Author Archives: Wayne Bivens-Tatum

The Librarian as Filter, Part 1

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Libguides Redux

Posted on by

A couple of months ago I posted briefly on Libguides just as my library began a trial subscription. I played around a little bit with it then, and liked what I saw. A couple of weeks ago our trial became a permanent subscription, so I’ve been spending some time creating, or really recreating, my philosophy and religion subject guides, which are now live, though definitely in beta. What I have so far is something of a data dump from my previous guides, which I’d been waiting for Libguides to update. Here are the new beta philosophy and religion research guides if you’re interested.

After spending a few days working on these guides, I can say that I like Libguides even more than I did before. It’s just all so easy. First, the data dump itself was easy. For the initial conversion I wanted to drop things in as quickly as possible, and I just copied text and links from various library web pages and when I pasted them in they looked more or less Libguides uniform. I did this for the database pages especially. Eventually I want to use the different linking features that let you rank the sites and have rollover popups with the descriptions. This is also easy to do, but it must be done link by link.

It’s also very easy to copy content from one Libguide to another, so that when I created a generic portion for the religion guide, I could create a box in the philosophy guide and just have it duplicate a box from my other guide. You can also do this for boxes of information from anyone else’s published guide in your Libguide system, and I used this feature to borrow some great content from my colleague Steve Adams, who I think has done some impressive work with his guides and just in general works hard at communicating with his clientèle. I mentioned that I wanted to use some of his stuff, and some of what I wanted to use he had taken from another colleague, John Hernandez. Libguides makes it very easy to share and borrow good content throughout your entire system. In addition, since we three all have our pictures on our profiles, Libguides lets the world know that many of the Princeton librarians aren’t exactly formal dressers.

Libguides also makes it easy to see, but not so easily import, content from other users of Libguides around the world. There’s a “community” tab that lets the users browse other libraries and take a look at their guides. Many of them are course specific guides or are still in even more beta than mine, but I found some good ideas this way for further revisions to my sites. Particularly relevant for me are the very nice philosophy and religion guides by Fred Rowland at Temple University. I’ll definitely be borrowing some ideas from those. (Though he’s just down the train line from me and seems to be my counterpart at Temple, I’ve never met Fred, but if you work at Temple feel free to give him my compliments. Or Fred, on the off chance you read this blog, I’ll just say “great job, and don’t be surprised if I steal your best ideas”.) I’ll be browsing other sites for ideas.

One thing you might have noticed if you clicked through on my guides, or those of Steve or Fred for that matter, is the easy way Libguides allows communication from library users. If you’ve actually visited this blog site recently, you will have seen the Meebo Me widget on the right. I put that in at the same time I put in the one on the Libguides profile. It’s very easy to drop in the Meebo code. It’s easy to set up IM contacts. You just drop in the info and Libguides does the rest. Also, all the boxes have a comments feature that allows users to send comments from any page.

The ease of getting usage statistics is another nice feature. Without bothering to put in separate tracking software, I can now find out if anyone at all is looking using the guides and which pages and features are the most used.

All the content on my sites needs an overhaul. Eventually I want to more to integrate blogs and other feeds into the site, and it looks very easy to do. I haven’t found anything yet that couldn’t be done by someone who knows how to point, click, copy, and paste, and has at least a very basic understanding of how wikis and rss feeds work.

The only thing I didn’t like was the picture portion of the profile. You can’t just make it go away as far as I could tell. You either need an image there or it has a blank white space that says “no photo available.” I’m not keen on having my picture online, but I don’t mind that much for this purpose, though I did consider putting up a picture of someone a lot more handsome just for fun. However, I can see where some people, such as people who might fear stalkers or who are uncomfortable with their looks for some reason, wouldn’t want to put their picture online. Not being able to eliminate that box makes it seem those people are just unfriendly or unwilling to help, whereas that might not be the case at all.

Other than that, my experience so far has been great. The ease of creation, duplication, copying, sharing, and communicating make this a great resource as far as I’m concerned.

Noblesse Oblige and Research Libraries

Posted on by

I’m all for mass digitization. The more information searchable the better, as far as I’m concerned. However, I suspect that if there ever is total digitization of print collections it will be decades and perhaps centuries in the future. More likely, I don’t think it will happen because of the sheer mass of print-only material already extant and increasing every year around the world.

This raises several issues. First, will it increasingly be the case that “everything is online”? We know that de jure this isn’t the case now, but de facto for many library users it is true, because whatever’s not online (or perhaps just very easily accessible) won’t be used. For the mass of information seekers, this doesn’t matter much, but for scholars at any level past novice it does matter. Will students become ever more reluctant to seek out the difficult data or the remote but appropriate archive? And if they do, in how many generations will we have an Idiocracy of scholarship?

Perhaps more important is the question of what obligation do librarians have to collect the human record past the popular mass of material? It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that electronic collections are mass collections. For most colleges and universities, this is a good thing. The rise of JSTOR and other large aggregate journal packages means that plenty of academic libraries that never had much of a collection can now have easy access to the benefits of this mass digitization. Even at Princeton I find that these journal collections sometimes provide easy access to journals in areas that were never collected, but that can be useful for some kinds of interdisciplinary research here. But still, the electronic collections for sale are still mass collections driven by the rule that if everyone doesn’t want it, nobody gets it. “Everyone” might be just a handful of the richest institutions, but the rule still stands. Commercial products are created to make money. Only so much ephemeral material can be included in a commercially viable package. Other digitization projects change this somewhat, but it’s not clear how Google Books or the Million Books Project or independent digitization projects will affect this. Even a combination of the largest of these projects contains only a portion of available material.

But what about those materials that aren’t digitized and never will be? Increasingly they will become niche items, even more so than they are now. Who will collect these? Who will make sure they’re available to the scholars of the future? In most libraries, there’s the assumption that the library can rely on some other library to collect the stuff that won’t be used often or may be of peripheral interest at most. In larger research libraries, especially at the richer private universities and the largest state universities, the librarians often have a different view, though. Some library has to be the library of last resort, and some librarians at the larger libraries understandably think, if we don’t collect this, who will? All libraries promote services and access to materials through borrowing, but ultimately some libraries actually have to buy those materials, and richer libraries have a obligation to collect the human record in a way that smaller and lesser funded libraries don’t, and a corollary obligation to make those materials known and available.

This obligation is sometimes difficult to justify, though oddly enough it fits in with the Princeton motto, “in the service of the nation and in the service of all nations.” (I’m not implying by this Princeton is in any unique position, since it’s not even in the top ten libraries by size in the country.) Though whatever means, individual or consortial, large research libraries have an obligation to collect everything they can. Consortial collection arrangements are tricky things, but ultimately they be necessary to avoid never having material that now seems ephemeral but may one day be important for scholarly research, if it’s available.

The phrase noblesse oblige seems elitist (and we know how some people bristle at any thing that seems “elite”), but in some respects it’s the only appropriate phrase. The largest and richest libraries should have a sense of noblesse oblige, a sense that ultimately they have a greater obligation to collect the human record. For a lot of people, including a lot of librarians, this mission doesn’t seem very important compared to other goals, but for historical and scholarly purposes it’s crucial. This ignores issues of digital divides, of rich and poor, of access to even minimal information, but it’s just as, if not more important for the future of human knowledge and understanding.

Knol Short for Knowledge

Posted on by

I’m sure everyone by now has heard that Google is testing a new service called Knol, short for knowledge. I spent all day Friday buying books and creating a Libguide, and all weekend reading a book instead of grading essays (which has been my usual weekend activity recently), so it wasn’t until this evening during my chat ref shift that I read my news feeds. The IHT wrote about Knol today. Here’s a Knol screenshot from Google. Since I’m periodically fortunate enough to get people to pay me to talk about Google, I figured I’d better at least have an opinion on this.

The IHT headline says, “Google tests content service that may one day rival Wikipedia.” Maybe. Knol is designed to let people create information pages just like on Wikipedia, except the author’s names are included and only the authors can edit the pages. Supposedly, Google hopes to attract experts to write pages, including competing pages on the same topic, that will become authoritative enough to make them first stops for information, much like Wikipedia is now for a lot of people. According to one of the Google people, they want to make it easy for experts to publish knowledge online. Google thinks some experts don’t share what they know with the world because it’s too difficult to do that now.

That’s the line that stumps me. If someone really has information to share that would be beneficial to the rest of us, as opposed to most of the information they share online, how hard is it these days to publish? It’s not like one has to be a web expert to publish online formation. One certainly doesn’t need to know any html or other markup languages. There are plenty of free wiki services about that let anyone put information online as easily as using Wikipedia, without the anonymity and porousness of Wikipedia. The proliferation of blogs shows allows all sorts of experts and non-experts alike to immediate publish whatever they please. Google already has a user-friendly Page Creator and will host web pages for free. So for some reason I don’t think that’s really why Google is doing this.

The only difference is that Knol would gather these pages together into a website that would be more likely to be found on a web search than somebody’s blog or personal website, especially, I would imagine, if one was searching the web with Google. If enough people contributed, then there would be enough links that Knol pages would start showing up along with Wikipedia pages as some of the first pages on many searches. That’s great for ad revenue for Google, but how great is it for the rest of us? Besides a revenue engine, what is Google trying to create?

It seems to be some hybrid of Britannica and Wikipedia. Like Britannica, they are trying to attract experts, but it doesn’t sound like they’re verifying anyone’s expertise, nor searching out experts the way Britannica or the excellent and free Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does. So it can’t have the authoritative expertise that librarians traditionally like in reference works and that makes them hate and fear the Wikipedia so much.

Unlike Wikipedia, if another expert sees something false or misleading or biased, there’s no way to edit the information to try to make it better. Many see this as a flaw to the Wikipedia, but this is actually its great strength, and you can tell from the discussion pages and page histories that plenty of people take Wikipedia’s attempt at objectivity seriously. If launched, Knol will have some participatory elements, mainly a comments and a ranking feature. Presumably even with competing articles, the better ones will rise to the top through repeated high rankings, and the comments might lead to revisions or at least let people know about possible caveats, if people take the time to both read the articles and read the following discussions, which could be considerably longer than the articles.

It sounds like an interesting experiment, trying to create the traditionally authoritative encyclopedia in a freely available format. One benefit could be to bring together dispersed knowledge on topics that we might not have now, though that’s the main benefit I see of the Wikipedia and of the Internet generally. That the authors are known will make this “authoritative” in a sense, but the authority won’t be of the Britannica kind. Instead it’ll be more of the Internet Movie Database or Amazon reviews kind. “Rank: 7.5 based on 9,734 votes.” “5 out of 7 people found this Knol helpful.”

Most people don’t seem to mind the Wikipedia, but many librarians do. Will this Knol satisfy the reference source authoritarian streak so many librarians seem to have? Since there are authors and only they can edit, will this be the free online reference source that pleases the librarians? Or since there’s no central authority to guarantee the authority of the authors will it still be inadequate by librarian standards? Unless the “experts” are the sorts of scholarly experts we expect now, will Knol be any more authoritative than the Wikipedia or someone’s blog?

It seems like Knol will operate in some limbo between the sort of authoritative reference sources that librarians and scholars like and the often excellent but literally un-authoritative Wikipedia.

Most people don’t care about authority anyway, not in the way librarians do. If it’s popular enough, it’ll have authority. I think it would be great if Knol was successful and created a compelling and free encyclopedia of some kind. Maybe there’ll be good articles. Regardless of the quality of the articles, though, I think we can be sure they’ll show up highly in Google searches, and for many people that’s all the authority they need.

The Appeal of Cultural Decline

Posted on by

I don’t know why, but I seem to be a sucker for books on cultural decadence. Give me a provocative book showing that the Western or American Civilization has been going to hell in a handcart since the fall of Rome or the Reformation or WWII or the beginning of the Reagan era, and I’ll probably at least skim it. Tell me that we’re amusing ourselves to death, or dumbing down our educational system, or that we live in a vulgar, violent mass culture “rooted in the cash nexus of corporate capitalism” and I’ll probably be entertained for a while.

That last quote is from the Choice review of America’s Meltdown: the Lowest-Common-Denominator Culture by John Boghosian Arden. I know nothing about this book other than the table of contents and what I read on the website, so I’m not recommending it. I picked up for holiday reading while browsing the stacks this afternoon in the American culture section. I’m sure I’ll spend an enjoyable couple of hours finding out in more detail about the melting down of America.

Why the trope of cultural decline is so appealing, I don’t know, but I do know I’m not alone in this. This theme has been appearing in Western literature and literature that has influenced the West since there was such literature. By Homer’s day, men were not what they had been in the heroic age. Then Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Talk about cultural decline! Certainly some of these concerns have been realistic, no matter what one thinks of the particular cultures. Roman culture did in fact decline. Christendom did in fact disintegrate. The culture of the Old South of Gone with the Wind has in fact gone with the wind, whatever there was of it that really existed outside the nostalgic minds of unreconstructed Southerners.

Nostalgia is often an underlying motivator behind tales of decline. Back in the old days things were always simpler or cleaner or purer or calmer or safer. Locally, there’s no doubt this is true. Trenton, New Jersey, where I live, was most likely safer 60 years ago than it is now. On the other hand, the air and water in many factory cities in Britain are probably cleaner than they were 150 years ago. Protecting the environment requires eternal vigilance, but on the other hand it’s been a long time since the Cuyahoga River caught fire. Nostalgia is so untrustworthy, though. Nostalgics always seem to remember only what was good in the past and only what is bad in the present. Some parts of America might have been better to live in in the 1950s, say, as long as you were white and middle class. (That’s still true today, I suppose). But the conservative nostalgia for the fifties ignores the conflicts of the time as well as the potential for not being in the advantaged classes.

I certainly have my own nostalgic eras about which I like to read. There have been times when I felt more comfortable with 16th or 18th century literature than I do with that of my own time. Like the nostalgic, I can easily see what might have been appealing in any given celebrated era, the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, the supposed cultural and religious unity of the Middle Ages, the excitement of creating a native poetry in 16th century England. But I wouldn’t want to live in any other era. Issues of hygiene, health care, and indoor plumbing aside, it’s easy to forget that until very recently the lives of most people even in the best off countries were hard, short, and poverty stricken, just like the lives of billions of people today. Nostalgics always seem to think they would have been aristocrats with all the advantages of modern medicine and technology, just like those who claim to be reincarnated all seem to be reincarnations of famous people of the past. Everyone is a reincarnated Napoleon. No one seems to be a reincarnation of the guy who emptied Napoleon’s chamberpot.

Librarians in general don’t seem to be very nostalgic, at least about libraries. How many of us long to return to the innocent days of print indexes or card catalogs? How many of us would want to eliminate the Internet because of the information revolution it has created? I would no more want to get rid of the Internet than the flushing toilet, though I’m glad I don’t have to face that choice. And the day we manage to remove the card catalog from the choicest space in Firestone Library will be a day of celebration, for me if not for the likes of Nicholson Baker.

It would seem that one can enjoying reading about cultural decline without being particularly nostalgic, then. I couldn’t point to any era that I would rather live in. The past doesn’t seem like it was better, but the future still looks like it might be worse. The contradictions of the unnostalgic view of decadence. I suspect for many critics of decadence the feeling of decline is simply the juxtaposition between cultural ideals–Arnold’s “sweetness and light,” culture as the best that has been thought or said that leads us to perfection–and the mass culture around us, forgetting that, as far as I can tell, the mass culture of every era has similarly fallen short of any ideal. Our culture may be declining or disintegrating as the doomsayers chant, or it may be that the decadent interpretation of culture merely shows the health of our ideals. If we ever stop producing criticisms of the declining culture around us, that would probably signify the death of our cultural ideals, thus the irony that when we stop critiquing our declining culture it will be because the culture has declined so much that we are no longer capable of critique.

So because I want to encourage and celebrate the health of our cultural ideals, I’ll spend some time this holiday season reading about how our society is hopelessly corrupt and decadent, basking in the warm glow of knowing that someone, somewhere, still thinks there’s something worth saving.

The Ethos of Librarians

Posted on by

The ALA has a Code of Ethics currently undergoing revision. (I have a tiny part in that process as the RUSA representative to the ALA Committee on Professional Ethics.) It’s important to have a code of ethics in case of disputes, just as it’s important to have collection development policies or other documents to refer to when a serious question arises. However, I don’t think librarians rely much on codes like this in their usual practice, but instead in times of stress or struggle. This isn’t a bad thing, because when it comes to the ethical culture of libraries, we shouldn’t be promoting a culture of rules, but a culture of character.

The Code of Ethics, indeed all codes of ethics, can be considered deontological documents. Here’s my very quick summary of ethical theories from an article I wrote on the virtue of reference last year: “To develop my argument I must give some background on “virtue ethics” and in particular on Aristotle’s Nicomachaen Ethics. Ethical philosophers have paid an increasing amount of attention to Aristotle’s ethics over the past few decades as “virtue ethics” has become prominent along with deontological and consequentialist ethics. While deontological ethics judges ethical actions by a particular standard of rightness or wrongness it is our duty to obey (e.g., the Ten Commandments or Kant’s categorical imperative) and consequentialist ethics judges ethical actions by their consequences (e.g., utilitarianism’s “greatest happiness for the greatest number”), virtue ethics follows Aristotle in focusing not on rules of conduct but on the character of the moral actor. What sort of person acts ethically? How do we raise and educate such people? What virtues (or excellences) does a person require to be an ethical human being? Those are some of the sorts of questions virtue ethicists might ask.”

Such codes are useful, as I said, in times of dispute, but in general we want to create a culture of character where librarians don’t think about the code or any code and don’t run to the rulebook to make any decisions. In culture of character, we perform virtuous actions because we have developed virtues or excellences through long habit, rather than through explicit rule following. We don’t keep lists of rules about proper professional or ethical behavior; we just behave appropriately, or we do not. For those who don’t behave appropriately, referring to codes is unlikely to reform their behavior because codes won’t overcome their lack of virtues and their habitual misbehavior. In library schools and libraries, we should strive to create this culture of character.

For the most part we already do this, and I’m not trying to present a radically new understanding of the ethical culture of libraries so much as trying to understand for myself what already goes on. Consider some practical examples. In a reference transaction, there are proper and improper behaviors. Failing to make eye contact while addressing a library patron would be inappropriate, as would lying to them. Some inappropriate behaviors are worse than others, obviously. In developing collections, we get a feel for what’s appropriate for the collection and what’s not. Perhaps there are people who frequently consult their collection development plans to see what they should be buying, but I’m not one of them.

As an example of habit and action being poorly formed, I’ll offer my own experience in chess, which I play at a mediocre level. I have a list of rules I keep in my head and that I run through before making moves, especially in the middle game. Fight for the center. Develop the pieces. Move the pawns only once. A knight on the rim is dim. Make a threatening move if you can. Leave nothing en prise. Etc. All the rules you might find in an introductory chess book. The problem is that I still rely on explicit rules because I’ve never developed adequate chess virtues, where moves just feel right. I read once of Boris Spassky analyzing a game and making a move. When asked, he couldn’t explain why it was a good move. It just had the feel of a good move, so he made it. Most grandmasters are probably like that. We all know, or at least should know, that feeling in our jobs. We do things because they just seem the right thing to do, even if we can’t articulate why.

Instead of a rule following culture, it would be better for libraries to develop an ethos where responsible action based on good habits was the norm, where people were allowed and encouraged and educated to act in these ways. The question is how to do this. Is the character of librarians something that can be taught, or do people who already have certain ethical habits just better at the job? Can one train a reference librarian to be considerate and thoughtful of the research needs of a library patron? Or is it that those people who aren’t already like that just won’t make good reference librarians? I don’t know. I can only speculate that certain cultures don’t encourage good habits. Rule following cultures. Rigid cultures. Micro-managing, permission-driven cultures, where people are afraid to act or are constantly being told what to do at every level. These are certainly not work cultures conducive to properly virtuous librarians.

Regardless, while I’m glad the ALA Code of Ethics exists as a normative set of rules to be depend upon if necessary, or that certain types of behavioral guidelines for librarians exist for various purposes, I can only think that if we have to go back to the rulebook, then we’ve already failed somehow.

Not My Worst Nightmare

Posted on by

The Library Link of the Day is a Slate article entitled “A Librarian’s Worst Nightmare,” about Yahoo Answers. I made fun of some of these answer services several years ago in the C&RL News, and the Yahoo Answers seems just as problematic as the services were then. The only reason to pay attention to these sites is to see what we might learn, not to be afraid of them.

The article concluded: “For a passive reader, this has the same value as listening to two random guys at a bar talk about what to do if you are driving during a tornado. You may not learn very much by eavesdropping–and you certainly shouldn’t trust what you hear if disaster strikes–but that isn’t really the purpose. The lesson Yahoo! Answers teaches is that, for millions of people on the Web, it’s less important to get a good answer than to get someone to listen to your question in the first place.”

Besides the easy availability of these services, from which librarians should certainly learn, the lesson on listening might also be taken to heart. We have the reference interview, which is all about listening and responding thoughtfully, but sometimes it’s easy to curtail such an interview, especially in online reference when the context seems to demand speed over thoroughness. I recently had my own embarrassing reminder of this in a chat ref session. But listening and seeming interested and available for help are reasons behind what some reference studies have found–that with the right service, people will come back to reference librarians even if they occasionally get the wrong answers. Ideally, we like to get the answers right, but even if we can’t help much, we can always listen.

You may have seen the TV show “Little Britain.” There’s a character in that show who always sits in front of a computer, and people come up and ask if they can get something (bank loans or whatever). The character always stares blankly, types for a few moments, then inevitably responds in a bland voice, “Computer says ‘No.'” As librarians, we don’t want to look like that.

The Chapel of Reason

Posted on by

Firestone Library (the main library at Princeton designed to be a “laboratory for the humanities and social sciences”) is supposed to be renovated over the next ten years. There have been plans floating around for years, but the money and will seem to be behind it this time. As part of the process, the architects are conducting focus groups with various constituencies. Yesterday the head of the company gave a brief report on some of the student focus groups. According to her, the student groups were very interested in having Firestone be a quiet place for study and reflection. She was surprised at this, considering the usual trend around the country to make things more noisy and communal in a lot of libraries. I wasn’t surprised at all, because I see the students working here every day and I know how they use the library. In the main reference room, a student once shushed me while I was conducting a reference interview, and I don’t speak very loudly.

The rest of the world, including our lovely campus, is getting noisier and more distracting. Between the cell phones and the televisions and the constant music blaring from just about every public space, especially coffeehouses, it’s difficult to find a place to study and reflect, to live the vita contempliva that the students are here to live, if only for a brief time. It’s no wonder so many people retreat into their iPods to escape the cacophony. The library has always been a haven from the restless energy of the rest of the world, a place to avoid the temptations of friends, to escape the crowded dorm or common room, to sit quietly reading, thinking, and writing. This doesn’t mean not having common areas or computer banks or whatever, but it does mean having a lot of space that is quiet and conducive to contemplation, ideally with wireless access. I’ve written before about the library as place, and how it shouldn’t try to compete with the entertainment centers on campus. Students need quiet places for study, places close to computers and books, but not noisy and distracting. The natural place for that is the library.

In his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig calls the university the “Church of Reason.” If extend that metaphor, the library might be considered the Chapel of Reason. The Church of Reason booms while the Rites of Reason are celebrated, but the chapel can be quieter. Catholic churches sometimes have smaller chapels attached to them for specific purposes, sometimes for contemplative activities such as adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. The Chapel of Reason is such a place. The rest of the Church of Reason has the communal activities, celebrating the common rights, worshiping together the goddess Reason. But there needs to be a Chapel of Reason as well, a still place to turn away from the hectic outer world and try to develop and understand the equally vibrant inner world of the mind, to commune solemnly and alone with the “sacred” texts, to find our company in the works of others and not in their person, and to do the long hard work of thinking, reading, and reflecting necessary to turn anyone into a scholar.

ALA Transparency and Inclusion

Posted on by

Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about the workings of the ALA, prompted by several things. First, I’m running for a couple of offices withing RUSA, RSS Vice-Chair and CODES Member at Large. (RSS stands for Reference Services Section, btw, and has nothing to do with feeds.) I know it seems strange to run for two offices in two different sections of RUSA, but I was nominated to run, and I have a developing history of losing elections, so I figured what the heck. And if I win both, then I’ll have a very busy year and might be able to do some useful stuff. Also, I’m chairing a nominating committee in RUSA-RSS. Lastly, I ran across this post on the ACRLog by a new librarian considering going to Midwinter, but unsure if he should, partly, as I read it, because of the opacity of ALA. He’s not sure what he’ll be allowed to do.

All of these led me to think of what I like and don’t like about the ALA. To be fair, I can’t say much about the ALA proper, since most of my work since taking this job has been with RUSA. I’m a rep to an ALA committee, but I haven’t enjoyed it as much as most of my RUSA work. I’ve liked most of the work I’ve done in RUSA. Regardless, one thing has always bothered me about the entire ALA enterprise–its unnecessary opacity to new librarians and those on the outside.

The blogger at ACRLog was understandably confused by what’s going on, because the ALA doesn’t seem to do a great job of welcoming new librarians, despite the New Members Round Table. By my first ALA conference (ALA Annual in Chicago in 2000), I was already on two ACRL section committees, but I had some professional incentive to dive in quickly, so I just wrote some section chairs and asked them to put me on something. Also, going to library school at Illinois and working as a GA in the central reference department there gave me a good initiation into ALA activities, since many librarians there are so active. That assistantship always seems to be a feeder to academic research libraries and ALA participation.

But even with this, I remember wondering what else to do. I went to my meetings, wandered the exhibits, saw a couple of presentations, and tried to avoid running into my then supervisor, but I still didn’t feel very engaged. It was only when I switched jobs and also switched most of my activity to RUSA that the sense of engagement increased, because I was suddenly thrown into the middle of a big project revising some reference guidelines. Because I knew something about writing and editing and reference, I felt very qualified to participate in the discussions and influence the changes taking place, participation which everyone welcomed. Without this sense of empowerment, it might have taken me longer to realize that at the committee level, many divisions and sections can be very welcoming and even democratic. There’s nothing for new librarians to fear.

It always seems to the neophyte that the old hands within ALA know all the answers and have seen it all before, but I don’t think that’s the case, and I’ve never encountered any librarians in ALA that ever tried to dismiss my opinions because I hadn’t been around for years. Maybe they did it in private, but never to my face. I’ve always felt very welcomed when I showed up, even if I just sat in silence not knowing what to say. As I’ve gained a bit more experience and chaired some committees, I’ve certainly always been welcoming to any guests. As far as I can tell, there’s almost nothing that should be secret at ALA, and hardly anyone treats newcomers badly. But how are the newcomers to know?

That’s one problem of opacity. The other is in the electoral process. I’ve been on two nominating committees so far, and am about to chair a third, and I’ve always been surprised by the insular nature of the process. Last time I was on a nominating committee, I advocated casting our net beyond the usual suspects, and actively trying to recruit people who might not think about running. I wanted to let people know that we weren’t just looking for people who had served their time on a dozen committees, people who might be capable and energetic, but not necessarily in the inner circle.

It would be helpful if all the unnecessarily mysterious inner workings of ALA conferences could be made plainer to everyone, but especially new librarians. I know that a lot of what goes on seems like meaningless busywork, and perhaps a lot of it is, but there are some interesting and useful things to do, even, perhaps especially, in some of the lower levels. It would also be good if there was a greater sense of inclusiveness, though I’m not sure how this can be done when 10-20,000 people show up for conferences. This is where the divisions and especially the sections can be most effective, I think. They can provide smaller, less daunting, more inclusive environments new librarians and others, if only those librarians knew about them.

I guess I’m trying to develop a platform of sorts if I win anything. This probably sounds silly considering I’m running for an office, but I’m not much of a politician. There’s not much campaigning for these offices, and they sometimes become merely popularity or name recognition contests, but if there was campaigning I’m not sure I’d be good at coming up with a program and persuading everyone I was the right person for the job. I’m too shy, and it’s too easy for me to see the other people running, most of whom I’ve worked with, and say, “oh, they’d probably be pretty good, too.”

But if I have any issues with RUSA, and by extension with the ALA, increased transparency and a sense of inclusion would be high on the list. I’m not sure of the best ways to make people feel welcome, or even to make them feel that any organization activity is at all worthwhile for them, but the whole thing should at least be as welcoming and inclusive as it can be.

Sickbed Reading

Posted on by

Indulge me a bit if you will. I’ve been sick for the past week or more, and spent several days doing little more than sleeping, reading, and watching the Addams Family. I’ve had to go without solid food, caffeine, or alcohol, thus without, some might say, necessary accouterments of civilized life. To make up for that, I read some short stories and reflected upon popular versus scholarly editions.

Lately I’ve been reading Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft, and M.R. James. Most of my fiction reading is confined to vacation time and now sick time, when I want my brain to relax. That may sound like I think fiction is a lesser read, but it’s probably my reaction to several years spent studying English literature. I read more widely for fun than I did in college, but I don’t take literature as seriously as an academic subject. It took a long time before I could read fiction or poetry without trying to find something clever to say about it or applying some critical theory to it.

It’s also rare that I find anything I like. My favorite literary genre is the essay, and there’s something I find very satisfying about a good writer exploring a small subject in a thoughtful way. For popular fiction, I prefer P.G. Wodehouse and the British detective novelists of the thirties and forties (Nicholas Blake, Naigo Marsh, etc), but usually I return to the same writers again and again, especially Henry James. However, when I noticed recently that the Library of America had given its imprimatur to Dick and Lovecraft, I thought I would give them a try. To save my valuable reading time, I usually wait for authors to die and for a cultural movement to establish them before I bother reading them, and the Library of America does a great job of this usually. (I’m still hoping they publish an edition of Robert Benchley and pay me to edit it.) I’ve been an M.R. James fan for years, and I recently bought the Penguin 2-volume complete short stories of M.R. James, annotated by S.T. Joshi. They arrived just in time for sickbed reading.

With Dick, I actually began with Selected Stories, the Pantheon volume edited by Jeremy Lethem. As the the stories themselves, I thought they were okay. I don’t know how they rank as science fiction, since they might be the only science fiction I’ve ever read, but they were entertaining and thoughtful for the most part. The non-literary thing that struck me most about the stories is how bad Dick was at predicting the future. He has characters hop from their interplan rocket ships and sit down to typewriters. The future world of some stories has a victorious Soviet Union and lifelike robots, but no personal computers. This gave me another sort of pleasure, as I compared what by now is the present of some of these stories to the world around us. The unvirtual materiality of Dick’s vision interested me in a way I wouldn’t have expected. But this led to scholarly disappointment. I then wanted to know when these stories were published, preferably with dates of composition as well. Obviously these were Cold War-era stories, but the “about the texts” page was woefully inadequate, and there were no notes. I was viewing Dick as a writer who needed to be historicized, and Lethem let me down.

Contrast the LoA Lovecraft edition. All the LoA books are beautifully bound and printed, joys to hold and read, and all the ones I have are annotated more or less heavily. (The Henry James set is almost complete with 14 volumes so far. The five volumes of short stories make great Christmas gifts.) The Lovecraft edition was no exception, though the editor, Peter Straub, relied upon both the texts and the notes that S.T. Joshi had provided in three other editions of Lovecraft’s work that he edited. It makes one wonder why Joshi wasn’t asked to edit this. Straub may be more famous, but would that be relevant for someone buying the LoA edition? I wonder. Still, it had the chronology of the author, notes on the texts, and annotations I’ve come to expect. I didn’t rely on them much, expect to figure out how “Cthulhu” might be pronounced, but some were interesting to read, and they let me date the story accordingly. This isn’t as important for Lovecraft, since he seemed to be deliberately archaic, anyway. If you read both Dick and Lovecraft in tandem, you would probably be struck by the dichotomy of styles. Dick’s prose is spare and lean and he’s often trying to understand what it is to be human. Lovecraft never met an adverb he didn’t like, or a foreigner he did. He certainly can evoke a mood of horror, but I’ve never read anyone so incapable of empathy. Still, the edition was perfect.

Then comes the James edition annotated by Joshi. This would seem to be my sort of edition, heavily annotated, semi-scholarly introductions with bibliography, appendices with juvenilia. But what I found instead was that the scholarly apparatus crushed the delicate stories. The introductions strained to be scholarly, but had little to work with. The annotations provided historical tidbits on people and places real and fictitious, but none of this helped illuminate the stories for me at all. Joshi seems to have made a career of editing and writing about the better popular fiction of the twentieth century, and I’m not maligning his work. It just seemed so unnecessary in this case. Unlike Dick, where I wanted to place the stories in their historical context because of the odd future expectations, and unlike Lovecraft, where some explanation of broader themes that apparently evolve in scattered works help illuminate slightly the stories, the James scholarly apparatus added nothing. The stories stood by themselves. Except for a couple of added stories, my old Wordsworth Classics M.R. James Collected Ghost Stories (available used for $1.99) was just as good.

Maybe I’m being uncharitable to both Lethem and Joshi, though. I probably shouldn’t have been evaluating scholarly editions on an empty stomach.