarians act as filters to keep them out of our scholarly collections, and the scholars apparently agree with our decisions, because they're not clamoring for more books by David Icke or other conspiracy theorists. There are few scholarly books on these kinds of theories, after all. Why would anyone want to study this intellectual gibberish?
The obvious argument against such collections is that scholars don't take these things seriously. We tend not to have major research collections on astrology or self-help, either, because the unserious and intellectually suspect nature of these books makes them unimportant as contributions to the scholarly record, yet at the same time the books pose as argumentative non-fiction, which is one way to describe scholarly books. Conspiracy books are in many ways like scholarly books. They consider evidence. They make arguments. Only they tend to do it badly and are often unverifiable. Still, we collect other books that pose unverifiable theories about the world, especially in the humanities. Are most of the assertions of French theory any more verifiable than those made by the 9/11 Truth Movement?
However, we collect non-scholarly works as objects of study as a matter of course. Novels, letters, diaries, films. Why don't we also collect conspiracy books in the same spirit? Perhaps it's because of the pseudo-scholarly nature of most of these books. Novels rarely pose as fact. Films don't claim to be true. David Icke presumably believes what he writes is true, and so do a lot of other people. Because of this pseudo-scholarly nature, perhaps the scholarly consensus to ignore these works makes more sense. Conspiracy books aren't proper objects of scholarly study because they compete with scholarly study. Taking them seriously even as objects of study would give them some sort of interest, would perhaps validate them in some way. Is this why we don't collect these things?
Are we the filters that guard scholarly knowledge, or even "legitimate" knowledge? Or is the truth darker? Perhaps academic librarians are part of the fortress guarding scholarly standards of knowledge, or perhaps instead we are all victims of false consciousness or even part of the conspiracy. Is this active non-collection or merely neglect? Are we repressing or merely ignoring conspiracy books? Do we not buy these books because we don't want them widely distributed, thus "marginalizing" them? Or is it that we don't want the theories to survive for later study, because we don't want people to know the truth?
It could be the absence of conspiracy collections in most research libraries is the result of benign neglect, but maybe, just maybe, something else is going on. We could be either reactionary dupes marginalizing the subversive radicals among us, or tools of the Illuminati doing our best to suppress the disruptive truth about the conspiracy to establish the new world order. Either way it doesn't look pretty for us. We may look like ordinary librarians widely dispersed doing out best to collect works of scholarship and objects of scholarly interest, but it might be naive to believe this, because it could be that everything is connected and nothing is what it seems. ]]>
I sat with an old friend during the program, someone who also works at a private university with a large research library. When discussing the program later, we both agreed that this all-about-the-service-and-the-people ethic wasn't necessarily the case at our libraries. Instead, the collections are the important thing. Certainly, there have to be people to acquire, catalog, and preserve the collections. Naturally, we also have people who instruct library users how to find what they need, which is where the "customer service" part would come in. But even without these people, and I'm one of them, the center would still be the collection.
Scholars don't necessarily want people; they want stuff. They want books, journals, archives, manuscripts, data, and if the library has the stuff they'll use the library regardless of the people. I've heard various stories about inhospitable research libraries, especially in Europe, that seem to make it as difficult as possible for scholars to get at their resources, but scholars go even to these libraries because they want the stuff. I'm not saying having a lot of desired resources means we should act like that librarian in The Name of the Rose or that we shouldn't be helpful and friendly. I'm just saying that for large libraries, the collection takes precedence in a way that it doesn't elsewhere, and that the service-is-everything attitude doesn't seem as prominent.
I know this isn't the case in smaller libraries. I worked for a couple of years in a liberal arts college library, which was probably adequate for most undergraduates, but definitely wasn't designed to support scholarly research at too high a level. The library usually didn't even have the books I wanted to read, for that matter. In smaller places, that's what ILL is for, but for ILL to work, the desired articles actually have to be somewhere. From the way some librarians speak, ILL means libraries can stop buying a lot of stuff, but for a resource to be shared, some library has to purchase it in the first place. There have to be just-in-case libraries for the just-in-time approach to work at other ones. No library has everything, of course, but some libraries must have a lot for the system to work.
It seems that most of what I read about customer service comes from public librarians, who want to attract as many people as possible in libraries with relatively small collections. In fact, another interesting speaker in the program was a public librarian who talked about a service her library provides, where librarians greet patrons at the door and walk them through the library helping them find what they need. I think I'd find that a bit too much if I were the patron, but then again I'm already a librarian. I'm sure there are plenty of library users who really like this program, and it sounded like a good way to get out of the reference desk mentality, where the librarians sit and wait while fewer patrons come to seek them out. I'm all for a service mentality in research libraries as well, but still I think it's important to remember that in research libraries, collection development is a customer service.]]>
The straw that broke this camel's back was at ALA. Normally I'm in so many committee meetings or discussion groups that I don't get to many programs, but I had an unexpectedly free slot and went to a program on "speaking the language of the millennials." I went, thinking I might learn something and might also get at least a blog post out of it. Besides, I knew one of the speakers.
It started with one of the organizers reading from the Beloit College Mindset List. Though this list might raise a chuckle, it's hardly a piece of keen sociological analysis. We were told that these kids today don't remember the Berlin Wall and that Michael Moore has always been around and apparently the Beloit College people think he's funny. I just took a quick look through the list, and, in the letters of my generation, BFD.
Were college professors and librarians such anxious ninnies when I started college? Did they have lists like the following: The class of 1991 doesn't remember where it was at when Kennedy was shot. Either one! It doesn't remember the Civil Rights Act, the moon landing, the Watts riots, the Stonewall riots, the Summer of Love, Woodstock, or the Vietnam War. There have always been The Pill and calculators. For them, cut and paste is a metaphor, and they write their essays on computers! Steve Martin has always been a wild and crazy guy. By the time they graduate, more time will have passed between then and Happy Days than between Happy Days and the era it depicted. How are we ever to communicate with these kids? I don't remember anything like that.
It was with the first speaker that I knew I was in the wrong demographic for this talk. He started with a list of eight questions. I can't remember them all (mind slipping in my old age, I guess), but I think they were: How many of you have a cell phone? Use IM and/or text messaging? Have a digital camera? Post photos to Flickr or something similar? Watch Youtube? Post videos to Youtube? Have a Facebook/Myspace profile? And something else I don't remember. Almost everyone raised a hand at almost every question. Even me. An entire audience of tuned in, plugged in, socially networking, socially softwaring librarians coming apparently just to make sure they weren't missing anything, anxious to learn how to speak like these millennial people. The speaker seemed taken aback. He paused for a moment, then said "Oh. Then you're a lot like the college students I see coming in every year." So much for difference. The first slide, and first statement after the questions, was something like, "the Internet is an important tool for modern communication." At that point I walked out. I just couldn't take it anymore.
I work with new college students every year. I teach them in class, I see them in instruction sessions, I meet with them in my office. Somehow I never seem to have any problem communicating with them or speaking a language they can understand. Where I work the language of the millennials is English (for the most part). Is that not the case elsewhere in the country? Yet we librarians are bombarded with claims that these students are so vastly different from "us" that we need to learn some special language to reach them, or that they're so much more tech-savvy than we benighted librarians. It's come to the point where I'm not sure whether to believe them or my lying eyes. ]]>
Before I began, I asked some other bloggers for advice. One told me he thought there might be a niche for a library blogger who wrote about the sort of issues I write about. Another blogger who chooses to remain anonymous said to go for quality over quantity of posts, not to be afraid of the long post, and to choose a blog title early in the alphabet so it shows up near the top of alphabetical blogrolls. I think I've succeeded well with the last two suggestions at least. I definitely didn't want a newsy blog, or a tech tips blog, or anything like that. Too many people doing that well already, and way too many people doing it badly. I've tried to write the blog as I might an opinion column, not too heavy, but not too light. Also, I deliberately avoided some of the tips that supposedly go to make popular bloggers. I don't link out much to other bloggers; I don't write about others to provoke them to write about me; though I'm not averse to the occasional scrap, I don't feel like the blog is very polemical; my goal has never been to get a high Technorati ranking; and despite my title, I wasn't trying to become the voice of academic librarianship, or anything like that.
Instead, I've tried to present the opinions of one lone librarian rather than represent the opinions of others, and I've tried to present those opinions in as thoughtful a manner as possible. Though I write these as essays, that is, as short exploratory pieces that may not be fully formed, still I've tried to avoid writing poorly reasoned pieces I'm not willing to defend.
I've also tried to present a somewhat non-librarian point of view. This isn't terribly difficult for me, because I'm sort of a librarian by default. If the market for Shakespeare scholars had been strong a dozen years ago, I would probably be happily teaching Shakespeare at some liberal arts college now. Instead, I stumbled into library school because it seemed like a better choice of career than adjunct rhetoric instructor. My motto at the time was "easy to get in, easy to get through, easy to get a job," and I was right. Even now, I'd probably be just as happy teaching rhetoric full time, but I make a lot more money and have a lot more job security as a librarian, plus I don't have to grade so many essays. So while I like being a librarian, and I think I'm pretty good at it, I don't always think of myself as a librarian. I think of myself as a person who loves and uses academic libraries, who identifies with the scholarly and humanistic mission of liberal education, who enjoys teaching and reading, and who also happens to work as a librarian. I see the library not as an end in itself but as one part of a much larger educational mission, and I've tried to comment on library issues from that perspective.
In one way I've definitely failed. This was supposed to be a purely professional blog. Though I've written a couple of personal pieces for fun, like my wedding anniversary post, the goal was to focus on library issues, not on my personal life and certainly not on my library. I've done pretty well about not blogging the Princeton University Library. Occasionally I've mentioned or praised colleagues, but in general I see no benefit to blogging about my workplace, as opposed to my work. My library has good points and bad points like every library, and I could certainly tell some entertaining stories, but this blog isn't the place for that. (See me at an ALA happy hour if you want to hear the good stuff!) However, what I didn't count on, because I'd never done this much sustained public writing, was just how much of my personality would be on display on the blog, and I'm not sure how happy I am about that. In general, I'm a private and even reserved person with those who don't know me. After looking back at the 100 or so posts I've written over the past year, it becomes clear what I think about, what my prejudices and assumptions are, what I care immensely about, and what I dismiss as folly in academic librarianship. Even that has exposed me more than I thought it would. On the other hand, I've grown more comfortable putting part of myself into the posts. Still, I won't be sharing vacation photos or music recommendations with you, so you can rest easy.
To make a long post short (too late!), I thank all of you who have been reading the blog, and I very much appreciate those of you who send kind words. No more navel-gazing for now. Tomorrow I'm hoping to write about a couple of ALA programs I went to, including the one where we were told in earnest tones that the Internet is a very important part of modern communication. Stay tuned!]]>
I would be curious to see the result of a similar comparison between Google Books and WorldCat, though. Often when looking for books on a subject, I skip my own OPAC and head for WorldCat anyway because I always come up with more results. It's not just a matter of WorldCat having more records, though obviously it does. WorldCat also seems to have more complete records as well. Almost inevitably when I do a keyword search, WorldCat generates ten times as many records as the Princeton catalog, including records for books Princeton owns but that don't show up with the same keyword search in our OPAC. Usually, that's because the WorldCat record has tables of contents or additional subject headings not in our records. Though I use Google Books occasionally, I haven't noticed it being any better than WorldCat, but that may change.
Imagine the possibilities if Google succeeds in what appears to be its endeavor to take over the information world. What kind of book searching capability would we have if Google and OCLC merged? GoogleWorldCat would probably put all the OPAC vendors out of business.]]>
However, I couldn't take issue because I found some of the comments so irrelevant to the issue of liberal education, though perhaps relative to the financial security of some liberal arts colleges. Consider this quote:
If liberal arts colleges are a dying breed, not everyone is in mourning. Career-based education is simply more practical, some experts believe."First, we all need to realize that the 'liberal arts curriculum' has never been proven through empirical research to be superior to the 'career college education,' or even 'self-teaching,' for that matter," says Marc Scheer, Ph.D., author of a soon-to-be-released book about higher education, No Sucker Left Behind: Avoiding the Great College Rip-Off.
I'm not going to make a case for the practicality of a liberal education, though one can certainly be made. Instead, I find the entire statement bizarre, and hope it was taken out of context. What exactly would an empirical study be like that could "prove" a liberal arts curriculum is superior or inferior to vocational education, which is really what "career college education" is, though for some reason the person doesn't want to use the term. Even vocational "education" is a euphemism for what many would prefer to call vocational training.
The only way the statement makes sense is if we add a purpose. Superior for what purpose? If the purpose is to leave four years of college and immediately be able to do some practical work, then perhaps vocational training is superior to liberal education. I'm assuming that is the context of the person's thought, because otherwise the remark doesn't mean much. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of a college "education" is to prepare one to immediately perform some practical job somewhere.
But of course that's obvious, because the purpose of liberal education and the liberal arts has rarely been to prepare people to perform specific jobs. The liberal arts are liberal because the purpose is to create free human beings knowledgeable about their world, capable of critical thought and sophisticated communication, and poised to develop their human potentials. I know this makes me sound like the unrepentant humanist I am, but it doesn't take any empirical research to show that a good liberal arts curriculum would go further toward this aim than any vocational training.
The critic of liberal education thinks the problem is the snobby professors.
"Liberal arts colleges need to add some more practical content to their coursework and encourage their instructors to do so. As it stands now, many faculty members have basic contempt for career training. They view it as beneath them. They don't think career training is part of their job. However, it's clear that both employers and students want more career training at all colleges. So colleges need to change their long-held contempt for this kind of training, and actively attempt to integrate practical material into their coursework."
However, I think even here the statement is problematic because of the faulty assumptions. I'm not sure any faculty members at liberal arts colleges have any "basic contempt" for vocational training, but that's just not what they do. I would bet that a lot of professors believe that a lot of the students that are in college now probably shouldn't be there because they have no interest in developing their intellects and themselves as free human beings and only want to get a job. If it really is "clear that both employers and students want more career training at all colleges," then the solution may be for liberal arts colleges to die off, though I hope that doesn't happen. However, if that really is the case, then it shows only that employers and students don't really want educated people, not that colleges should start offering more vocational training.
How exactly would one add "integrate practical material" into a seminar on literature, philosophy, or history? What does "practical" mean in this instance? All liberal arts classes aim to develop the critical and communication skills of students as well as understand a topic better. Are these not "practical" skills? The answer is probably in the forthcoming book, but I think I'll be too busy reading impractical philosophy and literature this summer to have time.
Even here, though, I can't agree based on my own work experience that vocational training is superior to a liberal arts curriculum. In my experience, those without a liberal education are perfectly capable of performing specific tasks, but often less capable of thinking about the broader context of their work as well as less capable of understanding other perspectives. This certainly isn't always the case, because intelligence and capacity can make up for a lot, and I've certainly known products of liberal arts colleges who were intellectually and conceptually substandard. Still, a liberal education teaches one to examine issues past the surface, to place ideas and actions in context, and to appreciate the diversity of people and motives. These things can come without it, and may not always stem from it, but those goals are parts of the purpose of a liberal education, and are typically not part of any vocational training.
Another odd perspective is that Scheer seems to think only in financial terms. For example:
"Yes, students at liberal arts colleges may recoup their investment over their lifetime," Scheer says. "But based on my research and the research of others, they probably won't 'recoup' their investment until the age of 33. In addition, students get the same financial payoff from college, whether they spend a lot on their degrees or not."
However, from the perspective of the liberally educated, this statement means next to nothing. How does one "recoup" an investment in reading a poem or a book or philosophy, or for that matter studying pure mathematics. The "investment" in liberal education cannot be measured in financial terms, but only the liberally educated can appreciate that. Attackers of liberal education think colleges should train employees; defenders think colleges should educate human beings. The financial interest for the individual person may dictate vocational training, but the human interest of the person as well as the social and political interest of the whole require a good dose of the liberal arts. ]]>
Bad experiences in the audience have affected my library instruction as well, which is probably where many of us give most of our public performances. When I was boring the students that first year, there was always one day of the semester where I knew they would be even more bored--the library instruction day. We teachers were all supposed to set up an appointment with the library, and we'd spend a class period with a library graduate assistant teaching the students about the catalog and maybe a database. It's hard to remember what was happening in the early 90s. Perhaps we got a demo of Infotrac or something. What I do remember is this library GA lecturing us for close to an hour on the catalog in a complete monotone while we just sat and stared. The only good points were that I didn't have to teach that day and that the lights were turned off, thus making it easier to sleep. After two semesters of complaints about how boring and useless these sessions were (and they all seemed to be by the same person), I stopped taking the students and started doing the introductions myself. We were both learning to teach, and were using those poor freshmen as our guinea pigs.
Sometimes we complain that professors don't want to let us into the classrooms to provide library instruction, but how much of that reluctance is based on bad experiences just like the one I had? We want to give the students help, but is our library instruction uniformly good? When I started teaching research sessions as a librarian, I always had in mind that poor GA from years past and how mind-numbing those sessions had been. The real benefit of those awful sessions was that I always knew at least some things to avoid.
Over the years I've had some great professors, and have often modeled parts of my teaching persona directly on them. As a teacher, I've benefited from bad teachers as well. I know not to hand out grades willy-nilly without being able to justify them, but I also learned to be honest with students when I don't know something and not try to bluff my way out of a bad situation. Part of my anger with the bad professor was that he was trying to bluff me. He didn't know what he was talking about, but seemed to treat me as some lesser being who could be lied to with no consequences. With him I think it was the product of nervousness and not arrogance, but still I didn't like it. He was anxious and trying to hide his embarrassment instead of just being honest.
Other teachers do this in the classroom. I've seen a couple of different teachers go out of their way to mask their ignorance. (Though my favorite story was second hand, about an English professor in a seminar who spent fifteen minutes of discussion time avoiding admitting he knew nothing about Condorcet, as if this is some sort of crime.) Librarians probably do this in instruction sessions as well, but I haven't seen as many of those. Yet I've never had a student who seemed to respect me less if I answered a direct question with, "I don't know, but I'll get back to you with an answer."
This post isn't so much about cataloging lessons learned from bad experiences as a student or audience member, but more about how I've tried to learn from other people's mistakes and avoid them myself. My teaching might not be great, but I know at least some things to avoid so that it doesn't become execrable, and for that I have even the execrable teachers in my past to thank. Thank you, execrable teachers from my past.]]>
Still, I wasn't going to complain. What's one B more or less? But a couple of days later I was passing by the professor's office and decided to ask him about it. Not so much about my grade, as about the odd fact that everyone got the exact same grade. When I asked him, he said they just all seemed like B papers to him. By that time I'd been teaching and grading essays in rhetoric and literature for a few years, and I found his answer very unsatisfactory. In a slightly disingenuous manner I asked him if he could articulate his grading standards for me, so that I might be able to meet them in the future. That is, what made a paper an A or a B or a C, what did he look at when grading, etc. At that point he started giving me the runaround, and it was clear that he had no idea. He didn't know what made a good or bad essay, other than his gut "feeling." Lots of people think grading essays is very subjective, but that's not true. It's fairly easy to articulate standards, and with common standards there's often a broad consensus on proper grades. "Feeling" like a paper is one grade or another without being able to justify a grade is a mark of a bad teacher, and also means the teacher cannot guide those students who honestly do want to know what standards they need to meet to succeed.
We discussed this and some other teaching issues. The class in general was badly run and his teaching ethos was deteriorating quickly for me. Finally, his avoidance of straight answers led me to ask the most aggressive question I've ever asked one of my teachers. Angry at his vague evasiveness, I asked, "Have you ever taught before?" I felt a little bad, because he was a nice guy, well meaning and seemed kind, but I resent unqualified people being my instructors. After a bit more stammering, he admitted that he hadn't taught before. So he hadn't taught, hadn't graded, and frankly couldn't lead a discussion. And yet he had the power over my grade. I went to library school for free, and in this class I was getting what I paid for, which I suppose made up for the bargains I received in a few classes with good instructors.
I left in a huff, feeling angry both at having what I considered an unqualified professor and also at myself for letting it get to me. The denouement? From then on, every assignment I turned in got an A+, and there was still no explanation why. Probably he just didn't want to have any more exchanges with that unreasonable, angry student.]]>
My main questions are about all those specialized reference books, things like the Encyclopedia of Hell or the Historical Dictionary of Taoism. In a reference room tight on space, how specialized can a reference book be before it can safely go out to the circulating stacks. If the multi-volume Encyclopedia of Buddhism is on the shelf, can I let the Popular Dictionary of Buddhism fly and be free? Do I need ready access to four different encyclopedias of Hinduism? Or multi-volume encyclopedias of philosophy in four different languages? And if all the big sets and the main encyclopedias are available, why bother with the single volume specialized works?
Should I keep reference works that I'm almost positive no one is going to consult just because I like to have them there, even though I don't consult them, either. Some old sets just seem like they belong, even if they're quite dated. The Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics comes to mind. That could easily live elsewhere, but it just feels right on the shelf to me. My feelings on the matter, may, as usual, have to be sacrificed.
Oh well, no time to ponder further. I've been asked if I can get this done before ALA. I should have asked whether she meant Annual or next Midwinter.]]>
You see, a lot of the students have money, or at least their parents do. This is good for the tip jar I put out when I'm working the reference desk and also because even in their dorm rooms they have some nice stuff. Unfortunately, come moving out time (this week), they don't have room to take all that stuff back, so it all gets piled up outside the dorms in big junk heaps. It's the only time our usually beautiful campus looks like an abandoned refugee camp. But at least the rest of us benefit. I almost got to scavenge a new Mercedes that was parked next to the trash pile, but it turned out it belonged to a parent.
Still, I'm happy because I picked up a very nice floor lamp during the long walk to the parking garage. It has a wooden shaft and polished steel trim and actually works, so I don't even have to rewire it. I'd been needing a good floor lamp, too, to replace the dilapidated one in my den that I've been carting around since I was in college. If I'd had a truck with me, and maybe another burly librarian, I could have come home with a sofa that would have been a huge improvement over the one in my den that I've been carting around since grad school. (As you can tell, my den is where all the old furniture from my impoverished student days goes. Now that I'm a prosperous librarian, I have furnished my living and dining rooms with that fancy Ikea furniture.)
The only problem I see now is that I've got a cheap, 20-year-old, brass floor lamp with a broken plastic shade sitting in my house and nothing to do with it. Perhaps I can take it to work with me tomorrow and replace the one in the junk pile. It seems the least I could do to show my gratitude.]]>
A month ago I read a post at Gypsy Librarian summarizing an article speculating about how much would be lost for libraries if some sort of disaster wiped out our electricity. (The article is also discussed at Logical Operator.) Given a sufficient enough world energy crisis and I suppose that future is plausible even if improbable, though if we enter some sort of Mad Max post-apocalyptic world we'll probably all be too busy defending our desert fortresses against roving bands of toughs to worry much about research. Still, the point is an interesting one. The pre-microfilm research library was impervious to this sort of disaster. Books printed on non-acidic paper last a long time, and that fact has been proven with time. They don't even need the exquisite care they sometimes get now. When weeding the philosophy collection in the open stacks, I several times came across sound copies of two and even three hundred year old books just sitting there.
While I'm a big supporter of digitization projects and like the ease of use and power of search that digital texts give us, I still worry about the future. Sometimes those of us who like printed books and are skeptical of some technological claims for future information bliss are accused of being too traditional, too rooted in the past. We must look to the future. See what the exciting tools are doing for us! I can see what the exciting tools are doing for us, and in many cases I heartily approve. However, it seems to me that some techno-thrill is centered merely on the present, not on the future. Traditional research libraries have always shown a concern for the future. The collections we have now that allow historical research are there because someone in the past collected them for future use. Darnton's example of the Folger collection is an excellent example of this.
I found his discussion of the multiple Folios had some personal relevance because of a discussion I once had with someone from Project Gutenberg. I was working in a used bookstore at the time and during a slow period we were arguing about the future of books. He was convinced that the future of books was electronic, while I was making the self-serving case that print books would be around for a long time to come. Though he was in fact haunting a used bookstore, he said he could read any book he wanted on his Newton (this will date the conversation somewhat). Anyway, the discussion got on to scholarly editions of Shakespeare, a topic I have a bit of knowledge about. He informed me that scholarly editions were irrelevant, and that any old text could be put online and everyone would be happy with it. In other words, he was assuming that the works of Shakespeare were stable texts, that there's just, for example, an unproblematic text of King Lear. For the sake of argument, I'd be willing to admit that the general reader of Shakespeare probably doesn't care about the details, but that unconcern is built on the foundation of texts created by scholars working with multiple texts of Shakespeare to try to create a best text for the general reader. It's just not true that there is a single, stable Shakespeare just as it isn't true there's a single stable text of the Bible, to name another book that the general reader often assumes is unproblematic. Editions matter to the scholar, and they should matter to everyone. Do all digitization projects consider this?
A concern for the future is a concern that what is being collected will be available for future use. Unfortunately, in many respects libraries are thinking less of the future and more of the present. Consider the example of scholarly journals. Until relatively recently, journals were purchased and that was that. The publisher could fold. The journal could dissolve. It didn't matter. The journal issues that had been purchased were still there in perpetuity. Now, however, libraries routinely aren't purchasing journals, they're purchasing access to journals, which is very different. Though all would be lost if we lost electricity, less dire circumstances could still lead to the loss of said access. If libraries stop subscribing, sometimes they might lose access to back issues that they had once been able to get. The stability of online collections differs, of course. JSTOR seems to me about as stable as can be, though I don't think research libraries should discard all their old copies of JSTOR journals. A research library would be quite foolish to start canceling subscriptions to necessary journals because they're now in ProQuest, though, as good as ProQuest is at providing a lot of content.
All is subject to uncertainty, and no individual library of the past could be sure that their collections wouldn't be destroyed by fire or natural disaster (though rarely has this occurred on a grand scale). Had that happened, though, the results would be disastrous for the individual institution and its scholars, but less so for everyone else unless the collection was very unique, because there are so many research libraries. Could we be so sanguine about the future? If publishers of the future started collapsing in some economic meltdown and their online offerings disappeared, would we still have what we had at one time purchased, or would then be reliant once more upon the pre-electronic collections?
I'm not trying to paint some gloomy picture of the future of research libraries or attempting to manufacture a crisis, because I don't feel gloomy about that future and I don't think a crisis exists. I don't think libraries are dying. But I find it odd that most of the time I see projections and prophesies about the future of libraries, they all concern the way some technological contrivance is going to affect the way we deliver content and services, but rarely on what that content will actually be. We're told, for example, that mobile devices are ever more common and that we will have to adapt to them. That's fine for some things. I have a mobile device of my own and use it all the time, but I think they're only useful in their place. I don't think people will be reading scholarly monographs on their smartphone. With DRM and copyright being what it is, I can't even see much of a future for reading scholarly monographs from libraries on dedicated ebook readers, which is too bad because that's a future I'd like to see. However, a concern for the future is a concern for preserving the past. The future of a research collection is its past, in what it has preserved and made available. If we abandon the known, stable good of print, can we be sure that what we collect now will still be available 100 years from now?
I don't know the answer to that question, and I'm not especially alarmed, but it's a question well worth addressing. If the collections of the future are just the things we managed to digitize, then they might be relatively more impoverished than our print collections are compared to all that has been printed. If the digital versions don't survive, we will have lost a lot. Right now we can't address the problem because we are too concerned with the flux of the present to think much of the future and because there's no way we can answer the problem of longevity and preservation without a lot of time passing by to prove the point one way or another. We take our multiple leaps of faith and hope for the best, because that's the best we can do right now. Regardless, we must always be concerned not just with present flux, but with future stability. The research library always shows concern for the past and hope for the future.
Some librarians are criticized for resisting "change." I put the term in quotes because it's used so often in the library literature but is an almost contentless word. Change has no concrete meaning; everything depends on the specific change. Is it a change for the better or worse? Can we tell? What are the reasons for change? Are they good ones? A concern for "change" is usually poised as a concern for the future, but there doesn't seem to be much agreement on what that future might be. This makes perfect sense, and I'd be very skeptical indeed of librarians who claimed with certainty to know exactly what libraries and library users would be like in twenty years. What bothers me about so much change rhetoric is its reactive nature, though. Instead, I prefer those librarians who change because they want to create a certain type of future, not because they think if a contemporary fad isn't exploited that libraries will become irrelevant. For research libraries, that future seems clear. We want to create a future where the human record of the past will be widely and indefinitely accessible. The future of research is in the past and its preservation (and by past, I include the very recent past as well, so in a sense almost anything is the past, including those statistics from last year you're using to make arguments about the present). How we go about preserving this past will determine the possibilities of future research, and for now the best bet might be to take the piecemeal approach suggested by Darnton. Digitize, but don't forget to buy the books. Print isn't dead, and it lives a long time. Insisting on buying print books isn't a reactionary resistance to change, but instead a cautious consideration of future needs in a time of uncertainty. ]]>
When I first started teaching as a grad student, I remember all too well the mediocre textbooks I was forced to use. In addition to some hurried advice on research, there were assignments asking students to write two letters--one to their parents and one to their friends back home--describing the same party. Oooh, look how an awareness of audience changes your writing! Yawn. We're also usually told that essays can be categorized by genre: exposition, narration, description, or persuasion, and we have to write all four separately, as if one could narrate well without description or persuade without exposition. "Tell us a story about something you did that you'll never forget." "Describe this aubergine." "Explain (or expositate) for us how to make a pizza. Include every step!" Or better yet, there are invented forms, such as the problem-solving essay, a variation, I suppose, of the expository essay.
I still vividly recall one of these from about fifteen years ago. There was a pizza place in town that had incredibly cheap pizzas, which always tempted students to buy them. However, the pizzas weren't very good and used cheap ingredients so that they tasted like rubbery cardboard. However, the student argued, this "problem" could be solved if the pizza place would just use slightly better and more expensive ingredients, thus making the pizzas better. QED.
It's like the textbooks were designed deliberately to bore students and make them hate writing, or perhaps under the assumption that writing itself is boring and students are lazy idiots, so if we just break everything down for them into simplistic, unrealistic tasks we can all get through this together. If we just Taylorize the teaching of writing, everything will be easier. There are some notably good contemporary rhetorics out there that avoid this oversimplification, but none that I've found do things quite like I want them to.
The ideal for me would be a combination of two such books: Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, by Edward Corbett, and The Modern Researcher, by Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff, both of which I highly recommend if you're unfamiliar with them. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student sounds like it would be a good introductory text, but in fact the 4th edition is a 550+ page, detailed introduction to classical rhetoric. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern (Upper-level to Graduate) Student would be a better title. The Modern Researcher, now in its 6th edition, seems to grow slimmer with each edition, but it's still a 300+ page introduction to academic research. One can't assign close to 900 pages of preparatory reading for a 12-week course and have any time left over for the other readings.
What I would love to see is a 150 page combination of these two works appropriate for the well prepared college freshman. The ideal book would cover the appeals and canons of classical rhetoric as well as the separate parts of classical arrangement and useful rhetorical concepts, plus provide concise sections on finding, evaluating, and analyzing sources through library research.
I'd like to write such a book myself, but I imagine the audience would be small. In spite of the fact that there are undoubtedly many people more qualified to write both the classical rhetoric and the library research portions, I think I'm in a good position to write this particular book. Classical Rhetoric and Modern Research has a nice sound to it. Unfortunately, I think the only audience might be my class, and no writer or publisher would take on a book likely to sell twelve copies a year. So I suppose for next Fall I'll rely once more upon the mishmash of my own handouts and links out to other people. At least the students won't have to buy any textbooks.]]>