Author Archives: Wayne Bivens-Tatum

Everything Connected, Nothing What It Seems

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Over the weekend I was reading Knowledge Goes Pop, by Clare Birchall. It’s a cultural studies book on what the author calls “popular knowledge,” the sort of knowledge embodied in gossip and conspiracy theories, and uses a Foucauldian / poststructuralist apparatus to analyze this knowledge and its relation to truth, or what the author would call “legitimate” knowledge (scare quotes, of course). She also considers its relation to cultural studies itself, which makes a lot of sense. After all, cultural studies as a field of inquiry often shares a point of view with conspiracy theories, especially the belief that everything is connected and nothing is what it seems to be. Structurally, is there much difference between the conspiracy theorist arguing that the US government deliberately destroyed the World Trade Center and the academic arguing that all of us (excepting the few academics who agree with the author) are all complicit in some dominant political ideology that we don’t understand but which nevertheless manipulates us?

So far I like the book, though it manifests the typical ideological conformity of most cultural studies writing I’ve read. Anything “marginalized,” “subversive,” “radical,” “disruptive,” or “resistant” is good and worthy of our attention; anything “legitimate” or “official” suspect. It’s not that I mind; it’s just that the attitude of such politicized scholarship is so predictable in its assumption that things are marginalized because of some reason other than they’re stupid or useless, as if marginal were in itself interesting and subversive always beneficial, regardless of what is being subverted. This sentence sums up a lot of that attitude: “There is a risk that the aestheticization of conspiracy theory only serves to depolitize any challenging or radical potential it might have (we could, however, think this is a good thing in relation to right wing Militia groups)” (41). I’m happy to take that risk.

However, while reading it I decided to do a bit more research on some conspiracy theories. As I’ve written before, conspiracy theories are a minor hobby of mine. I find them fascinating as objects of study. In particular I was going to follow up on my favorite conspiracy theorist, David Icke. He’s the one who claims that many world leaders are actually half human / half alien reptiles that allow them to shape-shift and pose as humans as they implement the fascistic new world order on behalf of the Illuminati. Needless to say, he’s a lot of fun. He’s also a dynamic and amusing speaker. Search Google Video for — david icke freedom fascism — to see a six hour presentation of his on conspiracies. As an example of his style, in the second video of three he criticizes Bush for continuing to read a children’s book about a pet goat after Andrew Card has informed him that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center. “Okay, Andy. After I find out what happens to this goat, I’ll be right out.”

Icke’s written a lot of books on his conspiracy theories, but the latest one seems to sum up his past books, so I thought it would be a good place to start: The David Icke Guide to the Global Conspiracy (and How to End It). I don’t know why I found it surprising, but according to Worldcat, of the 45 copies in American libraries, none are owned by academic libraries. Based on a very cursory glance through the holdings list on several other of his books, that’s for the most part true of his other books as well. Here and there an academic library may have one of the books, but almost all of them are held by public libraries, which means that eventually almost all of them will be weeded when they have passed their popularity date.

The question for research libraries is, does this matter? These books are part of what Birchall calls “popular knowledge.” They are decidedly not part of what we would call scholarly knowledge, which is typically what we buy. It’s obvious to me why few academic libraries ever buy these books. They’re books by kooks, right? We don’t buy those. We librarians act as filters to keep them out of our scholarly collections, and the scholars apparently agree with our decisions, because they’re not clamoring for more books by David Icke or other conspiracy theorists. There are few scholarly books on these kinds of theories, after all. Why would anyone want to study this intellectual gibberish?

The obvious argument against such collections is that scholars don’t take these things seriously. We tend not to have major research collections on astrology or self-help, either, because the unserious and intellectually suspect nature of these books makes them unimportant as contributions to the scholarly record, yet at the same time the books pose as argumentative non-fiction, which is one way to describe scholarly books. Conspiracy books are in many ways like scholarly books. They consider evidence. They make arguments. Only they tend to do it badly and are often unverifiable. Still, we collect other books that pose unverifiable theories about the world, especially in the humanities. Are most of the assertions of French theory any more verifiable than those made by the 9/11 Truth Movement?

However, we collect non-scholarly works as objects of study as a matter of course. Novels, letters, diaries, films. Why don’t we also collect conspiracy books in the same spirit? Perhaps it’s because of the pseudo-scholarly nature of most of these books. Novels rarely pose as fact. Films don’t claim to be true. David Icke presumably believes what he writes is true, and so do a lot of other people. Because of this pseudo-scholarly nature, perhaps the scholarly consensus to ignore these works makes more sense. Conspiracy books aren’t proper objects of scholarly study because they compete with scholarly study. Taking them seriously even as objects of study would give them some sort of interest, would perhaps validate them in some way. Is this why we don’t collect these things?

Are we the filters that guard scholarly knowledge, or even “legitimate” knowledge? Or is the truth darker? Perhaps academic librarians are part of the fortress guarding scholarly standards of knowledge, or perhaps instead we are all victims of false consciousness or even part of the conspiracy. Is this active non-collection or merely neglect? Are we repressing or merely ignoring conspiracy books? Do we not buy these books because we don’t want them widely distributed, thus “marginalizing” them? Or is it that we don’t want the theories to survive for later study, because we don’t want people to know the truth?

It could be the absence of conspiracy collections in most research libraries is the result of benign neglect, but maybe, just maybe, something else is going on. We could be either reactionary dupes marginalizing the subversive radicals among us, or tools of the Illuminati doing our best to suppress the disruptive truth about the conspiracy to establish the new world order. Either way it doesn’t look pretty for us. We may look like ordinary librarians widely dispersed doing out best to collect works of scholarship and objects of scholarly interest, but it might be naive to believe this, because it could be that everything is connected and nothing is what it seems.

Collection Development is a Customer Service

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I attended another program at ALA, the RUSA President’s Program, which was called “Quality Service in an Impersonal World” (if I remember correctly). That’s the program that began with several librarians singing a song called “R-U-S-A” to the tune of The Village People’s “Y-M-C-A,” though they weren’t dressed as colorfully at The Village People. Regarding the song, let’s just say that it was very long.

The first speaker was Robert Spector, author of The Nordstrom Way, which apparently has something to do with the great customer service at Nordstrom’s. Having never shopped at Nordstrom’s that didn’t mean much to me. However, the guy was definitely a great speaker, which is always a pleasure to find at these conferences. Personally, I’ve never found anything insightful in “customer service” talk that isn’t already contained in Kant’s categorical imperative, and Spector more or less agrees, it seems, since he said something like, all this is just the Golden Rule applied to sales. The impression I got from the whole program was that we’re all supposed to think it’s about the services. Everything is about good customer service, and it’s the people who make up the organization that really count.

I sat with an old friend during the program, someone who also works at a private university with a large research library. When discussing the program later, we both agreed that this all-about-the-service-and-the-people ethic wasn’t necessarily the case at our libraries. Instead, the collections are the important thing. Certainly, there have to be people to acquire, catalog, and preserve the collections. Naturally, we also have people who instruct library users how to find what they need, which is where the “customer service” part would come in. But even without these people, and I’m one of them, the center would still be the collection.

Scholars don’t necessarily want people; they want stuff. They want books, journals, archives, manuscripts, data, and if the library has the stuff they’ll use the library regardless of the people. I’ve heard various stories about inhospitable research libraries, especially in Europe, that seem to make it as difficult as possible for scholars to get at their resources, but scholars go even to these libraries because they want the stuff. I’m not saying having a lot of desired resources means we should act like that librarian in The Name of the Rose or that we shouldn’t be helpful and friendly. I’m just saying that for large libraries, the collection takes precedence in a way that it doesn’t elsewhere, and that the service-is-everything attitude doesn’t seem as prominent.

I know this isn’t the case in smaller libraries. I worked for a couple of years in a liberal arts college library, which was probably adequate for most undergraduates, but definitely wasn’t designed to support scholarly research at too high a level. The library usually didn’t even have the books I wanted to read, for that matter. In smaller places, that’s what ILL is for, but for ILL to work, the desired articles actually have to be somewhere. From the way some librarians speak, ILL means libraries can stop buying a lot of stuff, but for a resource to be shared, some library has to purchase it in the first place. There have to be just-in-case libraries for the just-in-time approach to work at other ones. No library has everything, of course, but some libraries must have a lot for the system to work.

It seems that most of what I read about customer service comes from public librarians, who want to attract as many people as possible in libraries with relatively small collections. In fact, another interesting speaker in the program was a public librarian who talked about a service her library provides, where librarians greet patrons at the door and walk them through the library helping them find what they need. I think I’d find that a bit too much if I were the patron, but then again I’m already a librarian. I’m sure there are plenty of library users who really like this program, and it sounded like a good way to get out of the reference desk mentality, where the librarians sit and wait while fewer patrons come to seek them out. I’m all for a service mentality in research libraries as well, but still I think it’s important to remember that in research libraries, collection development is a customer service.

The Language of the Millennials

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I now declare to the world that I don’t want to hear any more librarians try to tell me that college students today are so vastly different from normal human beings that no one can communicate with them. Since when did adults become such anxious ninnies about college students? I hate to make generational generalizations, but is it a boomer thing? Were they obsessed with their self-proclaimed specialness as youths and are now obsessed with their children? Or is it librarians who themselves feel out of touch who then tell the rest of us that we’re the ones out of touch?

Recently I heard from a librarian that it was as if college students today were from another planet and that they knew much more about all this techie stuff than anyone in the room. Um, sure. Speak for yourself, buddy.

The straw that broke this camel’s back was at ALA. Normally I’m in so many committee meetings or discussion groups that I don’t get to many programs, but I had an unexpectedly free slot and went to a program on “speaking the language of the millennials.” I went, thinking I might learn something and might also get at least a blog post out of it. Besides, I knew one of the speakers.

It started with one of the organizers reading from the Beloit College Mindset List. Though this list might raise a chuckle, it’s hardly a piece of keen sociological analysis. We were told that these kids today don’t remember the Berlin Wall and that Michael Moore has always been around and apparently the Beloit College people think he’s funny. I just took a quick look through the list, and, in the letters of my generation, BFD.

Were college professors and librarians such anxious ninnies when I started college? Did they have lists like the following: The class of 1991 doesn’t remember where it was at when Kennedy was shot. Either one! It doesn’t remember the Civil Rights Act, the moon landing, the Watts riots, the Stonewall riots, the Summer of Love, Woodstock, or the Vietnam War. There have always been The Pill and calculators. For them, cut and paste is a metaphor, and they write their essays on computers! Steve Martin has always been a wild and crazy guy. By the time they graduate, more time will have passed between then and Happy Days than between Happy Days and the era it depicted. How are we ever to communicate with these kids? I don’t remember anything like that.

It was with the first speaker that I knew I was in the wrong demographic for this talk. He started with a list of eight questions. I can’t remember them all (mind slipping in my old age, I guess), but I think they were: How many of you have a cell phone? Use IM and/or text messaging? Have a digital camera? Post photos to Flickr or something similar? Watch Youtube? Post videos to Youtube? Have a Facebook/Myspace profile? And something else I don’t remember. Almost everyone raised a hand at almost every question. Even me. An entire audience of tuned in, plugged in, socially networking, socially softwaring librarians coming apparently just to make sure they weren’t missing anything, anxious to learn how to speak like these millennial people. The speaker seemed taken aback. He paused for a moment, then said “Oh. Then you’re a lot like the college students I see coming in every year.” So much for difference. The first slide, and first statement after the questions, was something like, “the Internet is an important tool for modern communication.” At that point I walked out. I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I work with new college students every year. I teach them in class, I see them in instruction sessions, I meet with them in my office. Somehow I never seem to have any problem communicating with them or speaking a language they can understand. Where I work the language of the millennials is English (for the most part). Is that not the case elsewhere in the country? Yet we librarians are bombarded with claims that these students are so vastly different from “us” that we need to learn some special language to reach them, or that they’re so much more tech-savvy than we benighted librarians. It’s come to the point where I’m not sure whether to believe them or my lying eyes.

One Year In

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You may not be aware of this, but you’ve been reading an experiment. It might not have felt like an experiment, but it was. A year ago this week I started writing this blog as an experiment. A year in I’m trying to figure out just what I think I’ve been doing.

I’d been reading a number of library blogs for a couple of years, and had considered one of my own, but I wasn’t sure what I would write about or whether I could sustain it. Though I work in a library, and read and think about libraries, I never wrote much about libraries or librarianship until I started this blog, so I wasn’t sure I’d have much to say. Writing itself wasn’t a problem, because I write every day and find writing itself to be therapeutic, but writing just about libraries seemed like it might be tough. My goal was to write a solid, readable library blog that discussed issues in academic librarianship and higher education more generally. Up to a point, I think I’ve succeeded. Even if I haven’t, this somewhat atypical library blog seems to have about 300 regular readers and a bit more occasional readers after a year. That probably doesn’t sound like much, but it pleased me, and I thank you all for reading.

Before I began, I asked some other bloggers for advice. One told me he thought there might be a niche for a library blogger who wrote about the sort of issues I write about. Another blogger who chooses to remain anonymous said to go for quality over quantity of posts, not to be afraid of the long post, and to choose a blog title early in the alphabet so it shows up near the top of alphabetical blogrolls. I think I’ve succeeded well with the last two suggestions at least. I definitely didn’t want a newsy blog, or a tech tips blog, or anything like that. Too many people doing that well already, and way too many people doing it badly. I’ve tried to write the blog as I might an opinion column, not too heavy, but not too light. Also, I deliberately avoided some of the tips that supposedly go to make popular bloggers. I don’t link out much to other bloggers; I don’t write about others to provoke them to write about me; though I’m not averse to the occasional scrap, I don’t feel like the blog is very polemical; my goal has never been to get a high Technorati ranking; and despite my title, I wasn’t trying to become the voice of academic librarianship, or anything like that.

Instead, I’ve tried to present the opinions of one lone librarian rather than represent the opinions of others, and I’ve tried to present those opinions in as thoughtful a manner as possible. Though I write these as essays, that is, as short exploratory pieces that may not be fully formed, still I’ve tried to avoid writing poorly reasoned pieces I’m not willing to defend.

I’ve also tried to present a somewhat non-librarian point of view. This isn’t terribly difficult for me, because I’m sort of a librarian by default. If the market for Shakespeare scholars had been strong a dozen years ago, I would probably be happily teaching Shakespeare at some liberal arts college now. Instead, I stumbled into library school because it seemed like a better choice of career than adjunct rhetoric instructor. My motto at the time was “easy to get in, easy to get through, easy to get a job,” and I was right. Even now, I’d probably be just as happy teaching rhetoric full time, but I make a lot more money and have a lot more job security as a librarian, plus I don’t have to grade so many essays. So while I like being a librarian, and I think I’m pretty good at it, I don’t always think of myself as a librarian. I think of myself as a person who loves and uses academic libraries, who identifies with the scholarly and humanistic mission of liberal education, who enjoys teaching and reading, and who also happens to work as a librarian. I see the library not as an end in itself but as one part of a much larger educational mission, and I’ve tried to comment on library issues from that perspective.

In one way I’ve definitely failed. This was supposed to be a purely professional blog. Though I’ve written a couple of personal pieces for fun, like my wedding anniversary post, the goal was to focus on library issues, not on my personal life and certainly not on my library. I’ve done pretty well about not blogging the Princeton University Library. Occasionally I’ve mentioned or praised colleagues, but in general I see no benefit to blogging about my workplace, as opposed to my work. My library has good points and bad points like every library, and I could certainly tell some entertaining stories, but this blog isn’t the place for that. (See me at an ALA happy hour if you want to hear the good stuff!) However, what I didn’t count on, because I’d never done this much sustained public writing, was just how much of my personality would be on display on the blog, and I’m not sure how happy I am about that. In general, I’m a private and even reserved person with those who don’t know me. After looking back at the 100 or so posts I’ve written over the past year, it becomes clear what I think about, what my prejudices and assumptions are, what I care immensely about, and what I dismiss as folly in academic librarianship. Even that has exposed me more than I thought it would. On the other hand, I’ve grown more comfortable putting part of myself into the posts. Still, I won’t be sharing vacation photos or music recommendations with you, so you can rest easy.

To make a long post short (too late!), I thank all of you who have been reading the blog, and I very much appreciate those of you who send kind words. No more navel-gazing for now. Tomorrow I’m hoping to write about a couple of ALA programs I went to, including the one where we were told in earnest tones that the Internet is a very important part of modern communication. Stay tuned!

GoogleWorldCat

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I thought the results of this study were interesting, though not surprising. Librarians at SUNY Buffalo compared search results from their catalog and Google Books and found that Google Books generated many more results and that “many of the Google Books results were relevant and useful.” It would probably be the case when comparing Google Books with my library’s catalog, even though we have many more books in our library than Google has yet digitized.

I would be curious to see the result of a similar comparison between Google Books and WorldCat, though. Often when looking for books on a subject, I skip my own OPAC and head for WorldCat anyway because I always come up with more results. It’s not just a matter of WorldCat having more records, though obviously it does. WorldCat also seems to have more complete records as well. Almost inevitably when I do a keyword search, WorldCat generates ten times as many records as the Princeton catalog, including records for books Princeton owns but that don’t show up with the same keyword search in our OPAC. Usually, that’s because the WorldCat record has tables of contents or additional subject headings not in our records. Though I use Google Books occasionally, I haven’t noticed it being any better than WorldCat, but that may change.

Imagine the possibilities if Google succeeds in what appears to be its endeavor to take over the information world. What kind of book searching capability would we have if Google and OCLC merged? GoogleWorldCat would probably put all the OPAC vendors out of business.

On Liberal Education

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Assaults on the liberal arts always seem to come from people who don’t understand what liberal education is about.

Being a product and proponent of liberal education, I suppose I should take issue with this article: Liberal Arts Colleges: A Dying Breed? (found via the KUAL). The gist of the story is that liberal arts colleges are dying out because they’re not practical enough. It’s odd to focus just on liberal arts colleges, since most universities and colleges have undergraduates who study the liberal arts. Perhaps all those vocational students attending the universities subsidize the liberal arts students.

However, I couldn’t take issue because I found some of the comments so irrelevant to the issue of liberal education, though perhaps relative to the financial security of some liberal arts colleges. Consider this quote:

If liberal arts colleges are a dying breed, not everyone is in mourning. Career-based education is simply more practical, some experts believe.

“First, we all need to realize that the ‘liberal arts curriculum’ has never been proven through empirical research to be superior to the ‘career college education,’ or even ‘self-teaching,’ for that matter,” says Marc Scheer, Ph.D., author of a soon-to-be-released book about higher education, No Sucker Left Behind: Avoiding the Great College Rip-Off.

I’m not going to make a case for the practicality of a liberal education, though one can certainly be made. Instead, I find the entire statement bizarre, and hope it was taken out of context. What exactly would an empirical study be like that could “prove” a liberal arts curriculum is superior or inferior to vocational education, which is really what “career college education” is, though for some reason the person doesn’t want to use the term. Even vocational “education” is a euphemism for what many would prefer to call vocational training.

The only way the statement makes sense is if we add a purpose. Superior for what purpose? If the purpose is to leave four years of college and immediately be able to do some practical work, then perhaps vocational training is superior to liberal education. I’m assuming that is the context of the person’s thought, because otherwise the remark doesn’t mean much. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of a college “education” is to prepare one to immediately perform some practical job somewhere.

But of course that’s obvious, because the purpose of liberal education and the liberal arts has rarely been to prepare people to perform specific jobs. The liberal arts are liberal because the purpose is to create free human beings knowledgeable about their world, capable of critical thought and sophisticated communication, and poised to develop their human potentials. I know this makes me sound like the unrepentant humanist I am, but it doesn’t take any empirical research to show that a good liberal arts curriculum would go further toward this aim than any vocational training.

The critic of liberal education thinks the problem is the snobby professors.

“Liberal arts colleges need to add some more practical content to their coursework and encourage their instructors to do so. As it stands now, many faculty members have basic contempt for career training. They view it as beneath them. They don’t think career training is part of their job. However, it’s clear that both employers and students want more career training at all colleges. So colleges need to change their long-held contempt for this kind of training, and actively attempt to integrate practical material into their coursework.”

However, I think even here the statement is problematic because of the faulty assumptions. I’m not sure any faculty members at liberal arts colleges have any “basic contempt” for vocational training, but that’s just not what they do. I would bet that a lot of professors believe that a lot of the students that are in college now probably shouldn’t be there because they have no interest in developing their intellects and themselves as free human beings and only want to get a job. If it really is “clear that both employers and students want more career training at all colleges,” then the solution may be for liberal arts colleges to die off, though I hope that doesn’t happen. However, if that really is the case, then it shows only that employers and students don’t really want educated people, not that colleges should start offering more vocational training.

How exactly would one add “integrate practical material” into a seminar on literature, philosophy, or history? What does “practical” mean in this instance? All liberal arts classes aim to develop the critical and communication skills of students as well as understand a topic better. Are these not “practical” skills? The answer is probably in the forthcoming book, but I think I’ll be too busy reading impractical philosophy and literature this summer to have time.

Even here, though, I can’t agree based on my own work experience that vocational training is superior to a liberal arts curriculum. In my experience, those without a liberal education are perfectly capable of performing specific tasks, but often less capable of thinking about the broader context of their work as well as less capable of understanding other perspectives. This certainly isn’t always the case, because intelligence and capacity can make up for a lot, and I’ve certainly known products of liberal arts colleges who were intellectually and conceptually substandard. Still, a liberal education teaches one to examine issues past the surface, to place ideas and actions in context, and to appreciate the diversity of people and motives. These things can come without it, and may not always stem from it, but those goals are parts of the purpose of a liberal education, and are typically not part of any vocational training.

Another odd perspective is that Scheer seems to think only in financial terms. For example:

“Yes, students at liberal arts colleges may recoup their investment over their lifetime,” Scheer says. “But based on my research and the research of others, they probably won’t ‘recoup’ their investment until the age of 33. In addition, students get the same financial payoff from college, whether they spend a lot on their degrees or not.”

However, from the perspective of the liberally educated, this statement means next to nothing. How does one “recoup” an investment in reading a poem or a book or philosophy, or for that matter studying pure mathematics. The “investment” in liberal education cannot be measured in financial terms, but only the liberally educated can appreciate that. Attackers of liberal education think colleges should train employees; defenders think colleges should educate human beings. The financial interest for the individual person may dictate vocational training, but the human interest of the person as well as the social and political interest of the whole require a good dose of the liberal arts.

Learning Lessons

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Last week I wrote about an experience with a bad teacher, but I wasn’t ruminating on that just to complain. Moments like that make me reflect on my own teaching, and my own teaching makes me examine other people’s teaching more carefully than I did before.

Part of the problem of that particular professor was probably that he hadn’t been able to experiment on undergraduates while working on his PhD in library science. In other graduate programs, the graduate students gain teaching experience by making the freshmen suffer, or at least that’s how it was at UIUC. It pains me to think what the students had to put up with during my first year teaching. I was shy and quiet, and supposedly when I did speak I spoke too quickly and paced too much (at least according to my evaluations). Though I never got the abysmal evaluations some of my peers did (the best one I heard about: “This is the worst TA I’ve ever had, and he needs to wash his hair!”), they were mediocre at best that first year. The students were somewhat forgiving because they didn’t know any better. However, had those first students been 30 years old with several years of teaching experience, they would have known how pathetic I was.

Bad experiences in the audience have affected my library instruction as well, which is probably where many of us give most of our public performances. When I was boring the students that first year, there was always one day of the semester where I knew they would be even more bored–the library instruction day. We teachers were all supposed to set up an appointment with the library, and we’d spend a class period with a library graduate assistant teaching the students about the catalog and maybe a database. It’s hard to remember what was happening in the early 90s. Perhaps we got a demo of Infotrac or something. What I do remember is this library GA lecturing us for close to an hour on the catalog in a complete monotone while we just sat and stared. The only good points were that I didn’t have to teach that day and that the lights were turned off, thus making it easier to sleep. After two semesters of complaints about how boring and useless these sessions were (and they all seemed to be by the same person), I stopped taking the students and started doing the introductions myself. We were both learning to teach, and were using those poor freshmen as our guinea pigs.

Sometimes we complain that professors don’t want to let us into the classrooms to provide library instruction, but how much of that reluctance is based on bad experiences just like the one I had? We want to give the students help, but is our library instruction uniformly good? When I started teaching research sessions as a librarian, I always had in mind that poor GA from years past and how mind-numbing those sessions had been. The real benefit of those awful sessions was that I always knew at least some things to avoid.

Over the years I’ve had some great professors, and have often modeled parts of my teaching persona directly on them. As a teacher, I’ve benefited from bad teachers as well. I know not to hand out grades willy-nilly without being able to justify them, but I also learned to be honest with students when I don’t know something and not try to bluff my way out of a bad situation. Part of my anger with the bad professor was that he was trying to bluff me. He didn’t know what he was talking about, but seemed to treat me as some lesser being who could be lied to with no consequences. With him I think it was the product of nervousness and not arrogance, but still I didn’t like it. He was anxious and trying to hide his embarrassment instead of just being honest.

Other teachers do this in the classroom. I’ve seen a couple of different teachers go out of their way to mask their ignorance. (Though my favorite story was second hand, about an English professor in a seminar who spent fifteen minutes of discussion time avoiding admitting he knew nothing about Condorcet, as if this is some sort of crime.) Librarians probably do this in instruction sessions as well, but I haven’t seen as many of those. Yet I’ve never had a student who seemed to respect me less if I answered a direct question with, “I don’t know, but I’ll get back to you with an answer.”

This post isn’t so much about cataloging lessons learned from bad experiences as a student or audience member, but more about how I’ve tried to learn from other people’s mistakes and avoid them myself. My teaching might not be great, but I know at least some things to avoid so that it doesn’t become execrable, and for that I have even the execrable teachers in my past to thank. Thank you, execrable teachers from my past.

Rating the Professors

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I’ve been thinking about a couple of my odder experiences in library school lately, possibly because I recently read my teaching evaluations from last fall and am also working on an article on the ethics of unobtrusive reference evaluation (which has required actual research, and has thus seriously cut into my blogging time). A chain of associations carried me back to an interaction I once had with a library school professor that I can only call an obtrusive teacher evaluation.

In one of those intro classes that anyone who could read could teach but apparently not teach well, we were required to write a one-page “essay.” I can’t remember if it was supposed to have any purpose, but probably not. Regardless, I cranked it out and handed it in. It came back with a grade of B. Okay, I could live with that, though it surprised me a bit, since I’m a competent writer. I was also surprised he’d turned one of my commas into a semicolon, thus creating a fragment, and turned my one semicolon into a comma, thus creating a run-on sentence. But everyone has their bad days when basic grammar is just too much trouble. However, I then found out in discussion with other students that everyone got a B. That is, every person in a very large class got a B. Nobody got an A. Nobody got a C, D, or F (are library schools allowed to fail anyone?). This seemed peculiar.

Still, I wasn’t going to complain. What’s one B more or less? But a couple of days later I was passing by the professor’s office and decided to ask him about it. Not so much about my grade, as about the odd fact that everyone got the exact same grade. When I asked him, he said they just all seemed like B papers to him. By that time I’d been teaching and grading essays in rhetoric and literature for a few years, and I found his answer very unsatisfactory. In a slightly disingenuous manner I asked him if he could articulate his grading standards for me, so that I might be able to meet them in the future. That is, what made a paper an A or a B or a C, what did he look at when grading, etc. At that point he started giving me the runaround, and it was clear that he had no idea. He didn’t know what made a good or bad essay, other than his gut “feeling.” Lots of people think grading essays is very subjective, but that’s not true. It’s fairly easy to articulate standards, and with common standards there’s often a broad consensus on proper grades. “Feeling” like a paper is one grade or another without being able to justify a grade is a mark of a bad teacher, and also means the teacher cannot guide those students who honestly do want to know what standards they need to meet to succeed.

We discussed this and some other teaching issues. The class in general was badly run and his teaching ethos was deteriorating quickly for me. Finally, his avoidance of straight answers led me to ask the most aggressive question I’ve ever asked one of my teachers. Angry at his vague evasiveness, I asked, “Have you ever taught before?” I felt a little bad, because he was a nice guy, well meaning and seemed kind, but I resent unqualified people being my instructors. After a bit more stammering, he admitted that he hadn’t taught before. So he hadn’t taught, hadn’t graded, and frankly couldn’t lead a discussion. And yet he had the power over my grade. I went to library school for free, and in this class I was getting what I paid for, which I suppose made up for the bargains I received in a few classes with good instructors.

I left in a huff, feeling angry both at having what I considered an unqualified professor and also at myself for letting it get to me. The denouement? From then on, every assignment I turned in got an A+, and there was still no explanation why. Probably he just didn’t want to have any more exchanges with that unreasonable, angry student.

Weeding Questions

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I’ve been commanded to weed the Bs in our main reference room. The good thing is it gives me something to do at the reference desk. I’m finding it relatively easy to move out some things–e.g., the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, which I just found is digitized anyway, or the Reallexikon fur Antike und Christentum–that I’m pretty sure are rarely, if ever, consulted here, and are quite old for reference books. Our library has subject study rooms with reference materials, and anyone likely to consult the Reallexikon fur Antike und Christentum will also probably have a key to the religion study room.

My main questions are about all those specialized reference books, things like the Encyclopedia of Hell or the Historical Dictionary of Taoism. In a reference room tight on space, how specialized can a reference book be before it can safely go out to the circulating stacks. If the multi-volume Encyclopedia of Buddhism is on the shelf, can I let the Popular Dictionary of Buddhism fly and be free? Do I need ready access to four different encyclopedias of Hinduism? Or multi-volume encyclopedias of philosophy in four different languages? And if all the big sets and the main encyclopedias are available, why bother with the single volume specialized works?

Should I keep reference works that I’m almost positive no one is going to consult just because I like to have them there, even though I don’t consult them, either. Some old sets just seem like they belong, even if they’re quite dated. The Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics comes to mind. That could easily live elsewhere, but it just feels right on the shelf to me. My feelings on the matter, may, as usual, have to be sacrificed.

Oh well, no time to ponder further. I’ve been asked if I can get this done before ALA. I should have asked whether she meant Annual or next Midwinter.

Collecting Hard Drives?

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Libraries often acquire the papers of famous writers, and these sometimes have drafts of stories, poems, or novels, so that interested scholars can see the process of writerly creation. Are those days dying? Most writers write on computers, I assume, and plenty probably don’t even print out drafts as they go along. Maybe they save them as separate drafts, but unless they’re thinking specifically of scholarly posterity everything might just be one Word file. Maybe one could examine the writing process by hitting Control-Z a million times.

Are there libraries or archives out there that are trying to acquire not just authors’ papers, but perhaps their hard drives as well? Instead of boxes upon boxes of paper, the entire creative life of a typical writer could probably be stored on a flash drive. Even without public digitization, such drives would be useful to study some writers. It’s just something I’ve been wondering about lately, but don’t know of any examples.