Author Archives: Wayne Bivens-Tatum

Campaign Rhetoric 2008 (1958?)

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Like a lot of you, I’ve been thinking lately about politics and the upcoming election. Some of this thinking has been deliberation about political issues, but not much. Rarely do I get inspired enough by any candidate to vote wholeheartedly for that person, and for me elections are usually about voting the lesser of two evils. Sometimes the lesser evil isn’t even evil, which is a nice change. Considering that I’ve been voting for twenty years in five different states and few candidates I’ve voted for have won, perhaps I’m just a jinx and should vote for the most evil candidate for a change.

We all have different evils. My top ones are stupidity, ignorance, and viciousness. I know this might make me "unAmerican" or "elitist," but I’ll come out and say that I don’t think stupid or ignorant people should be in charge of things, no matter how nice they are. I think I’m pretty smart and knowledgeable, and as a smart and knowledgeable citizen I want people even smarter and more knowledgeable than me running the government. Always I am puzzled when I read about voters who vote for candidates "because they seem like me." Do any of these voters think they’d be qualified to be President? Apparently they do. I don’t think I am, and I don’t think they are either.

In elections, the stupidity, ignorance, and viciousness come out mostly in the campaign rhetoric, and though I find practical politics distasteful for the most part, I’m definitely interested in political rhetoric. Some of the rhetoric in this campaign sounds like it was pulled from a shelf where it had rested since the fifties, dusted off, and put to use once more. Consider the "socialist" label that’s come into use recently. I guess some people think Cold War rhetoric never stales. When the word socialist is used as an attack in American politics, stupidity, ignorance, or viciousness – and perhaps all of them – are almost always present.

I’m not aware of any Presidential candidate in any major American political party that is a socialist. Is there a candidate who wants to nationalize any of the means of production, or, in the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick’s words, prevent capitalist acts between consenting adults.  Some Americans seem terribly frightened by something called "socialized medicine," but does either major Presidential candidate have a plan to nationalize the health industry? And even if our health service were truly nationalized, would that alone make America a "socialist" country? Would even Hayek think that alone would be enough to put us on the road to serfdom? Oh, I know. It’s the slippery slope. The thin end of the wedge. Nationalize health care, and next thing you know the one party state will force us all to march down Main Street in lockstep singing the Internationale.

There was a time when politicians called supporters of Social Security or Medicare socialists. The implication is that any state relief for the poor or the sick is "socialist," the only problem being that the provision of such service has nothing inherently to do with socializing the means of production or nationalizing any industries and  predates socialism in the West by centuries. Philosophically this is suspect, and historically it’s nonsense. Elizabethan England had poor relief. Was Queen Elizabeth a socialist? The Catholic Church has provided poor relief for centuries. Was St. Thomas a socialist? Any politicians trying to use the word socialist to frighten the ignorant are either too ignorant to know what socialism is, too stupid to make fairly easy distinctions between socialist and capitalist economies, or too vicious to tell the truth.

Another curious rhetorical strategy reminiscent of the fifties is the unAmerican label, as if anyone could actually define what an American is other than by citizenship. One of the candidates for office this year has spoken of "real Americans." Rhetorically, this is an interesting phrase. It involves what the rhetorician Chaim Perelman calls the "dissociation of ideas." In The Realm of Rhetoric he discusses the way some philosophers have split a term into two parts to separate appearance and reality and provide a criterion to distinguish the merely apparent in a particular term.

Term I corresponds to the apparent, to what occurs in the first instance, to what is actual, immediate, and known directly. Term II, to the extent that it is distinguished from it, can be understood only by comparison with term I: it results from a dissociation effected within term I with the purpose of getting rid of incompatibilities that may appear between different aspects of term I. Term II provides a criterion, a norm which allows us to distinguish those aspects of term I which are of value from those which are not (127).

Perelman analyzes the way Plato and Plotinus use this rhetorical strategy to "devalue the sensible world," and politicians who make this move attempt to devalue those who aren’t "real," in much the same way. Often this rhetorical move is fallacious. Philosophers sometimes call it the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, but we can call it the "no real American" fallacy. "No American would support policy X." "But millions of Americans support policy X. " "Well, no real American would support it." Q.E.D.

Both of these rhetorical strategies are contained in a comment on a blog post at the Heritage Foundation, where someone named "Dave" writes that "NO REAL AMERICAN WOULD VOTE FOR A SOCIALIST LIKE OBAMA." The all caps indicate that "Dave" is a very passionate person who wants to make sure you don’t miss his clever point. (By the way, "Dave" also thinks Barney Frank caused the recent banking crisis.)

Sloppy thinking is hardly the sole property of any one political party. Most of us are guilty of fallacious thinking about all sorts of unexamined issues. We think we’re absolutely right and everyone who doesn’t agree with us is just wrong. Sometimes we even think that people who disagree with us are not only wrong, but evil as well. Sometimes it might even be true. I’m glad the election will be over soon, because for the most part the lies, distortions, and oversimplifications of campaign rhetoric on both sides depress me. Just about the only enjoyment I get out of campaign rhetoric is analyzing the fallacies and playing "spot the stupid person." The sad thing is the stupid person often wins.

Political Limbo

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Just when I get a break from the second job, along comes jury duty. Where I live, I’m desperately trying to avoid getting on a trial for a gang murder or something. After catching bits of campaign rhetoric lately, I’m not even sure I should be allowed to serve on a jury.

All week a question has been nagging me, making it hard to think about librarianship or anything else. Am I a “real American” or an “east coast elite”? It may seem a trivial question, perhaps even a false dichotomy created in the fallacious mind of a fervent ideologue, but then again, maybe it’s not. I’ve been trying to work my way through the implications, because if I’m not a real American, ordinary and hard working, then I really have no business participating in the upcoming election, and I certainly shouldn’t have to serve on a jury.

Could I be an east coast elite? Boy, that would be nice. I’d like to be an east coast elite. It’s been a dream of mine ever since I was a youngster growing up poor in Louisiana. I do live on the east coast, there’s no doubt about that. I live right in central New Jersey, about an hour from the ocean, and I’ve lived either here or just across the Delaware River in eastern Pennsylvania for almost seven years. I’m almost a native at this point, and even know what people mean when they say they’re going "down the shore."

I’m also relatively well educated compared to most Americans. I finished college and have a graduate degree or two, just like most of you. I’ve read a lot of books, including some really hard ones. Were I to attend a cocktail party (which east coast elites apparently do every day), while sipping my single-malt scotch or my dry martini, I could discuss phenomenology, post-structuralism, enjambment, the Markan priority, the fetishization of commodities, or the law of diminishing returns and more or less know what I’m talking about. I listen to classical music on one of my many local public radio stations. I can recite poetry from memory. I value education and high culture and all that sort of thing. I don’t eat meat. Yesterday I even had a latte. It was good.

Then there’s my child. She goes to a private school. Not one of those $20,000 a year private schools that populate the New Jersey landscape, but it’s still private. She’s in the fourth grade and studies subjects like Latin, Greek, history, and geography. That’s pretty elite. She reads a lot of books herself, so she’ll probably grow up to be one of those intellectual types. Plus, she’s tall and athletic and the most adorable child in the world, so real Americans would probably envy her. (I’d put up a photo, but it would just make you feel bad at how inadequate your own children are.)

There are also my political views. Unlike those real Americans, I don’t pay a lot of attention to people’s race, religion, or sexual orientation. I have no problem voting for a black man for President. I think homosexuals should actually be treated like other citizens and have rights and stuff. I think the worldview of most religious fundamentalists is overly simplistic, but as long as they’re not shouting at me or trying to forcibly convert me to their views, I don’t really care what they do. I feel the same way about atheists. “Socialized” medicine doesn’t bother me at all; in fact, I think Medicare is a good thing. Welfare? Fine by me. If we’re hard nosed about it, we can say we don’t want people starving in the streets and blocking traffic. If we’re proponents of liberal democracy, we can say that no people would consent to be governed by a state that would let them starve. If we’re compassionate, we can consider it what Catholics call the preferential option for the poor.

Also, I work at Princeton, which, you may have heard, is one of those snooty Ivy League universities. Princeton is really rich, too. You’re probably aware of that. And a lot of the students are rich as well. Over half of them need no financial aid, and the tuition and fees are approaching fifty grand a year at this point. Imagine having an extra $50K to spend every year, more if there are multiple children in the family going to Princeton, which often happens. My job, such that it is, is more or less intellectual work and requires very little physical labor. In fact, I made a vow to myself never to take the elevator just so I wouldn’t fall into the sedentary librarian’s habit of expanding too much.

On the other hand, while I work at an Ivy League university, I didn’t go to one. All my degrees are from mere state universities. One of those state universities is even in the South, which is just about unforgivable from an east coast elite perspective. Also, being a librarian at an Ivy League university lacks the cultural capital of being a professor at one. Does librarian counts as an elite profession? Considering the stereotypes about librarians in this country, I’m sure it doesn’t. Librarians are always second class citizens of a sort on a university campus. And then there’s my pay. It’s not bad as librarian pay goes, but I’m never going to be rich, and I sure couldn’t afford to send my child to Princeton. I don’t even make enough to use “summer” as a verb. So my job doesn’t qualify me as an east coast elite, even if  it disqualifies me as a real American.

And while I do live in what one of my former colleagues called “the socialist republic of New Jersey,” my neighborhood isn’t fancy or anything. There aren’t any drug dealers or coal miners that I know of, but there aren’t any Ivy League professors or Wall Street types, either. It’s just a standard, boring, middle-class kind of neighborhood. One of my neighbors does own a Hummer, but I think the Hummer might be larger and more expensive than his actual house. About the best that can be said of my city is that we have the state capital here, and that’s not saying much. I get from my modest house to my modest job in a modest eight-year-old Ford. I could be wrong here, but I’m almost positive east coast elites don’t drive Fords. We can probably take that as axiomatic.

Thus, I’m torn. Real Americans would presumably scorn my political, intellectual, and cultural habits and values and probably my diction as well, while east coast elites would disdain my state university degrees, my middling job, and my humble family background. I’m caught on the horns of a dilemma, and I’m not sure I can escape. My only hope is that I can use this argument to persuade the attorneys that being neither a real American nor an east coast elite means I shouldn’t have to serve on a jury for a murder trial. It’s not much, but it may be all I have here in political limbo.

Academic Reader’s Advisory

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I almost put a question mark after the title. This morning I received one of those ALA Editions emails advertising three recent reader’s advisory titles. The whole concept seems very foreign to me. Certainly I get the idea – helping people find books they want to read, probably based on what they’ve liked in the past – but it doesn’t seem to be anything we do in academic libraries as a matter of course.

Once a few years ago I did get a question that was almost reader’s advisory like. It’s the only time I’ve ever gotten it, so I even remember. Someone was looking for books with musician characters because they were assigning a research essay and wanted to suggest books to students. For a minute or so I wondered how I was going to help the person, but then realized some public reference librarian had probably already done my job for me. Sure enough, within a couple of Google searches I found several reader’s advisory lists of novels with musician characters. At the time I thought to myself, how do they do that?

On the other hand, I guess some of us do reader’s advisory of a sort. In a research consultation, we’re definitely dispensing some advice on what to read. "Peer-reviewed, scholarly books and articles are just the thing you need!" In the technical sense of the phrase, this is reader’s advisory, right? We’re advising readers.

I have a feeling that the public librarians get more satisfied patrons, though, or at least patrons with a different sort of satisfaction. I would imagine (and I could be wrong) that the people who come away from a good reader’s advisory consultation are looking at all the copacetic books on their list bursting with anticipation, whereas often after a successful consultation with me a student goes away with a list of great looking sources but not necessarily with a gleeful look in their eyes as they contemplate reading the stuff. I want the gleeful look; I’m just not sure how to get it.

The Improbable Source

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In a couple of weeks I’ll start helping freshmen in the writing seminars with the library portion of their research essays. Inevitably, I see some students who are looking for the improbable source. There are all sorts of improbable sources.

I hear from my colleagues in the social sciences about students who want statistics on things no one keeps statistics on, or they want a data set that has already been compiled on the obscure topic they themselves want data for.

The improbable source I’m asked for most often comes from students in writing seminars working on relatively esoteric topics, topics that might only be a focus of interest for the recent PhD teaching the class. Typically, the students are armed with some theoretical readings about a topic, then are told to go out and find cultural objects or trends to apply those theories to. Somewhere, the lesson breaks down, though. My favorite is from a student a couple of years ago. She was taking a seminar on civic friendship, which is a relatively unstudied topic. She wanted to write a research essay about email. Thus, the inevitable request, "Can you help me find scholarly books and articles on how email is a form of civic friendship?"

I’m torn in my response to questions like this. Naturally, I want to help. But of course, I want to say! There’s a vast literature on the topic! Another part of me wants to chuckle at the naivete of these kids today. Oh my, how could they be so silly as to think something like that might exist! What are they teaching in the schools these days!

Of course I do neither, and instead explain the problem, which is that they want sources that already do their work for them. In some ways, the question makes a great teaching moment, because while it seems such a simple request, it opens a dialogue about what research is and is not possible, the place of a researcher in a scholarly conversation, the way trends in scholarship affect what other scholars write on, the duty of the researcher to create something new, etc. All of these are good lessons, even if they never need them again.

These questions also give me something enjoyable to look forward to, which is always a boon as the research paper deluge descends upon me.

Above the Law

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Everyone has probably seen the story about McCain’s campaign complaining to Youtube about campaign videos being removed and reviewed because of possible violations of copyright. Google News has a roundup of them. My favorite response so far is from CNET. McCain’s campaign wants special treatment. Tgdaily put it this way:

The McCain camp’s biggest complaint was that the copyright act does not favor the user of the material, but usually the copyright owner. If the video creator feels that their video has been pulled inappropriately, the act doesn’t give them any wiggle room in trying to get the video put back up before a period of ten to fourteen days.

Is there any response a librarian can have other than: Wow! Where has McCain’s lawyer been living the last ten years that this should come as a surprise? As many have noted, McCain (or at least his campaign’s lawyer) is asking for a special exemption from the same DMCA that he himself voted for. The person who would want you to be fined for making a copy of your own DVD for your own use wants to use CBS news clips willy-nilly in his campaign videos.

There are so many issues here it’s hard to know where to begin, but the biggest one is political, not legal. Youtube has undoubtedly taken the right stand in reminding McCain and his lawyer that they aren’t above the law. McCain is being subjected to the same law as everyone else, because if any citizen stands above the law, then the law is an arbitrary force lacking authority and legitimacy. I’m sure that if he understood the issue, even McCain – perhaps even the new creature McCain has morphed into over the past few months – would agree.

McCain or his lawyer is right to feel irritated by this, though, because it’s obvious to almost everyone that the DMCA is an unjust law that is too restrictive of copyright. If there weren’t such a feeling, then millions upon millions of people wouldn’t violate that law every day with no qualms whatsoever. Is there anyone who feels even remotely bad about, for example, copying their own DVD to load onto their iPod? Is there anyone except the big studios who cares if anyone else does this for their own videos? Does anyone feel like such a person has committed a crime? Of course they don’t. No victim, no crime.

The same goes for Youtube. Is anyone really bothered if someone puts up a few minutes of a TV show or a mashup of different copyrighted materials on Youtube? Of course they don’t. The copyright holders protest, presumably with the argument that using their material is losing them money, but I think that would be hard to prove. If someone directs me to a video clip from a copyrighted TV show I might watch it, but if it weren’t there I wouldn’t seek it out in it’s copyrighted source. i just wouldn’t watch it.

Since I’m often a glass-is-half-empty sort of person, I have trouble believing any change to copyright will come out of this incident, but I have to admit to just a tiny bit of schadenfreude at the moment.

Book Challenges in Academic Libraries

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Thanks to Banned Books Week, we’re all familiar with book challenges in public libraries in the United States. Does this ever happen in academic libraries in this country?

I ask only because I’ve been intrigued by this story over the past few days. The challenge isn’t in the United States, but New Zealand. A New Zealand Nazi and Holocaust denier has complained to a university library that a master’s thesis examining his Satanic Neo-Nazism is a "smear document." Though, as the Chronicle article notes, "ironically, only a few years ago, Mr. Bolton complained bitterly when another New Zealand university pulled a master’s thesis because of its Holocaust denial. He asked, ‘Is Canterbury University in the business of denying academic freedom?’" He wants the thesis removed and some money from the university to sooth his damaged feelings. The university library has in fact removed the thesis while the complaint is being investigated.

At a certain level, the story is comical, obviously. The hypocritical Nazi Satanist doesn’t like criticism. Those Nazi Satanists never do, I suppose. That a thesis approved by the university has been removed even for an investigation is a bit troubling, but I’m hoping that it’s just a ploy to get the Nazi Satanist to shut up for a while.

While think about this, I ran across this post in my Google Reader (I’m slowly catching up on my blog reading after the overscheduled hell of last week). It’s one of the Gypsy Librarian’s useful article summaries, this time an article on academic freedom and academic librarians. It’s depressingly clear that the Gypsy Librarian has no protections for his academic freedom, but what would he need protection for? Well, lots of things, including teaching and just generally speaking about anything. I’ve always avoided the tenure track, but I’m thankful for my own quasi-tenure nonetheless.

Collection development is typically the place librarians would want their academic freedom protected. I’m just not sure of any places where the academic freedom of collection development is challenged. Do things like this happen in American academic libraries? There’s mention in that blog post of things like the so-called "Academic Bill of Rights." But if anything like that were to apply to libraries, surely it would be to request more books representing conservatism than the attempt to suppress alternative titles. This doesn’t seem too radical. Provided the money was available, are there academic librarians who would refuse to buy conservative books? No, I take that back, there might be. But should we consider those librarians anything other than partisan ideologues who don’t share the values of scholarship? I’m not particularly concerned with the Coulters and the Limbaughs, but academic libraries with any sort of politics collection should have some Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver.

It seems to me there’s little ground for book challenges in academic libraries. Public libraries have an obligation both to the principle of representing various viewpoints as well as to their communities. Like it or not, they have to at least respond to book challenges from their public. Who in the academic community would challenge a book, though? Professors? That seems hard to believe. Students? I can’t imagine they’d care, but even if they did they have no authority over a library collections, and for good reason. In research libraries, at least, students are not the primary community for the collection. They use only a residual part of the collection.

However, it’s always possible I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve only worked in collection development for two libraries – one college and one university, both in the mid-Atlantic – so maybe challenges of this sort would be taken seriously in Texas, where the Gypsy Librarian resides, or in Alabama, where I spent my college years. I’m hoping not, though. I wouldn’t want the same thing to happen here as happened in New Zealand.

Learning and Unlearning

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One of the most difficult things for me as I grow older and presumably more experienced is unlearning what I have learned, or at least being aware of what I have learned since adulthood so I don’t make unwarranted assumptions about student knowledge. This might be the sort of thing the Beloit College Mindset List tries to do in a general way, but that list seems more to indicate what Boomers think is important that new college students have never heard of. I’m talking more about what the students themselves will eventually know about processes that will become common tasks for both the students and ourselves.

I was thinking about this in a small, specific way last week when I did an introductory research session for juniors about to begin what are most likely their first independent research projects since their first year writing seminar. Among other things, I discuss using WorldCat as a discovery tool because it shows so much that isn’t in our library as well as lets us easily distinguish between books, journals, archival resources, etc. Every year I ask who’s heard of WorldCat. Every year almost no one has. Afterwards, the professor expressed some surprise that they hadn’t, because for him, as for me, it was the first stop in any search for books. He joked that we have all these assumptions about what students know, even though the purpose of college that they come out knowing them rather than come in knowing them.

Something like knowing about WorldCat is minor compared to all the things I have to unlearn. It’s very easy for people well versed in the research process to forget that new college students aren’t. I’ve become much more minimalist in my instruction over the years, because I’ve come to believe that students have to learn how to do research by doing research, and trying to get them to memorize a treatise on library research for their first 10-page essay is folly. No one learned that way. I’ve seen librarians in instruction sessions who are of the kitchen-sink philosophy of library instruction, apparently believing that college freshmen really need a 45-minute introduction to the OPAC.

These librarians are certainly aware of the knowledge gap between them and the students, but have forgotten what it might be like to have an adult talk ad nauseum about any topic, much less one as dull as the OPAC. They’ve also forgotten that what they think is terribly important probably isn’t that important for the students, either theoretically or practically. They’ve forgotten what it’s like to be eighteen, like the author of The Dumbest Generation. And some librarians seem to resent students for not knowing as much as they do.

Many of us could spend hours talking about the research process. Some of us, like my colleague Mary George, write books on the topic. A lot of us even do some of it. For me at least, it becomes more difficult over the years to remember what would be most useful or relevant to new college students and also to remember what they don’t know. Part of me has to unlearn everything I’ve learned to go back to that previous state and see the library through the eyes of a novice.

I’ve had similar experiences teaching. Last year I taught an essay on feminist political theory for the first time at Princeton. After eighteen years or so of feminist awareness, it never occurred to me that the new college students would have had no exposure whatsoever to feminism. The concept of gender was foreign to them, so naturally someone arguing that a complete theory of justice would require a society without gender confused them somewhat. What are they teaching in the schools these days, I almost said to them. I went into the class with a lot of assumptions about what people "just know" about feminism or gender and ended up having to deliver an impromptu lecture on the feminist movement. (This episode is fresh in my mind because I’m teaching the same essay tomorrow, this time prefaced by an encyclopedia article on feminist political theory.)

Assuming we can accomplish this unlearning – and I’m not at all sure we can – how would we do it? If only I could offer a bulleted list of techniques, I could probably start selling myself on the library motivational circuit. Some of it is relatively easy. When students ask the same questions year after year, those are the things they don’t know. This is why I prefer minimalizing my contribution and responding to students as much as possible, so I can remain somewhat aware of what they don’t know.  I try to assume the minimum amount of knowledge while respecting their intelligence.  Some of it may be more difficult. Can we ever look at the library through fresh eyes?

There’s one place where I at least can’t unlearn. Once I finally drank of the Pierian Spring, as Pope puts it, I’ve tried to drink as deeply as I can, which would explain why I do the sort of job I do instead of some job without access to a large library. I doubt most of the students have the same assumptions I have about the centrality of learning, but I try to assume that if everything goes well, the spark will ignite, and they will discover the thrill of the life of the mind. Here is perhaps where I can’t unlearn but only try to model.

For the rest, I try think of how I might remember what it’s like not to know what I know, to remember how I felt the first time I worked in a library with ten million books or so, how daunted I was by the sheer size of everything and the scope of all I didn’t even know I didn’t know.  Then I remember why the Delphic Oracle considerd Socrates the wisest man in Greece, because he was the only one who knew he didn’t know anything. To put it more mildly, he was aware of how much he didn’t know.

This makes it a little easier, I think, for me to look through fresh eyes and avoid the jaded cynicism of the old and experienced. Everyone’s ignorant about most things, but it’s always easy for me to see how little I know even about subjects I’m interested in. However much I might know, I always have the feeling that it isn’t nearly enough. Achieving that humility is a first step. We’re all novices in most areas, and perhaps that common ground makes it easier for us both to strip away our assumptions and not to mind so much that yet again we’re going over the same material we’ve covered a hundred times for students who seem to change only in that they always look younger than they did the year before.

More on the Humanities in the Library

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My last post generated a short conversation on Friendfeed. I’m not much of a controversialist, so it’s always interesting to be criticized. Last time I was merely reflecting on a couple of recent reports and their possible relationship to scholarship in the humanities. Dorothea Salo took issue with the post, and rather than respond on Friendfeed, I thought it worthwhile just to address the criticisms here. Also, I came to the discussion a bit late since I just noticed it today. Working two jobs right now is taking up a lot of my time.

The first criticism is more about what I didn’t do in that post than what I did. The quote in full:

Interesting, but dodges the hard questions. What are we going to have to STOP DOING in order to do the new stuff? Because we ARE going to have to stop doing SOMETHING. There aren’t enough resources in the world.

I have a range of possible responses to this, from the snipey to the less snipey. The less snipey is that it seems I’m being criticized for failing to do something I never set out to do in the first place, which is hardly a meaningful criticism. After all, it was a blog post, not a management treatise. Thus, I wasn’t "dodging" the "hard questions." The supposedly hard questions were merely not part of the subject of the blog post. The topic was what I saw as a possible future of humanities scholarship and research libraries in about a thousand words.

I’ll get back to what we might stop doing in a moment. Before I do, I’d like to take a look at the second criticism:

Well, from my POV, I get cynical about posts like this because as a librarian working in a new area, I get damn-all help or support from librarians in general, non-technical librarians in particular, and humanities librarians ESPECIALLY. So until they get outta their comfort zone a little, I read such posts as this as "we don’t have to change a bit! really! lalalalalala let the world fly by…" instead of "we’ve got some hard decisions to consider and some changes to make."

Now it seems that I’m being criticized because she doesn’t get enough support for her work in her library. That’s never a good feeling at work, but I’m not sure how my post contributes to it. I’m really not sure what she does in her daily work or whether I would support it or not, but I’m an open-minded librarian and not especially reactionary, so who knows. I’m not sure what is meant in this context by "non-technical," but whatever it is I probably qualify, and I’m certainly a humanities librarian, so I suppose I’ll stand up for my own.

Apparently I don’t want to get out of my "comfort zone," and also I’m saying we don’t have to change a bit. My comfort zone is pretty large, but I suppose that could still be true. Do any of us want to get out of our comfort zones? I work in the humanities. I don’t see those science librarians getting out of their comfort zones to understand how the humanities operate, so I don’t think it’s just we humanities librarians who are special in that regard. The most serious criticism is that I’m arguing that some changes won’t or perhaps shouldn’t be occurring. That’s not what I’m saying at all. What I will say, and what I have said before, is that some things just aren’t changing, and the traditions and practices of humanities scholarship are among those things. It’s not a question of wanting or not wanting "change." It’s a question of looking around at what scholars in the humanities are actually doing, and for the most part they’re doing the same things they’ve been doing for centuries, and they’re not showing any signs of rapidly changing. Rather

The world of information may be changing rapidly, but humanists for the most part just don’t care. That change may in itself become a major object of humanistic study, and when it does it will be addressed in scholarly monographs and articles. We could only speculate on why change is slow, but I suspect that it’s the way they’re trained, the long years of discipline they undergo mastering a tradition. It also has to do with the nature of such scholarship. Humanists engage texts and arguments; thus they need texts and arguments to engage. Giving them a nice data set won’t please them. Libraries are there to serve scholars, not the other way around. It would be hubris to say scholars in the humanities need to change the way they work because we librarians just aren’t happy with their slow pace. Humanities librarians may be among the slowest to change, but it seems to me they’re still changing faster than humanities scholars might be comfortable with.

As for what we might give up, I don’t have many concrete answers. Part of my goal is to try to articulate in a small way what an ideal research library might be. Whether or not any library can live up to the ideal doesn’t really matter. Just because we fail at a worthwhile goal doesn’t mean the goal isn’t worthwhile. It just means we’re failures. That’s hard to take sometimes, but unpleasant truths are no less truthful for their unpleasantness.

Some libraries subscribe to fewer journals. Some cut their book budgets to the bone. Some give up buying European monographs. I’m not interested in the question of what libraries should give up, but of what they should provide. If research libraries can’t at a minimum provide the resources that their current cohort of scholars needs, then those research libraries are failing in their most important mission. If that means that humanists still need those scholarly monographs, but librarians aren’t buying them for whatever reason, the library has failed. Period. To some extent, we’re all failures, but we should have the courage to admit it, not challenge the facts of scholarship.

As a practical matter, I in fact don’t have a lot of hard decisions to consider. However you might feel about that, it’s true. While my library isn’t the richest or the biggest library around, it’s reasonably well endowed. I should also note for those of you not in the humanities, collecting in the humanities is cheap relative to the sciences. While some of those STM serials might be $10,000 a year and rising, that’s not the case in the humanities. Some of the best or most important journals might be a couple hundred dollars. Monographs are often under a hundred dollars, at least ones from this country. It’s not humanities collections that are breaking library budgets.

As for giving things up, we would have to look at the library more broadly than just humanities collection development, which to some extent was the main topic of my last post. Some of the changes seem quite easy. A reference librarian retires. We don’t have as much reference as we used to. But hey, we need a digital photographer if we’re going to digitize stuff. Let’s take the reference librarian line and hire a digital photographer instead. It’s library science, not rocket science. Regardless, I’m not the one making those large decisions for any library, and I’m not in a position to speculate on the future of every part of the research library or how every library should address their hard questions. I just write about what I know. The problem might be that I just don’t know that much.

Humanities and the Research Library

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I’ve been reading some of the reports that were released last month, especially Ithaka’s 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education and CLIR’s No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century. Naturally I’ve been thinking about them in the context of the humanities and the research library. I’m not sure I have a thesis yet, but I do have some reflections. For the most part I suspect that research libraries will continue to be hybrids for perhaps decades to come, especially in the humanities. Just as we collect the past for future study, we’ll live with the past during the long transition to a different future.

As I’ve argued before, though perhaps not convincingly, some things about the humanities don’t change. We continue to ask the same basic questions and continue to study texts in a way that fundamentally has remained the same since the Renaissance. Some new trends are nevertheless emerging, though, the “digital humanities.” Some of the digital humanities seem to be just digital versions of previous physical items, like digitizing archives, which makes these items much more available, but doesn’t change the fundamental nature of our interaction with them. Nevertheless, new techniques are open to us.

But still a lot is the same. Studying texts, interpreting culture, making arguments about human things. Some of this will involve experimental methods and text mining and statistical analysis and specifically data driven techniques: from brain experiments to confirm epistemological hypotheses to using text mining to finally prove that Bacon or Oxford or Rutland or whomever really wrote the works of Shakespeare. But most of it will involve traditional analysis and arguments applied to digital entities. Central questions will remain: What does this cultural text or artifact mean? What does it tell us about ourselves and our world? What happened at such and such a time and what does it mean? And, it seems, for a long time to come traditional methods will also apply. Some people criticize libraries as slow to change, but the traditions of humanities scholarship might be even slower. There have been humanist scholars around a long time. Humanists think libraries, even traditional libraries, will still be important for their future.

The Ithaka report seems to confirm this, at least for the short run. It considers three roles the library plays: Gateway to, Archive of, and Buyer of information resources. The Ithaka folks surveyed scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as librarians. The people who think the library is the most important are the librarians, naturally. But humanists were much more likely than their scientific or social scientific colleagues to continue to rate the library highly is all three functions, though the key function for all is Buyer.

Humanists are much less likely than anyone, including librarians, to want to do away with print journal collections even if electronic versions were available. Humanists are more likely to feel comfortable in the library, and less likely to think they’ll be more reliant upon electronic resources.

It’s possible that humanists are just going to have to be disappointed in the short run, especially with print journals, but the transition might take a very long time, and is unlikely to be complete in the foreseeable future. By then they will have adapted, or gone extinct, as will the libraries they love now.

Despite the heated change rhetoric from some quarters, libraries seem to be adapting to the future already. The CLIR report addressed all sorts of issues, and I liked it because it lacked heated rhetoric. My idiosyncratic take on it can be summarized by considering roles and techniques used by research libraries. What seems clear to me is not how much has or will change, but how much will stay the same even after huge changes.

Same Roles, Same Techniques: Collection, Organization, Preservation, Authority

Things we’ll continue to do and in more or less the same ways:

  • Buying books, organizing them, making them accessible in many of the same ways we do now, maybe using digital vendor slips instead of paper, but still more or less the same.
  • For scholarly works, we’ll continue to combine with scholarly presses to put our collective imprimatur on such works.
  • Building special collections and archives. If nothing else, they have to be built before they can be digitized.

Same Roles, Different Techniques: Collection, Organization, Preservation, Accessibility, Discovery

We’ll continue to collect, but with new techniques we can even make our traditional collections more discoverable and accessible.

  • Collection will increasingly be digital. Hardly a surprise. But even providing access to print collections should improve. Even with ebooks, will copyright and DRM allow us to treat ebooks as we now treat print books?
  • Organizing it, providing metadata, better web portals, better OPACs
  • Preserving the digital collection
  • Ensuring quality. this is something we can strive to do.
  • Making it accessible
  • Making it discoverable! Not just a sealed off archive, but easily findable (study on use of non easily accessible resources not being used as much). We know that not everything is online and easily accessible, even with the Google books project, but if we define everything as “everything anyone will actually use” then everything is increasingly online. Research libraries need to make their collections more discoverable and accessible. Digitization of copyrighted books at least lets them be found, and digitization of special collections and out of copyright books allows access for everyone.

Different Roles, New Techniques: Creation, Collaboration

These are a couple of roles some people are predicting for research libraries in the future, obviously based on activities at least of the fringe of a lot of library operations now.

Creation

  • Creators of Digital Content–digital libraries, institutional repositories, open access journals, academic publishers. Obviously we’re already doing some of this, but doing more of this will make the library more central to scholarship.
  • Creators of information tools: Zotero, Omeka, LibX toolbar
  • Helping scholars create digital content, like at the Center for History and New Media

Collaboration

  • Between libraries: Print repositories, keeping ready access to our own copies, but sharing in an organized fashion.
  • Between libraries and other campus units: Working with information technologists, for example.
  • Between librarians and faculty: collaborating with faculty or enabling faculty to collaborate

Some libraries are doing these things now, and more will probably have to to adapt, but nevertheless many of the traditional roles are likely to remain, especially in the humanities. Still not much of thesis, I’m afraid.