Monthly Archives: January 2008

Blaming Dewey

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On Sunday I read most of the book Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages, by Alex Wright. It’s a quick read and very informative, and Wright actually knows something about libraries, so I didn’t get the odd feeling I do when reading books and articles by non-librarians that discuss libraries–the feeling that people don’t know what they’re talking about. As much as I enjoyed Everything is Miscellaneous, the mention of card catalogs and the Dewey Decimal System almost as if they were librarianship’s last contribution to information organization was strange. I won’t even discuss what I think about Nicholson Baker’s tirades against the profession. Though not a librarian as far as I can tell, Wright has an MLS and has thought deeply about the issues he addresses. Good writing and clear thinking are always nice to come across in a book.

A lot of librarians these days rage against the clunky machinery of the library. Some older librarians look at rapid technological changes and wonder why, while some newer librarians see what look like easy adaptations to changing circumstances and wonder why not. According to Wright, it might all be Dewey’s fault.

“Dewey’s relentless efforts to create a unified national library system, magnified by his considerable ambition, would prove a mix that yielded lasting consequences for American libraries. Dewey’s obsession with efficiency and his strong bent for hierarchical management made him an ideal agent of the industrial age. . . . His hyper-controlling personality exerted an unfortunate influence over the subsequent history of American librarians, who have long struggled with excessive bureaucratization and a process-centric work culture that regularly leaves libraries struggling to adapt in a world of fast-changing information technologies. . . . Many [librarians] spend their entire careers chafing under the often stultifying management culture that Dewey played a large part in fostering.” (174-75).

I don’t think I’m knowledgeable enough to judge this quote. I only wonder if the excessive bureaucratization and process-centric work culture, which may very well prevail in libraries, are the result of Dewey specifically, or just an earlier industrial work culture in general, and that libraries are slower to adapt than other industrial era organizations. It could be argued that most organizations dating from the nineteenth century face problems of adaptation.

The failure to adapt quickly enough to change might be explained by other reasons. Consider Wright’s own observations upon Vannevar Bush. “In later years, Bush would lament that the computer revolution had left libraries altogether behind. ‘The great digital machines of today have had their exciting proliferations because they could vitally aid business, because they could increase profits. The libraries still operate by horse-and-buggy methods, for there is no profit in libraries.'” (195).

This seems to me a more likely barrier to change than institutional structure alone. Certainly many libraries are hidebound, traditionally structured organizations, and we might owe all of this to Dewey. One might even say the older and more established the organization, the less adaptable to rapid change it might be. I speak in generalizations, and would never imply that my own library, richly endowed and predating the United States of America, would ever have any such problems. But in general, one might say this. Is it a problem, though, of adherence to Deweyian structures? (Is that the proper adjective? I confess, when seeing it I’m still more likely to think of John than Melvil.) Or does the problem lie elsewhere, most likely in the lack of financial incentive to change. Commercial organizations that fail to adapt eventually go bankrupt, smaller ones more quickly than large ones, but still, it always happens. Sears has been around about as long as the American Library Association, and at one time dominated the domestic retail market; it was a giant that might slowly be dying because it just can’t adapt. Smaller commercial organizations go under more quickly.

But American libraries aren’t commercial organizations. Public libraries are funded by tax money. In my state I think there’s a law that a certain percentage of property tax money has to go to public libraries. Academic libraries are perhaps even less commercial than public libraries, because their clientèle tends to be much more restricted and is, in some senses, a captive clientèle. The way things have been done means a lot, and some of us understand the losses that come with change even as we heartily embrace such change. The other day an elderly professor came asking for a printout listing all our databases. I’ve had such requests before. I didn’t say, hey, get with the 21st century! I explained that we had no such printout and why we couldn’t have such a thing, and instead offered to walk her through the online steps to get what she wanted. Some librarians disdain such professors, but I know that this person had accomplished some great scholarly work in her life, and her slow adaptation wasn’t a sign of incompetence or stupidity. Things just changed quickly without her noticing because she was busy doing something else, and for her the old ways would work just as well as the newer ones, since as we quickly established all she really wanted was an article. This example shows that change can occur too rapidly even for our patrons.

But back to the point. There’s no money to be made in academic libraries, and fashions are largely ignored. Money and changing fashions drive much of commercial culture, so it seems hardly surprising when libraries don’t adapt very quickly. Will this be ever such? Undoubtedly. Will it mean the end of libraries? I don’t think so. Libraries adapt slowly, but they do adapt. To consider the library a relic of the past seems hasty, and that judgment does not come from a habitually sanguine librarian. Librarians may chaff under stultifying management structures, and they may be dissatisfied with the pace of change. But it’s only that the pace is slow, not that the change is nonexistent. I don’t think we can envision the distant future of libraries, but that doesn’t mean we have to believe they have no future. Instead, like the bricoleurs we must be, we take up the tools we have and use them as best we can to solve the problems before us. The structure might very well be Dewey’s fault, but the lack of incentive to change comes from a culture of libraries separate from the structure itself. Without the incentive of money or fashion, it may be that libraries can never adapt quickly enough, but that doesn’t mean they can’t adapt.

Depression and 24/7

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A couple of days ago I attended a presentation from the Princeton Depression Awareness Program on how to detect problems with any students we might work with. PDAP, as it’s called, it trying to raise awareness with faculty and staff about the problems some students have and how we might be able to help them. I’m not sure how much I can help, since I usually don’t see the same students repeatedly over several sessions, but I applaud the effort. It seems a lot of students are diagnosed with depression, including severe depression, and that the onset age range begins about 15. From ages 15-20 I suffered from what I’ve come to understand was relatively severe depression, and there was certainly not as much awareness then. I just assumed thoughts of suicide and hopelessness were normal, but apparently they’re not. It might have been nice had someone mentioned that to me in high school or college. I probably would have ignored them, but at least someone would have made the effort. Nevertheless, the experience made me the man I am today, and those of you who know me can now nod sagely and mutter, yes, tis a pity.

During the presentation, one of the presenters talked about various stressors that can bring on depression, a common one being erratic sleep patterns or complete lack of sleep, which then led to a brief discussion of the importance of regular sleep patterns on health in general. She noted that some students seem to wear their lack of sleep like a badge of honor. “I stayed up all night studying for this exam!” Most of us who work in public services get emails at all hours of the night from students, as I’m sure some of you do, too. One of my colleagues then brought up the demands libraries are sometimes under to remain open and accessible all the time. Students are used to and demand a 24/7 culture, according to just about every student trend-watching document I see. There are plenty of good reasons not to open libraries 24/7, from maintenance costs to the health of the staff, but one I hadn’t thought of before was the health of the student.

I always have reservations about meeting every student desire, because part of the educational mission of the university is to mold desires as much as meet them. The gratification that comes from learning is seldom instant, neither in its attainment nor its duration, and that is an important lesson to learn. No step along the way (e.g., retrieving a book) should be more time consuming than necessary, but there are some things that just can’t be done quickly. Normally, though, I think 24/7 access to the library is a good thing if possible, but now I wonder about the possible links between 24/7 access and the health of the students.

The assumption always seems to be that regarding library research, anything the students want is a good thing. It’s not like we’re setting up kegs in the stacks or anything. But by the creation of 24/7 libraries, are we capitulating to a demand that encourages unhealthy behavior? By advocating them, do we say, yes, it’s a good thing to stay up all night and sleep erratically so that your health suffers and you possibly bring on depression? Are sleep deprivation and the attendant health problems things we want libraries to encourage? I’m still not sure where I stand on this, but I do think these are important questions to consider.

Copyright and the Code

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You might not know this, and based on the attendance at open hearings and such you probably don’t care, but the ALA Council approved a minor revision of the ALA Code of Ethics last week. I had a very small part in this process as the RUSA representative to the ALA Committee on Professional Ethics.

Almost everyone with any interest in the Code was happy with it, except for Article IV, which since 1995 has read, “We recognize and respect intellectual property rights.” Apparently, this article was slipped into the Code during the last revision without much discussion. On the surface, it seems innocuous enough. To me it doesn’t say much more than, “we obey the law.” The problem that I and others had was with what wasn’t said, namely, that librarians also want to make information available to people. After many good suggestions and a lot of wrangling, the revised wording, and that which I think was approved, is: “We respect intellectual property rights and advocate balance between the interests of information users and rights holders.”

Near the end of the committee discussion, I found myself in the unusual position of being on the radical side of the debate. In general, I’m temperamentally moderate and believe in different spheres of justice, to borrow and inappropriately apply a term of Walzer’s. For example, I’m one of those who thinks the ALA shouldn’t take a position on the Iraq War, despite the fact that I have opposed it from the beginning on ethical, political, and military grounds. This would mark me as a “conservative” among some groups of librarians. However, the pendulum shifts when it comes to library issues. I proposed dropping the property rights clause entirely, and substituting something like, “We want to make as much information as possible as freely available to as many users as possible.” Perhaps not that very wording, since it isn’t bureaucratic enough, but certainly that sentiment.

At one point, I was accused of wanted to do away with copyright, but such was not the case. My argument for this change assumed that the ALA as an organization and the vast majority of librarians want as much access to information as possible, and that while we agree with the idea of copyright, we do not in fact agree with much of current copyright law, especially the Sonny Bono copyright extension and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Had those acts been in force in 1995, Article IV might not have been written.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution states the purpose of copyright: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” My personal test case for copyright is T.S. Eliot, who has been dead for over 40 years, but whose estate maintains strict control over much of his work because of copyright extensions and charges high prices for inclusion of his work in anthologies. But any copyright that extends this far past the author’s death isn’t promoting the progress of anything. It’s of no benefit to the author or the common good. The idea of copyright as an unlimited right to ownership by a corporation to some piece of intellectual property in perpetuity has no justification, legal or moral.

I wanted to write this yesterday, because I was thinking of Martin Luther King Jr., and his use in the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” of Aquinas’s distinction between just and unjust laws. Under natural law theory, a law on the books (or a positive law) is only just if it’s in accordance with the natural law. We can have unjust laws, and it seems to me that people are much more likely to ignore an unjust law and not feel bad about it. How many people, I wonder, make copies of their own DVDs to put on their video iPods or other portable devices? Plenty. But why would so many people violate the law against this? Because it’s a stupid law, and also an unjust one, if we can imagine a clause of the natural law governing digital copies of DVDs. People violate this law all the time, and feel no remorse at all. Nor should they.

The new code wants to ensure that librarians are on record supporting the rights of people to access information that may be copyrighted, which libraries have been doing since there was copyright. With current copyright law, we might not be able to create libraries today if they didn’t already exist, and if we move to an all digital world with the extremely restrictive digital rights of today, then libraries will have a harder time serving users. A more radical approach would have been the acknowledgment that a lot of us only grudgingly accept current copyright law, and push it to the limit in various ways to get information to users. Upon reflection, I don’t think the more radical version would be a good idea, because we don’t want to give the copyright fascists any more ammunition to attack libraries with, but I still believe that in the dark shadows of our professional souls where the lawyers aren’t allowed, the needs of the users still trump excessive copyright laws. We just can’t officially admit it.

The Librarian as Filter, Part 3

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I should subtitle this post “The Librarian is the Filter,” or perhaps “The Librarian is the Filter.”

My first librarian as filter post received a couple of comments, and since I don’t get many comments that fact alone was exciting. Maybe I should be more provocative, but in general I’m too willing to see the other’s point of view to provoke too much.

Here’s part of one of the comments: “The mayor of Oak Lawn, IL, said, “There is a difference between censorship and sponsorship. If someone wants [Playboy], that’s fine, they can buy it at a store.” It appears you would agree with that mayor’s statement. Do you?”

My initial response was that I assumed “the mayor of Oak Lawn is responding to a censorship or banned books controversy of some sort. The censorship/sponsorship distinction doesn’t seem to me to make much sense. I don’t think that a library not buying Playboy constitutes censorship, if that’s what you’re getting at, though I also don’t see how a library buying Playboy constitutes sponsorship of its content in any usual sense of the word.” Certainly the implication of my initial post was that the librarian’s job was to decide what to do in the collection, and that not putting something in the collection (in my case Self-aggrandizing Amateur Philosophers or SAPs) was not censorship. In the case of academic libraries, putting scholarly works in the collection is a step towards establishing authority, but it isn’t sponsorship of the content so much as sponsorship of the process of peer-reviewed scholarly publication. Adding other items to the collection also isn’t sponsoring their particular content so much as recognizing their cultural or intellectual value. As part of the larger process of publishing, collecting, and disseminating the human record, the librarian’s job is to make such decisions.

My commenter, Dan Kleinman of safelibraries.org, is understandably concerned with pornography in public libraries, particularly if it’s available to children. My immediate response to this was that “if pressed, I suppose I would argue that not buying something is a matter of selection rather than censorship, but one of the joys of academic librarianship is not being faced with the selection controversies that plague some public libraries.

I wouldn’t want my young daughter hanging out in the public library reading Playboy or stumbling across Internet porn, but as long as the children’s section is kept free of pornography and creepy adults I don’t know that I have much of an opinion on the issue, though I suppose I wouldn’t want even the adult portion of the library to start looking like an “adult” bookstore.

This is such a local issue, as collection development usually is. The public library I visit the most (the Ewing Public Library in Ewing, NJ) seems like a decent enough place to me with what seem to be appropriate collection choices for the community, though I’ve rarely ventured outside the children’s section.”

Mr. Kleinman also noted that “I’ll expect you to be very guarded in discussing this topic. The ALA does not take kindly to librarians not carrying the party line.”

I don’t think I’m in any danger from the ALA regardless of what I say, since there’s little the ALA can do to me. The ALA doesn’t even have a party line for academic libraries as far as I know. Just to show how bold and provocative I can be, I’ll say that honestly I don’t care what the ALA has to say about these issues, because ultimately it’s not the ALA that decides what to select. That, as I’ve noted, is the librarian’s job.

However (and here I fear I will not make Mr. Kleinman happy), the implication of my position is that the librarian is the filter, not the ALA, but also not the “community,” whatever that term might mean in context. It’s the librarian’s job to decide what is selected, and if it becomes anyone’s job but the librarian’s, then there isn’t any reason to have a librarian. I realize there’s a move on nationwide to deprofessionalize certain aspects of librarianship, but I resist that deprofessionalization for collection development.

The librarian certainly acts with the interests and needs of the community in mind. I’m not talking about the librarian as lone decider of what gets in and what stays out, with no input from anyone. I would be a bad selector if I ignored the current curricula or faculty research or whatever might be very timely, but I would also be a bad selector if I didn’t keep in mind that the users of the library are not just the people currently around, but those of the future as well. The librarian’s job is to synthesize all these disparate demands as well as possible.

I don’t feel as comfortable addressing public libraries. I worked in a great public library for two years, but not as a professional librarian, so I can’t speak with much authority on the subject. But it still seems to me that the librarian is the filter there as well, much more of a filter than librarians in big research libraries, since collection budgets and space are typically much more limited. It’s the librarian’s job to decide these things. If the community is unhappy, then fire the librarians or get rid of the library, but librarians can’t be dictated to by the concerns of a group of citizens, no matter how large, and still remain professional. Even if every single person in the community wanted to get rid of something in the library, it would still be a violation of the professionalism of librarians to demand that the librarians themselves get rid of it.

Either trust the librarians or dismiss them, but don’t expect them to forgo all professional judgment. The librarian’s job is to consider not just the community, but the larger culture, and to present in microcosm the truth of the world as much as possible. Librarians have to consider not only the parents concerned that their children might be turned into homosexuals by reading about gay penguins, but also the gay children wrestling with their sexuality in a confusing culture.

So what about porn in the library? Honestly, I don’t like it. If my library, or at least the children’s section of my library, started turning into a haven for pornography, I wouldn’t go there anymore. I disagree with the view that every type of information should be made available to every person of every age, and I think most parents would agree. My concern isn’t one of prudery about sex or pornography so much as the knowledge that not all information is appropriate for children. Just as I wouldn’t ask my 8-year old daughter to read Descartes and understand his significance, so I wouldn’t show her a pornographic website and ask her to understand what’s going on. Having A Man with a Maid in the children’s section would be as absurd as having the Critique of Pure Reason there. Books and websites on sex education are fine, but no young child is going to be educated about sex by watching Youporn.

But that’s my judgment as a parent. Regardless, I still have to trust the judgment of librarians to filter or select. If absolutely everyone in the community is in disagreement with the librarians’ choices, then perhaps it’s time to get rid of the librarians or the libraries, though I can’t imagine that ever being the case. Individual librarians either have professional judgment or they don’t. They are either competent or incompetent. They have reasons for their collection decisions or they don’t. As a class, however, we have to trust that librarians have professional judgment and reasons for their decisions or there’s little point in having librarians.

Benefits of Attendance

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With ALA coming up this weekend, my work is particularly busy. Add in a pile of essays to grade and some students to meet and books to buy, and the work starts piling up. On the other hand, I know more about British Islamic hip-hop and whether it’s haram or embodiment education and its relationship to feminist theory than I did a couple of days ago, and one never knows when that information will be just the thing to make me a hit at a cocktail party.

Sometimes I ponder just what I get out of ALA attendance. Technically, I don’t have to go to ALA conferences, though some sort of national or regional professional participation is more or less a requirement of my job, and I can most easily fulfill that requirement through ALA, or rather ALA divisional participation. It also seems to me that a lot of newer librarians don’t have much good to say about the ALA and its conferences. ALA business is so arcane.

I always seem to feel like an outsider, even though I’m always busy. I’m typically on the maximum three committees at any given time (right now an ALA committee, a division committee, and a section committee), and yet ALA is so huge that my maximum active involvement is such a tiny part of the picture. Who does feel like an insider, I wonder? Perhaps the ALA Councilors and the top officers. I’ve burrowed comfortably into my RUSA home and don’t look out much.

It took me a while to find something useful to do. I was on a couple of committees early on with people I really liked, but we didn’t seem very busy. I had a great time going to meetings and chatting with people, but not much came of it. Since then, I’ve tried to work only on committees that get things done, and I’ve felt much better about it. I’ve worked a lot with RUSA guidelines, which some people ridicule or ignore, but I think the RUSA guidelines provide useful touchstones for public service training, and it’s important that they be as good as they can be. Part of the satisfaction I get from ALA attendance is the actual work produced.

One of the greatest professional benefits I get is definitely psychological. I feel better getting away from my own library for a few days and talking shop with other people from around the country. Don’t get me wrong, I work in a great library, and I have a great job, and I have many thoughtful and talented colleagues, but my library often has a closeted feel. Perhaps because of all the resources and the talented colleagues, there’s a tendency to look inward rather than outward. Nowadays I can get a feel for what others are doing from reading library blogs, but until very recently conference attendance was one of the only ways to get a more immediate feel for what other libraries were doing than the traditional library literature offered. It also helps me get a perspective on my own library and job. Our library has problems just like any other large institution, and some of the more insular librarians obsess over them, but after talking to other librarians and hearing about other libraries I usually come back thinking about the positives rather than the negatives.

There’s also the socializing, which is sometime personal and sometimes professional. Some friends from library school and I have a regular Saturday night dinner at a nice restaurant, which is always enjoyable. There are also the more professional social engagements. This year I’m considering going to the OCLC Blogger’s Salon, for example, even though I have no idea what to expect, and don’t necessarily identify as a library blogger. Also, since I’m pretty shy, entering a roomful of strangers is always daunting. Regardless, usually when people get together who have little in common except being librarians, the discussion turns to libraries and librarianship, and I learn something new that’s useful in a way hard to quantify.

I know a lot of people attend the programs, but I’ve never gotten much out of them. My learning style is to sit in a room alone reading or playing with software or something, preferably with some good music playing in the background. Usually whatever people are speaking about I’ve already learned. The discussion groups, on the other hand, are often engaging.

I’m not sure if I have a point in this. It seems to me that some newer librarians wonder why they might attend ALA at all, especially since there are other conferences they might go to. Smaller conferences certainly have their appeal, especially because you can focus on smaller topics and talk more about relevant subjects. But the gigantic nature of ALA has its appeal as well, because so much is going on that you can satisfy almost any librarian urge.

The Librarian as Filter, Part 2

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Wishing a happy new year to libraries in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Princeton professor Stan Katz writes:

“For today I want to ignore the challenge to authority (and the library) posed by the World Wide Web and digital information, the world in which authority is hardest to establish and maintain — except to say that it is the great libraries that are probably our best hope of maintaining the concept of authority in an age in which truth seems only a keystroke away. I think, by the way, that it is easy to make the case that we need librarians to mediate digital information for us. I want also, at least for today, to ignore the extent to which humanists have complexified the concept of authority in a generation-long outburst of postmodernist casting of doubt upon truth. My tribute for the new year is to the ancient institution that has so nobly served those of us who care about knowledge, and to the trained scholar-technicians who have so patiently created and sustained it.”

This is a call for libraries and librarians to be, as Ortega asked us to be, a filter between men and books, or as we might say in updating the phrase, a filter between people and information, including digital information. The notion of authority is central to the academic library mission. In past discussions of Wikipedia, I’ve poked fun at some of the authoritative notions of librarians, but only because I think to apply the notion of authority to the Wikipedia is to misunderstand the nature of that source and its popularity and usefulness. Authority as such is still crucial, and librarians are still in one of the most important positions to determine that authority. Librarians are one of the groups deciding what’s important enough to be saved.

It’s possible that one day in decades hence this won’t be the case, that “everything will be digitized” or something like that. It’s possible. Certainly Google and others are digitizing like crazy, though Google at least is digitizing what librarians of the past found fit to salvage from the culture. If all information was indeed digitized, that would only create the problem of figuring out how to cull out the useless and awful from the useful and good. That’s a real problem even today, and search engines work hard to get us to the good stuff while eliminating the dross. Librarians routinely filter digital content, deciding which websites to catalog or link to or which databases to purchase.

Even if storage space were limitless, not everything deserves to be saved. We might very well have people’s personal blogs online for centuries after they’ve quit posting, but it doesn’t mean they’re worth saving. Even research libraries make decisions about what’s important to save or study, usually driven by current scholarly standards and trends, and these decisions have lasting effects for whatever reason.

Consider the study of popular culture, or perhaps mass culture would be more accurate. Research libraries in the past tended to ignore a lot of mass culture. The study of the popular culture of the past has been growing for decades, but research libraries still tend to ignore parts of it. I searched Worldcat for Harlequin as a publisher and came up with about 50,000 entries. How many of these Harlequin books are in academic libraries? Few, I’d bet. The most-owned item – Summer Lovin’ by Carly Phillips – is available right now in hundreds of libraries, but when I skimmed the list I noticed only two academic libraries – Rutgers and Texas A&M. The subject heading is “Atlantic City (N.J.) — Fiction,” so that would explain Rutgers. Go back 50 years to Mary Burchell’s Love is My Reason,” and you’ll see that only a few libraries have that, and only one public library. The research libraries rarely bought it, and whatever public libraries bought it weeded it decades ago.

Should we feel bad that Love is My Reason is so hard to find? I would say not. But what about for the study of popular culture? Shouldn’t we have at least some of these books available? Yes, we should, and we do. But it’s highly unlikely that anyone will want to study in-depth any particular Harlequin romance novel the way they might a Shakespeare play or a Hurston novel. Even when Harlequin romances are studied, they are studied as a genre, or for what they tell us about reading habits, or something like that. We don’t buy them, or don’t buy many of them, because individually they are of no literary or scholarly worth, at least as decided by every scholar who has approached them. Even if the thousands of Harlequin romances were all digitized and freely available, scholars would have to filter to get any meaning from them.This isn’t so much a matter of authority as a matter of filtering.

More closely related to issues of authority would be the type of books I mentioned last week, the tomes sent into me by Self-aggrandizing Amateur Philosophers (or SAPs for short). I have the work of one of these SAPs in front of me as I write. This particular book is a self-published effort consisting of unpithy ruminations from his website regaling us with “his philosophy.” (I would just point to the website, but I don’t want to give this stuff any exposure at all.) This person has taken the contents of a website, paid to have it printed up in book form, and sent it round the country to get librarians to put it in their collections. I checked Worldcat for this, and so far the only library copy anywhere in the country is at Cornell, where it will probably remain unwept, unhonored, and unsung for the next half-millennium. Not including this SAP in the collection is a method of establishing authority and of deciding what is worth studying. The individual work of no SAP is worth studying, and I think any student or professor of philosophy would agree with me. I wouldn’t want this in the collection, because I wouldn’t want some ignorant student wandering the stacks to stumble across this and decide that since it’s a “scholarly” book and it’s in Princeton’s collection it must at least be worth taking a look at. I could link to it from a research guide or philosophy website, but that would still imply it’s worth reading. It’s not worth it, and when the question is asked, who decides if it’s worth reading, the answer has to be, I do. That’s my job, especially when I’m not aided by the peer-review and other processes we have in place to help me.

If by some fluke of fate a Princeton philosopher wants to read this book, I’ll point to the website. And if for some bizarre reason anyone in the future needs this particular text in their study of SAP in the early 21st century, they’ll just have to ILL the book from Cornell.

Deciding a large portion of the fate of scholarship in the future is an important and sometimes unnerving mission. One never knows what might be important a century hence, and there’s always a sense of loss for some things that weren’t preserved, from classical manuscripts to early 20th century films. Regardless, it’s the mission of the librarian to filter and to establish authority of some kind as well as to preserve the best that has been thought and said in the culture for as long as possible, and I can’t believe that mission will completely disappear in the future.

The Librarian as Filter, Part 1

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Orwell wrote somewhere that unless one has some professional relationship to books, one has no idea how many bad books are actually published. The Internet multiplies bad publications a billionfold, but it’s still true of books as far as I can tell.

Besides the 100K+ books we buy every year, our library gets myriad book donations, and these donated books are diverted to the appropriate selector to decide whether they should enter the collection or be sold to used book dealers. Since I’m the philosophy and religion selector, I get most of the books that look too weird for any other category. Philosophy and religion between them are broad enough to encompass almost everything, I suppose, though if that’s the case my budgets should be much larger. So if someone relates their alien abduction and how it changed their life or is born again and wants all of us in library land to find Jesus, the book somehow gets sent to me.

The books that puzzle me the most are the ones from people on a mission from God, as the Blues Brothers might say. These are the self published ruminations of people who have a “philosophy,” for example. I put “philosophy” in quotes because of the nature of some of these books. These people aren’t “doing philosophy,” as philosophy professors would say; these are people who have a life philosophy or a philosophical system in the the old fashioned sense. There was a time when people outside the academy were considered philosophers. All one needed was to be brilliant and write compelling books engaging the perennial questions of life. In some ways academic philosophy has diminished this meaning of “philosopher,” since now anyone with a PhD in philosophy and an appointment as a philosophy professor somewhere is entitled to be called a philosopher. However, none of the academic philosophers I’ve ever met have ever claimed to be a philosopher in the older mode.

Not being an academic philosopher, but being somewhat philosophical, I’m perfectly happy to consider some of those outside the academy worthy of the formerly prestigious name of “philosopher,” but the old criteria remain. One needs to be brilliant and write compellingly and intelligently about the perennial questions of life. It’s not enough to self-publish your platitudes and send them off to a librarian, which is what so many people do with their books. They would all be “honored” if their book could be added to the collection of such and such library.

I got back to work today after a week off to find several of these earnest books. One is by a retired something-or-other who wants to tell us all about “his philosophy.” It’s a big, thick book, and so probably has the sort of detailed philosophical system that would have made Hobbes or Kant proud. Perhaps he just wants to share Jesus with me, but it looks like a book with a system. However, the author’s biographical blurb contains such an egregious and unintentionally comical grammatical error, that the effect of book’s thickness was lost on me. If I’m laughing out loud at the earnest biographical blurb, it doesn’t bode well for the material inside. Another book is by someone of indeterminable background who is doing his part, as he tells us, to make philosophy more accessible by putting it up on the Internet. Strange that no one has thought of that before. Whereas the first “philosopher” is obviously a systematizer, this second puckish fellow is an aphoristic “philosopher” a la Nietzsche who tells us plainly in one of his aphorisms that everything we need to know about life we can learn from reading his website.

Skimming through some of these books is one of the highlights of my job. I try to imagine what motivates the authors so much that they pay to have books printed up of stuff no one is likely to read. In my experience of these, it’s not the fact that the writers aren’t professional philosophers that will doom the books to obscurity. Most professional philosophy books are justly doomed to obscurity. It’s that the people can’t write well and don’t have anything original or interesting to say. I think of Dr. Johnson’s remark that someone’s book was both good and original, though unfortunately that which was original wasn’t good and that which was good wasn’t original. These earnest philosophical tomes are neither good nor original. I certainly understand the motivation to write, and I would love to publish a couple of the books I’ve written that languish eternally on my hard drive, but paying for them and shipping them around the country is the puzzler. It’s so easy to get information out in the world these days. Just publish a blog!

(Speaking of publishing books, I just finished revising a delightful comic novel about a young professor searching for love and a lost manuscript during a Canadian country house weekend. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, it’ll become a part of you. If anyone wants to hook me up with a literary agent, let me know.)

The fact that they want their books in research libraries shows part of the motivation. They don’t just want their work scattered into the indiscriminate winds of the Internet. They want to enshrine their work in the chapel of reason, the library. They want to be taken seriously and studied carefully, because after all they’ve written books. These are actual books, published by actual vanity presses, printed on actual paper. They’ve even saved the library the expense of paying for the books, which I’d be happy to do for anything good.

Here is where the authors are bound to be disappointed, because I rarely add these titles to the collection. It might seem that anything sent my way for free should just be thrown into the pile. After all, I could always send it offsite. But collection building is never indiscriminate, even at a big library. Space is still finite, though that’s rarely the issue. The question becomes, what is worth studying and what is worth preserving. Research libraries often become the last line of defense for collecting the human record, but choices must be made, and my choice is not to add things like this. Not everything in the human record is worth preserving, especially when you consider finite space and resources. You may think this sounds elitist, and you would be correct. If you consider the question, you will also probably agree with me.

Does this mean that I’m suppressing someone’s life work? Or that I’m censoring them? I don’t think so. I, along with all of my colleagues here and all of our counterparts around the world, are selecting what might be studied in the future. It’s a big responsibility, and part of the responsibility is to act as a filter.

In his address on “The Mission of the Librarian,” the philosopher Ortega y Gasset argued that librarians should act as a filter between people and books. In 1940, Ortega already feared information overload. One can only imagine how he would view the Internet. I think Ortega had a fine point, and I’ve been considering how librarians play the role of filter today. Librarians are champions of access to information, but we all, for whatever reasons, set limits on the information that can be accessed at our libraries. Choosing what will not enter the library is just as important as choosing what will; choice is inevitable and each choice effects the future of research.