Monthly Archives: April 2009

English Only, Please

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A couple of weeks ago my colleague Mary George published an article in Inside Higher Education about student confessions related to what they didn’t know about research. (For the record, I am not the "Academic librarian" in the comments section.) Some of these are typical missteps many of us probably see with students all the time. They try to find periodical articles in the OPAC, or believe (or maybe just hope or even pretend to believe) that if an article isn’t digitized they won’t be able to get it. It’s a good list of some of those tidbits of knowledge both professors and librarians might take for granted, but that somehow never got passed on to the students.

This could signal many things, such as a breakdown in communication or instruction or a failure to integrate research skills into the curriculum. I suspect as much as anything it signals our inability to unlearn and get back into the mindset of a novice researcher, especially one used to Google or Yahoo who suddenly encounters the sometimes unnecessarily complicated world of the academic library. (I mean unnecessarily complicated in a theoretical sense, because after all why shouldn’t students search for periodical articles in the OPAC; had librarians begun indexing a century ago instead of relying upon commercial indexes, how different the library world might be.)

One topic that didn’t make it onto Mary’s short list of misunderstandings is language, but it’s one I’ve seen many times. We’ve all encountered the students who believe that everything is online, whether it’s a recent article from the New York Times or a church bulletin from a small parish in England in the late nineteenth century. In some ways this doesn’t surprise me as much as the double assumption that everything will be both online and in English, no matter what it is or when or where it was published. Long after I’ve gotten used to the misconceptions related specifically to library research, I have to admit this one still astounds me.

I know I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, there’s the old joke: "What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual. Two languages: Bilingual. One language: American." Still, I am surprised, not because students seem to have no familiarity with any foreign languages. I think I’m more surprised by the assumption that there’s some organization somewhere that takes every document created anywhere in the world at any time and immediately translates it for American college students. The Babelfish Institute does this for everything, regardless of the origin or likelihood of being used.

The reasons for the misunderstanding seems to vary. One I heard recently made at least some sense to me. Someone had seen citations from a conference proceeding and wanted to track down the articles. The proceeding was from a technical conference in Germany in 2007. According to Worldcat, only two libraries held the proceedings, both in Germany. It looked like they were available from the institute that hosted the conference, and had time not been a factor I would have suggested requesting we purchase them since they weren’t expensive. Then I discovered the student didn’t read any German, but thought that since some American scholars had cited them maybe they had been translated. This definitely shows a misunderstanding of the world of scholarship, but I could sort of see the logic in this, because often scholars not writing in English have to be translated to make an impact in America. In all seriousness, how much of an impact would existentialism or poststructuralism or other French philosophy have made in America had not Sartre or Derrida or Foucault or Lyotard been translated into English?

Sometimes the assumption seems considerably less grounded even than this. "I’m looking for primary documents in Soviet archives written by Russian spies." "Do you read Russian?" "No. Would I need to?" "I want to study the local French response to riots in the banlieues of Paris." "Do you read French?" "I need newspaper editorials from Mexican newspapers about the drug wars." "Do you read Spanish?" I think you get the idea. In some cases, the fact of sources being in English or even translated into English would seem inplicit in the request. Russian spies wrote in Russian. The French respond to things in French. Etc. If we find news articles from Djibouti in English, they’re probably from the BBC World Service.

So many questions suggest themselves to us that probably don’t occur to students. Why would this particular document have been translated into English? Who would have translated it? The same questions apply to digitization. Who would have taken the trouble to digitize this obscure document from this relatively poor part of the world? Do students have any sense of the time and effort that goes into digitization or translation, how many people have to work together to get something digitized or translated, how much funding would be involved, or how that typically there has to be some commercial benefit or assumption of broad appeal before such projects are launched? Of course they don’t, and there’s no reason they should have thought about this. I’m not ridiculing the students, but only pointing out another area of understandable ignorance that has to be dealt with.

Thus when I work with students, I’ve learned to counsel them about a neglected rule of scholarship. if you’re going to work on historical or cutural topics about some other place in the world, you need to learn the language. If you don’t know the language, either learn it or change your topic. I try not to make it a harsh lesson, but somewhere along the way students have to learn that despite the popularity of English, most people in the world are not communicating in English in their local communities, and that a lot of people even in the United States don’t communicate in English in their local communities. People in non-English speaking countries are involved in living their lives and being in their worlds, and never pause to think that some American college student might want to study them for a research essay.

This lesson might be hard to communicate to most students. It might be easier to just digitize every document in the entire world and have it translated into English. Maybe Google can take care of that for us.

Preserving the Integrity of Civilization

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I emerged from a long period of intense work to find the Darien Statements popping up all over my Google Reader. They seem like worthwhile enough statements, if  grandly stated. Readers of this blog know that I’m not averse to grandiloquent overstatement in the search for purpose. They didn’t evoke in me the visceral reaction they seem to in others, and I think I occupy the middle ground somewhere between the acid cynicism of the some bloggers and the sunny optimism of others. Mostly, I wonder about the meaning of the first statement that is supposed to support the others. "The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization." When I first read it, that sentence really grabbed me. Yes, I thought, that sounds good. However, as I thought about it more and unpacked the sentence, the meaning seemed to dissolve before me, and I’ve been trying to make sense of it.

The first problem for me was the Library. Maybe it’s something about the singular and the capitalization that bothers me, the assumption that there’s some essence common to all libraries, the librariness of the library existing in the mind of God or something. One of the reasons I focus on academic libraries is that I don’t think there is a Library; there are libraries of all sorts and all types, and there doesn’t seem to be much that they have in common. We might say they all provide access to information of some kind to some set of users as a common denominator. That seems to be about it, and that doesn’t seem enough to warrant the singular, capitalized noun. In my mind I always contrast the tiny public library that serves my grandmother and the largish academic library I work in. They are vastly different libraries with very different goals. If we add in school and special libraries, the variety becomes even greater. Though public and academic libraries have a lot in common, it seems to me that these days public libraries consider their missions to be broader than the educational mission usually assumed of most academic libraries.

If there is no one Library, then there can be no one purpose. But even if there were one Library and one purpose, would it be to preserve the integrity of civilization? In addition to implying that there’s a Library, this statement also implies there’s a civilization, and that this civilization has integrity. In one common sense of the term, there are many civilizations, and ours (if we share one) is but one of them. If we are talking about our civilization, which one is that? Let’s assume for the sake of argument we’re talking about Western civilization. This makes sense. The statements are written in English and are undoubtedly written from the perspective of librarians who are the products of Western civilization. This is a troublesome phrase to some. What might I mean by Western civilization? I’m not quite sure, other than the current state of the Judeo-Christian-Greco-Roman-Germanic mishmash that has defined so much about Europeans and the places they have colonized.

Which leads to my next question. How much integrity does this civilization have? What do we mean by integrity? Etymologically it means something whole, undivided, complete, possibly pure. I’ll ignore the moral protests against Western civilization, because they tend to ignore comparisons with other civilizations. Just trying to look objectively, dispassionately at Western civilization, in modern times it seems to be the most porous, divided, unintegrated civilization in existence. This civilization, born amongst the commingling cultures in the ancient Mediterranean, has always been impure and open and unintegrated and grows more so every year. Rarely in the West has there been an active decision – as there once was in Japan, for example – to retreat from contact with other civilizations. There was some isolation during the early Middle Ages as the structure of the Roman empire collapsed, but otherwise the West has been porous.

Even what is sometimes popularly considered the most integral period of Western history, the apex of Christendom during the high middle ages, was much more internally divided than most people realize and was also deliberately and aggressively open to Islamic civilization through the Crusades. Since the Reformation, Western civilization has begun an endless process of splintering and dividing while growing ever more open to outside influences while also overwhelming other civilizations with Westernization.

But maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way. Could it be civilization in some moral sense that is meant, as we might use it when we say people are civilized, which in some senses we would say only of a subset of a civilization in the first sense. ? Or in a related sense, using civilization as Matthew Arnold used "culture"? Culture for Arnold was the best that has been thought and said, and the human mission to perfect ourselves through an immersion in this culture. In this way of thinking, the mission of The Library would be a cultural mission, a civilizing mission. The Library preserves the integrity of civilization by civilizing us, by preserving culture in the high Arnoldian sense and allowing us access to it in a way we wouldn’t have if The Library didn’t exist.

This understanding makes sense of many of the statements,for example the phrases about "personal enlightenment" and "love of learning" and "creative expression," as well as the liberal content of some of the exhortations to promote openness, kindness, or trust. This Arnoldian interpretation is high-minded, and to some can be inspiring. It is what I myself think of my own library and its educational and research mission in my prouder moments. However, if something like this is meant, especially for all libraries, it seems to go against the grain of some popular thinking on libraries and librarians, especially the idea that librarians can or should be "neutral," or the relativistic "every book his reader" of Ranganathan. If The Library has a civilizing mission, then librarians must act accordingly, and become the guardians and promoters of this civilization. Civilization loses any neutral sense it might have. Such a civilization has a content, a philosophy, an ethic, a framework to choose what is worthwhile to be preserved or promoted and what isn’t.

This doesn’t bother me at all. Something like this was implied in my arguments for the librarian as filter. In those posts, I argued that it was the librarian’s job to select and thus to choose what to preserve, and that librarians can not and should not be neutral, but I was talking about academic libraries. I wonder if librarians in the mass are ready for such a charge when they’ve been taught for a long time to be neutral providers devoted to "access" in the abstract, but not access to particular items of value. If my Arnoldian interpretation is right, then this statement means that all librarians and all libraries have a positive, substantial educational and civilizing mission. This means that public libraries and librarians would need to move away from the usual policy of giving the public what it wants to giving the public what the librarians think they need. This already happens in academic libraries, but it seems foreign to what I know of public libraries.

I can’t say for sure if this is what the authors of the Darien Statements meant by "preserving the integrity of civilization." This is the interpretation that seems to me to make the most sense of the document. If it is what they meant, it’s a powerful statement that cuts d
eeper through the thinking of a lot of librarians than perhaps they meant to. If this interpretation veers too far from the authorial intentions, perhaps more clarification would help me understand the statements better.