Author Archives: Wayne Bivens-Tatum

Are Libraries Doomed?

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Are libraries doomed to extinction? I get the feeling from some articles and discussions on some blogs that a lot of people seem to think so. I won’t point to any particular discussions, but I do sometimes get the impression that some librarians think libraries have to change radically or die, that somehow contemporary libraries are so outdated that they will soon go the way of the buggy whip if they don’t adapt completely and immediately. If we don’t immediately adopt this gadget or re-engineer everything for the different styles of every cohort of students, then we’re all failures. As I said, I get this from reading blogs and articles, because nobody I know ever discusses the issue, at least not with me. If libraries are sinking rapidly, then my colleagues are models of grace under pressure. But is there any basis for that belief, if in fact anyone believes it?

Often the discussion is of technological change. It seems to me that libraries do adapt even to technological change, albeit slowly at times. I’d be willing to bet (not much, because I’m only a librarian) that librarians on average have been ahead of the public on average with lots of technological change. OCLC began 40 years ago. OPACs have been around for 20 years. Libraries were making information available online before most people even knew what online was. Popular IM programs appeared in the late 1990s, and within 3-5 years many libraries were setting up chat services. (That might seem slow, but I suspect it was decades from the invention of the telephone to the advent of telephone reference.)* Before I started library school, I wasn’t paying much attention to any online developments. To say that librarians fight change is to ignore the many real technological changes that libraries have been adopting for decades. Libraries are slow to adapt, possibly, but so are most non-commercial organizations.

If libraries do die, I’m not sure what will replace them. Infotopia, I suppose. Will there ever be a world where all information is digitized, freely available, and easily findable? This to me would be Infotopia, and I’d be happy for it, even if it meant the extinction of libraries. Does anyone see a trend toward this? Because I don’t. I see a world with increasingly more restrictive copyright laws and the commercialization and corporate control of information. Sure there’s a lot of information on the Internet and some activities, such as ready reference, might be dying. But plenty of information still isn’t freely available, and it’s not clear that it ever will be, even if the fight over open access is won by the good guys. A lot of the talk about social software and the ease of generating content means that a lot more information is available, but not necessarily information anyone wants. Anyone can publish a blog or set up a wiki, but at the moment these are of limited scholarly value compared to books and journals. And how many freely available data sets are out there?

Even if all information is ever freely available, which I doubt will ever happen, there’s still the problem of finding it. Our library has a huge amount of electronic information that is technically freely available to our users, but that doesn’t mean they can find everything. Much effort goes into the never-ending task of trying to select this information, purchase it, organize it, catalog it, promote it, and make it findable for both librarians and everyone else. Will these tasks just go away in the future? It seems unlikely.

From my limited perspective, it seems that the information universe grows vastly more complicated with every new digitization project or publishing venture, not to mention the good to be found on blogs and websites. Libraries try to make sense of this chaos. Even if they ultimately fail to control the information universe (which is inevitable), they still control enough of it to make it more useful for scholars that it would otherwise be. There’s also the personal element. A big part of my job could just be labeled Problem Solver. Librarians solve problems for their users, and not all problems can be solved with the click of a button. (One time I very much wanted to tell a problematic graduate student, “I solve problems, and right now the problem is you,” but I don’t think librarians sounding like Dirty Harry is a good thing.) Librarians communicate and interact with people in ways that can’t be replicated by machine. Will these problems go away in Infotopia? Will no one need to talk to someone in the library?

It could be, however, that the death-of-the-library discussion is more concerned with public libraries. If public libraries go extinct, it’ll be worse for us all, but if that dark, unlikely day ever comes I’ll be too concerned with making sure I don’t go extinct to worry about it.

*For an overview of phone reference and its relation to chat reference, see the following article by Kathleen Kern: “Have(n’t) We Been Here Before? Lessons from Telephone Reference.” The Reference Librarian no. 85 (2004) p. 1-17.

Rethinking My Own Reference

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My official title is “General & Humanities Reference Librarian,” but I don’t use it much. Partly it’s because a goodly portion of my job is collection development, but that’s not the only reason. It’s a good title as these things go, and nothing to be ashamed of, but when I think “reference librarian,” one thing comes first to mind. Reference librarians sit at desks in rooms full of reference books and wait for questions. Sure, they do more, but they still do this. Whether this is a good thing depends upon your library, and I can’t say how much your library might be like mine. But as long as that’s part of being a reference librarian, then “reference librarian” seems outdated for a lot of librarians.

Sitting at Desks

Reference librarians sit at desks in rooms full of reference books and wait for questions. Librarians have been arguing about the desk for years, but the reference desk still seems to figure prominently in libraries. I don’t know of any offhand that have gotten rid of theirs, and only a few places practicing the Brandeis model, though you probably know of more. On my last reference shift, I cleared a printer jam and refilled a stapler. The closest thing to a reference question I got was a visiting scholar asking me to look up an old communist newspaper in the catalog (which he’d already done, and which he knew we didn’t have). I then listened politely while he loudly told me how amazed and stunned he was that we didn’t have this on microfilm. No, perhaps the closest thing to a reference question was his follow-up question: WHY don’t you have this on microfilm? That’s one that with a little research and speculation I could probably answer. However, because of my knowledge of the reference interview, I know that’s not really the question he wanted answered. Is that an atypical desk shift? For some librarians it doesn’t matter. We sit and sit and sit and sit, and that’s what makes a reference librarian.

In Rooms Full of Reference Books

Reference librarians sit at desks in rooms full of reference books and wait for questions. Reference books seem to show no sign of diminishing in volume. There are specialized thises and concise thats on just about every topic under the sun. Some of these reference books are quite good, or at least I assume they are, because I couldn’t tell you the last time I consulted a reference book other than a foreign language dictionary. The only reference book anyone has asked me for recently is the Liddell-Scott lexicon. I do sometimes consult reference works, but typically only the large online sets. Smaller works are often most useful for answering quick factual questions, but I don’t get any quick factual questions, because everyone asking those just goes to Google or the Wikipedia. The background information and clarification of terms I need usually comes from just a handful of large online reference titles, and sometimes just from the Wikipedia for those subjects that traditional reference sources don’t handle well. (Whether contemporary British Islamic rap music is haram is a recent question that springs to mind. Is there a reference work with an entry on Fun-Da-Mental?) Some of my colleagues consult the books more often. One of my colleagues has been working in our reference room since I was three, and she’ll turn to the books and find great information. The question isn’t the usefulness of reference books, but whether the same information isn’t found more easily elsewhere. After a few years, not turning to reference books first became rarely turning to reference books at all.

I’m looking through my old reference textbook for all the kinds of books I don’t go to anymore. Directories? Never in print, almost never online. Almanacs? Typically only for historical questions. Atlases? Occasionally. Bibliographies? Years ago, I know librarians would write subject bibliographies. They might still write them, but I wouldn’t know because I never go to them. I used to try, but they were always dated. I’d find the perfect bibliography on some obscure subject only to realize it was written in 1974. So much of the information available only in reference books is now online for free or fee, and yet the reference books keep coming, and we keep buying them. Maybe that’s a good thing, but it seems like a fruitless attempt to control information by methods designed for a time when there was a lot less information to control.

Waiting for Questions

Reference librarians sit at desks in rooms full of reference books and wait for questions. I like to answer reference questions. I just rarely get any, at the desk. I’d be happy to get rid of the desk and hire a student to fill the staplers and search titles in the catalog. Sitting at a reference desk waiting patiently for the questions that never come–the questions using even a small portion of my research expertise–is a waste of my time.

What about the students? Don’t they need help? Yes, they do. I meet with a lot of students and answer a lot of emails from students, but they don’t come to the desk. They come to me because of my own outreach or instruction efforts, and that’s the case with much of the reference and research help done here. Students in the philosophy and religion departments know who I am and that they can come visit me because I go meet them all every year. The freshman writing seminars all have librarians assigned to them whose purpose is to help the students when they need help. So in any given semester, dozens of students of all years know they can contact me if they need library help, so they contact me directly. I much prefer this to the desk, because it gives them more personal and directed help. It also helps explain why they students don’t come to the desk as often. I help them get started or go farther on research essays; I help them find books and articles and other relevant material; I help them formulate research questions and get relevant background information. And I can help the advanced students more in arranged consultations in my office because I can prepare and learn something about the topics in advance. This is better for both of us than me trying to do it on the fly.

There are plenty of other options besides the desk, or even besides the outreach that I prefer. We also have a research consultation service. We have email reference. Oh, and there’s a page listing subject specialists people can contact directly. And all the databases-by-subject pages and research guides have names and contact information on them. And we have chat reference for those needing a quick answer. With all of the outreach, instruction, and easily available consultation, the reference desk fades in importance. I’d like to see it fade more, because I think there are better, more personal, and more efficient ways to provide research help.

But what about the small handful of people who wander up to the desk occasionally and expect a professional librarian to be sitting there ready to answer any complex question that they may have? What about that? I’ve heard that objection before, though not couched in quite those terms. The question is usually put more mildly, but that is the assumption behind the question. What about when someone has an immediate information need that can only be solved by a librarian? First, what are the chances that any given librarian sitting at a desk can solve every complex information problem? Low, I’d bet. Second, there are still librarians in the building. We can find one. Third, let’s check the stats. How often does this occur? Is there no cost-to-benefit ratio for the librarian’s time? If there are lots of reference questions, then staff the desk with reference librarians. But otherwise . . . .

I realize reference is different everywhere. Perhaps in your library the reference questions come fast and thick at the desk. At my library the questions often get filtered out before they make it to the desk. On the other hand, the reference desk is a great place to blog.

Rhetoric for Librarians

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Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. According to Aristotle, it’s finding the best available means of persuasion for any given case. According to Chaim Perelman, the “aim of argumentation is not to deduce consequences from given premises; it is rather to elicit or increase the adherence of the members of an audience to theses that are presented for their consent” (The Realm of Rhetoric, 9). I note this so everyone knows that when I discuss rhetoric, I don’t mean it in the sloppy popular sense of “empty verbiage.”

Librarians have much to learn from the art of rhetoric. Essentially, rhetoric is about communication, and with any communication there are at least three elements: the speaker, the message, and the audience. Most people, including librarians, are aware of themselves as speakers and often aware of their message, but too many times do not consider the audience, and the effect on the audience is crucially important. From a rhetorical point of view, for example, it doesn’t matter how right or logical you are, if you alienate your audience and fail to persuade them of your points, then you have a failed argument. Fret and bemoan your fate all you like, but the problem is you.

Today I want to consider three rhetorical situations many librarians often find themselves in and show the importance of audience: staff meetings, presentations, and library instruction.

If you are in a staff meeting discussing some controversial topic and want to persuade your opponents, the last thing you want to do is alienate them. Unfortunately, that’s easy to do. You can call their ideas stupid, or better yet say something like, “only an idiot would believe that.” You can aggressively state your views as if they were the only ones that mattered. You can interrupt your opponents with frequent hostile criticism. You can state from the beginning that you have no intention of changing your mind. All these behaviors alienate others. Some, like aggression and interruption, alienate because they threaten. Others, such as saying there’s no way you’ll change your mind, inform your listeners that this is not in fact a discussion or debate, because where there is no willingness to consider the opponent’s point of view, there is no dialog, and thus no point of continuing a discussion. By acting like this, you’ve notified them that you don’t give a damn about them or their ideas. Don’t act surprised when they reciprocate.

Try to remember presentations you have seen, either at conferences, on campus, in your library, wherever. Were the speakers aware of their audience and their fellow speakers? Was it an hour long talk that took an hour and a half? Did the speaker seem aware of appropriate time limits or the effect on the audience? Remembering a few simple rules can make your own presentations better, but the most basic rule of all is, think about other people. Do as you would be done by. If you’re on a panel and someone else hogs all the speaking time leaving you with five minutes to get in fifteen minutes’ worth of information and thus forcing you to cut and adapt extemporaneously, how would you feel? I can tell you, you’d most likely be angry, and understandably so.

When you perform library instruction (and I use the word perform deliberately, for it is a performance), do you stand like a lump in front of the class for an hour or more monotonously giving special attention to every nuance of your OPAC or selected database but no attention to your audience? Do you even care if the students are listening to you? If students are checking their email or Facebook or are nodding off, do you blame these kids today and their short attention spans, or yourself for being so boring? You should blame yourself. You’re boring. It doesn’t matter if every single bit of information you convey could potentially be useful to your students. If you don’t communicate with the audience, then the message fails, and the problem is most likely you.

I could offer some practical tips. Listen to your colleagues and acknowledge that you understand their points, even if you don’t agree with them. Don’t alienate people with your arrogance. Pay attention to time limits. Don’t read from your PowerPoint slides with your back to the audience. Don’t speak monotonously or too quickly. During library instruction, consider having a student run that presentation computer while you walk around engaging students and speaking. (They’ll be less like to tune you out or Facebook that way.)

Practical tips are easy to find online, though, and there are plenty of them. However, the primary rule is always to consider your audience. Pay attention to what they’re doing. When you speak, do your colleagues roll their eyes or purse their lips while glaring at you? Then maybe you should tone down your aggression and be more sensitive to their views. During a presentation, do audience members check their watches frequently? Think about time, and how bored you’d be if someone prattled on too long. Do you notice jerky heads as people nod off to sleep but pop back awake as their chins hit their chest? Then speed it up, change the tone of your voice, change topic, do something to engage them. Do students come out of your instruction sessions thinking librarians are bores who want to teach everyone to be librarians? Can they still not research very well because they tuned you out as soon as it was obvious you had no intention of engaging them? Then change your approach, engage students more, don’t try to teach them everything.

Teaching and speaking are performances, and performances are designed for audiences. The best performances should teach and delight. This certainly doesn’t mean we all have to act like clowns or stand-up comics, though I’m never afraid to say something silly or make a joke if I think it will keep the audience paying attention. A bit of wit can carry an audience through a lot of dull business. But we have to keep in mind that public speaking is a performance, and the person up their speaking isn’t us. It’s a persona called Librarian, and part of that persona is an awareness of others.

Considering other people is always difficult. Having an awareness of how our speaking affects those around us, the audience at a big talk or the students at a small BI session, takes practice. Moreover, it takes deliberate consciousness of what we are saying and how we say it, which a lot of people can’t seem to master. Some people are nervous enough just standing up in front of audiences and speaking. I know how it can be. I’ve been teaching and speaking to groups for 15 years, and I’m pretty good at both, but every time I feel sick in the minutes before beginning. Some people mistakenly believe that it’s what they say that’s important, not how the audience hears what they say. Those people don’t usually feel the same way when they’re part of an audience, though.

The most important thing is to communicate our point, to persuade our colleagues, to win the adherence of the audience to our ideas, to get our students to understand a bit about library research and about what librarians can do for them. By alienating or boring your audience, your message is lost, and you have only yourself to blame.

Teaching Dialog

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Stephanie Willen Brown’s post at ACRLog on teaching Dialog in a reference course both puzzled and intrigued me.

First, the puzzlement. My first thought was, how quaint. That must be the first thought of a lot of librarians, or the apologetic post would not have been necessary. However, that was also my first thought when I encountered Dialog for the first and last time in my own basic reference class at the University of Illinois ten years ago. It was a summer reference class, and I don’t remember much about it, except being taught Dialog. In 1998 this seemed quaint, and that was before Google tricked the world into thinking search was always simple. The odd queries, the per search payment, the pre-search calculations of what might be effective–all these already seemed old fashioned to me, and I wasn’t even a librarian yet. After ten years of reference work, it seems even more old fashioned. In general, I’m not opposed to old fashioned, and in fact am quite comfortable with it, but nevertheless that’s how my Dialog training struck me.

Then, the intrigue. But wait, maybe the problem is me. I’ll be the first to admit that with things I don’t quite understand. Is it that I’m an academic librarian and don’t do any fee-based searching, so I can just be as sloppy as I like? Or did those couple of weeks on Dialog teach me important lessons on searching databases? I’m not the best reference librarian I’ve ever worked with, but I’m pretty good at searching databases effectively. Did the exposure to Dialog help? Reflecting on this, I’d still have to say, no. It may teach “how databases are structured beneath the hood,” but I got that lesson without doing much Dialog searching.

To digress slightly, though, I’m not sure how much I got out of that reference course. My best reference class was a humanities reference class, and the best training was a year and a half at the information desk in the UIUC Main Library and the intensive apprenticeship we all underwent. Maybe if we’d worked with Dialog there, I’d have fonder memories of it. I learned much of what I know about reference there, so if I can’t search Dialog effectively I have only Beth Woodard to blame.

Brown also linked to a 2001 essay by Carol Tenopir on all the lessons Dialog can easily teach LIS students, lessons on indexing, boolean operators, proximity operators, controlled vocabulary, etc. All important, undoubtedly. But is Dialog the best way to teach such things? Possibly, but it still seems quaint to me. Then again, maybe that’s why nobody asks me to teach reference.

Blaming Dewey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Depression and 24/7

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

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

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

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

Copyright and the Code

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Librarian as Filter, Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Benefits of Attendance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Librarian as Filter, Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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