Librarians and Traditional Cultural Expressions

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[Update: a revised version of this post was published as “Librarians and Traditional Cultural Expressions.” Journal of Religious & Theological Information 9 (2010), 47-54.

In the context of a project I’m working on about libraries and Enlightenment, I was asked what I thought about “Librarianship and Traditional Cultural Expressions: Nurturing Understanding and Respect.” (The latest draft I could find is here.) I’d read a little about it, but my only impression was that most of it seemed fine while some of it seemed to conflict with academic and library values. The basic thesis of the document is that librarians should be sensitive to the desires of indigenous communities regarding library collections of “traditional cultural expressions,” i.e. objects, documents, etc.  created by members of those communities.

In a general sense, this seems a reasonable and ethical position, and upon further analysis, I realized I supported many of the document’s claims, but not at all for the reasons given by the document. A very small portion of the TCE document does indeed conflict with core values of libraries and universities, but a lot of the rationale does. It took me a while to parse out which parts I thought were in conflict with library values and which not, and also to figure out why I supported most of the document despite the flawed rationale. I’m still working through the labor of the notion, as Hegel might say, and the result is below. I think this is supposed to be debated by ALA Council. My opinion is that the Council should probably support a revised version of the document, but that the document as it stands is unsatisfactory. 
Philosophical Objections
Librarians can object to bits and pieces of this document, and those are the bits and pieces which should be revised. First, we can simply analyze the document to see if the statements all make sense.  The portion on “Meaning and Social Context” is the most problematic from this perspective, and the least necessary for the document as a whole. In that section it is claimed, for example, that “Traditional cultural expressions do not exist separately from the living cultures they reflect. Tradition-bearers are the living repositories of cultural heritage.” Quite frankly, the first statement isn’t true. If it was true, then there would be no need for such a document as this, because libraries wouldn’t own any of these “expressions.” They obviously do exist separately from their cultures, as all expressions do. And yet, this statement is somehow supposed to justify the claims being made. The position of the writers is that there aren’t objects in libraries, but “expressions,” and an expression must have an expresser. But “expressions” as such don’t exist as “expressions.” They exist as objects or texts or whatever. Calling them “expressions” is presenting an interpretation of those objects preferred by the writers of the document, but difficult to support if you don’t share their assumptions.
It’s definitely true that these objects or texts are meaningful in their cultural context, and such a context is the best way to try to determine their original meaning. Objects and texts out of their appropriate context can be interpreted many ways, though, and their meanings can never be restricted or contained by any one context. If there is any value to poststructuralist arguments about texts and interpretation–and I think this is the most valuable part of the poststructuralist enterprise–I’m not even sure how anyone would begin to prove that an “expression” doesn’t exist beyond its expresser. 
The second sentence, that tradition-bearers are the living repositories of cultural heritage, makes much more sense, but it’s not clear how it’s related to the first sentence, or how it is related to an argument about how librarians should treat objects and texts in their care. If the tradition-bearers are indeed the repositories of their cultural heritage, then once again there’s no need to worry about other repositories like libraries. If “expressions” can’t exist without the expressers, and if the expressers are the repositories, then what could there possibly be in libraries? What are those things librarians collect?  Statements such as this do little to support the main claims of the document. The rest of the statements in that section might be true, but aren’t necessarily relevant to an argument about what librarians should do with TCEs.
Librarian Objections
The document claims that “the special sensitivity and care TCEs require are supported by the fundamental tenets of librarianship. These principles serve as a reminder of core library values and our mission to safeguard and provide access to materials without sacrificing individual liberty or respect for cultural differences.” I don’t think this is correct, and it’s certainly not proven in the document, which references librarians’ core values but doesn’t analyze the claims regarding TCEs according to those values. Here’s the list of ALA “core values”:
  • Access
  • Confidentiality/Privacy
  • Democracy
  • Diversity
  • Education and Lifelong Learning
  • Intellectual Freedom
  • Preservation
  • The Public Good
  • Professionalism
  • Service
  • Social Responsibility
We could take them in turn. Access requires that librarians strive to make collections as freely available as possible to all comers. In addition to the commendable statement that libraries should help indigenous peoples preserve and even digitize their cultural “expressions,” we also have this statement: “Libraries should be sensitive to the possibility that digitizing traditional cultural expressions could expose the content to a world beyond the boundaries of the library, making it potentially more vulnerable to misuse.” I’ll address “misuse” in a moment, but even without that this is an odd statement. First of all, there’s not just the possibility that digitization would expose the content beyond the bounds of the library; that’s the entire purpose of digitization. We want to make our collections more accessible. That’s why we digitize. 
Confidentiality/Privacy could conflict with this statement: “Libraries strive to provide the necessary social and cultural context in connection with use of indigenous materials in their collections, and make every effort to ensure appropriate use of materials.” It might not conflict, but it all depends on what one means by ensuring appropriate use. To make sure someone isn’t going to destroy or deface an object? Definitely.  But what if the object or text is used as a source for a research project? Should librarians inquire about how the object will be used, and not allow access to those who aren’t “using” the objects “appropriately”? This relates to the worry over “misuse.” What would it mean to “misuse” a digital collection? To interpret it badly? To use it to mock or criticize a culture? These are certainly possibilities, but they are “misuses” that must be allowed for educational and intellectual purposes. If someone interprets something wrongly, they should be refuted, not prevented. This is the essence of democratic debate and education. The language here isn’t very clear, and doesn’t explain what appropriate use might be. That alone should be reason enough to require revision.
Democracy would also possibly conflict with the claims that indigenous peoples somehow control the meanings of objects in libraries. Democratic values protect, but don’t privilege minority groups. It also conflicts with the claims about misu
se. Democracy requires open inquiry and debate, that requires access to information and the freedom to debate it. These are core library values that we disregard at our peril.
Diversity is a contested term, but would probably be one of the most relevant values to support the parts of the document worthy of support. Because libraries have diverse collections in a diverse society, it’s important to make the effort to understand that diversity and to be sensitive to the needs and desires of diverse communities. This would lend support to the more reasonable and defensible claims in the document, such as, “Librarians have a responsibility to develop an understanding appreciation of the traditions and cultures associated with materials held in their collections.” Absolutely, they do. 
The next two values–Education and Intellectual Freedom–are perhaps the most crucial to academic libraries, and the values that have the best claim to provide the foundations for libraries in the first place. If we consider these values absolute and universal, they undoubtedly trump some of the claims being made in the document about sacred knowledge or (potentially) restricted access. The modern research university is a product of the Enlightenment, for better or worse, and its values are that anything can be considered an object of investigation, and that in most circumstances the importance of  the production and dissemination of knowledge takes precedent over other concerns. We study and investigate peoples, texts, objects, nature, etc. because knowledge is both good for its own sake and useful for the progress of society. Together with other Enlightenment values such as democracy, freedom of speech and publication, and toleration of dissent in a marketplace of ideas, these provide the rationale for the research universities and their libraries.
Here also is where possible difficulties lie. Some parts of this document are utterly incompatible with such values. In the discussion, the other librarian posed the problem as possibly one of colonialist versus indigenous people’s values. This is the cultural relativist perspective. But the Enlightenment perspective would pose it as a problem of universal versus local values. Who’s correct here? Your position on this will probably determine your position on some of the more mystical portions of the document. 
The tempting position to defend is that the values of the indigenous peoples should take precedent because they were both the victims of aggression and the creators of the “expressions.” I’m tempted by this argument. However, one can be sensitive to the suffering of indigenous peoples without sacrificing universal values.
Think of what happens in other, more fraught contexts when universal Enlightenment values that underlie librarianship are considered merely the relative values of European colonialist oppressors. Do we consider it morally acceptable to stone homosexuals to death? To perform forced clitorectomies on women? To keep girls away from educational institutions and throw acid in the faces of little girls who dare go to school? To forcibly marry preteen girls to older men? These are all practices among some cultures. What should our position be on them? If all values are relative to particular cultures, and Enlightenment values of liberty, democracy, and racial and sexual equality are merely the local values of Western cultures, then we can’t criticize them. What librarians would be willing to stand up and defend such a position?
There are times when librarians must respond like General Sir Charles Napier in India. “”You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.” You say it is your custom to venerate certain objects. It is our custom to study them.
But if we can’t defend such practices, or at least refrain from criticizing them, it’s because we believe that values such as liberty and equality are necessary and universal human values, and that humans who don’t believe this are wrong, and in extreme cases evil. Isaiah Berlin makes the rather existential argument in “Two Concepts of Liberty” that values pluralism, the belief that there are many ultimate but irreconcilable human values, is what makes the liberty to choose absolutely essential to the human condition. Liberty, equality, security, order–they are all ultimate and necessary for humans to thrive. Because there are many such values, we have to choose among them, and because this choice is essential to the human condition, then it cannot be justly restricted.
For librarians, this supports the value of intellectual freedom. Intellectual freedom isn’t an ultimate value because we like the sound of it. It’s an ultimate value because educating ourselves about options and choosing among them are a necessary part of being human. It is a universal value. If we believe it is a universal value, then we believe in universal human values. And if we believe that, then we also believe that local values that conflict with universal values must lose in competition. We don’t restrict access to materials based on cultural or religious grounds for the same reason we don’t believe homosexuals should be stoned to death. We make objects and texts from other cultures available for study because we think educating ourselves about everything–including other cultures–is important. 
Let’s skip to social responsibility because the other values are less clearly relevant, and because I’ve gone on long enough. According to the “core values” statement, “The broad social responsibilities of the American Library Association are defined in terms of the contribution that librarianship can make in ameliorating or solving the critical problems of society; support for efforts to help inform and educate the people of the United States on these problems and to encourage them to examine the many views on and the facts regarding each problem; and the willingness of ALA to take a position on current critical issues with the relationship to libraries and library service set forth in the position statement.” [Note to ALA: that sentence could definitely use some editing.]
Supporting efforts to inform and educate Americans about critical problems would support all of the statements in the TCE document that want librarians to educate themselves and others about the “expressions” of indigenous peoples and those peoples themselves. But that education is concomitant with the fullest and freest access to the texts and objects the library possesses. We can do our best to present such objects in their most relevant context, but ultimately “misuse” or misinterpretation is beyond our control.To use the objects and texts to try to educate the public about what they really mean and about their relationship to indigenous cultures is part of the universal values of education and intellectual freedom as well as social responsibility. We do this because of our universal values, not because of our cultural relativism, which is the same reason we would digitize collections or make them available to library users.
This is also why we might return items. “Indigenous communities understand that some traditional cultural expressions are private or sacred knowledge and share this insight with libraries that may have these works in their collections. Libraries that hold private or sacred knowledge should consider returning those materials to the indigenous communities or
to institutions in which such restrictions are appropriate.” From the relativist perspective of the document, libraries would return sacred objects because they are sacred, but libraries don’t recognize the value of sanctity. An object or text is there to study. We may find it interesting and relevant that some groups consider this object or text sacred. The Bible is sacred to Christians and the Koran to Muslims. But from a more universal and academic perspective, that is but one fact about these texts. It doesn’t change the nature of the texts for the researcher; it only adds a relevant and important fact about their context. The same is true of objects from indigenous cultures. If I am from that culture, I might consider an object sacred. But I’m not. And even if I was, the values of education and intellectual freedom would still trump the supposed sanctity of objects. 
Reasons to Support a Revised Document
At this point you might think I disagree with the general idea of the TCE document, but I don’t. What I disagree with are its reasons for making the claims that it does. The values of one group in a society don’t trump the universal values of education and intellectual freedom, nor do they trump library values of access or privacy. But the most important desiderata of the document can be defended in terms relevant to library values, even though that isn’t done in the document as written. Education and intellectual freedom and access means we make objects and texts as available as possible, but it also means we do all we can to understand these objects and texts and the people that produced them, and also do our best to pass that understanding on to library users. 
Returning some collections is also completely justifiable, but from the universal perspective of justice, not the local perspective of sanctity. Justice trumps even education and intellectual freedom. The important question is, how did these collections come to exist? Were they stolen? Purchased? Traded for? Acquired as gifts? The prominent libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick based his philosophy of distributive justice on the principles of justice in acquisition and justice in transfer. In other words, if property was initially acquired justly (via the Lockean proviso that enough and as good is left for others), and transferred justly, then whoever owns it in the end is the just owner.  If we find at the end of the line that ownership isn’t just, the principle of rectification requires us to reallocate resources in a just manner if possible.
Casual libertarianism is usually the political philosophy of people who can only hold one idea in their heads at a time (freedom!), but  Nozick’s principles don’t support his libertarianism very well, because if we go back far enough, little was ever acquired justly. The history of acquisitions of property can probably be traced back to force or trickery or exploitation. He also supports a principle of restitution of property, if it can be shown that ownership didn’t follow the two principles of justice. Jeremy Waldron analyzes Nozick’s principles from this perspective in his essay “Superceding Historical Injustice.” Waldron argues that reparations for historical injustice have to consider changing circumstances and what would currently be just. For example, it wouldn’t be just to send all non-indigenous persons in the United States back to whatever part of the world they or their ancestors came from, even if that were possible, because that act in itself would cause tremendous amounts of suffering and injustice. However, this doesn’t preclude reparations for actions that were historically unjust, if such reparations don’t create injustice in the present. 
Something like this might support the return of some objects. Libraries shoudn’t return objects or documents because they are sacred, but because they were acquired unjustly or transferred unjustly. Their sacredness as such is irrelevant to library values. Returning items or negotiating with cultural communities about their use are forms of reparation, and could only be justified within a library framework as works of justice. This argument smuggles in a plethora of problems regarding the relationships between indigenous peoples and colonists, but it helps us make more sense of some of these statements from within the value structure of librarians, rather than from an external and incompatible set of values. If libraries were to return objects or restrict access, it’s not because the objects are sacred or because they’re “expressions” of a culture. That could be said of many objects and texts and carries no special weight for librarians. Instead, it would be because the objects or texts were acquired or transferred unjustly at some point, and their return itself wouldn’t cause injustice in the present. Figuring this out for every collection would be difficult, if not impossible, but only this type of reasoning could be compatible with core library values. One group’s claims about sacred knowledge tells us what they believe, but gives librarians little cause for action.
However, there are probably cases where even a return of unjustly acquired objects might do an injustice to education and knowledge. Let’s say for the sake of argument there’s an absolutely unique collection of TCEs in an archive somewhere. I don’t mean unique like yet another Civil War diary is unique, but unique in a strong sense. There’s nothing quite like this, and it’s the only public available collection of objects from a community available for study. And let’s assume that if the objects were returned to their cultural community, they would be restricted so that only members of that community could see them. Even if the provenance wasn’t completely pure, there’s an argument for keeping them in the library, because restricting access to that extent would be impossible to reconcile with the values of education, intellectual freedom, and the public good. It’s a thorny area, but once librarians betray their values we could be on a slippery slope to other problems.
The majority of of claims in the TCE document are fully compatible with library values, but not for the reasons given in the document itself. A revised document, with more rigorous reasoning about how the core values of librarianship support the claims about education and context, and a revision of the claims not supported by those core values, specifically those on restriction of access, would be an appropriate document for ALA support.

Libraries and Enlightened Views

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I’ve been reading Gabriel Naude’s Advice on Establishing a Library (1st ed. 1627, 2nd ed. 1644; trans. into English, 1661). Naude’s treatise is one of the earliest works on librarianship in any modern sense, and lays out a plan for systematically collecting a research library. Among other things, Naude was the librarian who developed Cardinal Mazarin’s personal library, the Bibliotheque Mazarine, and requested it be open to the  public, thus creating the first public library in France (at least as far as I can tell). Until relatively recently in human history, libraries were private, the property of royals or the rich, and served to collect but not disseminate knowledge, and Naude was among the first to develop the idea of a comprehensive, "universal library" open to the public and collecting works on almost every subject, libraries the historian Jonathan Israel has called "workshops of the early Enlightenment."

What’s especially interesting considering the time and place is Naude’s enlightened views on collection development. Consider some of his defenses for acquiring unpopular, heretical, or just plain wacky books:

On books with new ideas:

Neither may all those who have introduced or modified anything in the sciences be omitted, for it is merely flattering the bondage of man’s feeble wit if the scanty knowledge that we possess of these authors is buried under the disdain to which they are inescapably subject for having set themselves up against the ancients and having learnedly examined what others were used to accept as by tradition. . . .  I affirm that all these authors are requisite to a library . . . since it is certain that the knowledge of these books is so useful and valuable to him who can consider and draw profit from all that he sees that it provides him a thousand openings and new conceptions, which, being received by a mind that is open, inquiring, and free from prejudice, “bound to no master fealty to swear,” make him speak to the purpose on all subjects, deliver him from the admiration which is the true mark of our weakness, and enable him to discourse upon whatsoever presents itself with a great deal more judgment, foresight, and resolution than many persons of letters and merit are used to do. (23-24 in the U. of CA Press ed.)

On unusual books (Cabbala, divinations, etc.):

For, though most of them teach only hollow and unprofitable things, and though I hold them but as stumbling blocks to all who amuse themselves with them, nevertheless, to have something with which to please the weaker wits as well as the strong and at the least to satisfy those who desire to see them in order to refute them, one should collect the books on these subjects, although they out to be considered among the rest of the volumes in the library like serpents and vipers among other living creatures, like tares in good wheat, like thorns among the roses—and all this in imitation of the natural world, in which these unprofitable and dangerous things help to round out the masterwork and the scheme by which it was accomplished. (26)

On heretical works:

Since it is necessary, therefore, that our scholars should find these authors somewhere available in order to refute them; since M. de T. posed no objections to collecting them; since the early Fathers and Doctors had them at hand; since many of the clergy keep them in their libraries; since there are no scruples about having a Talmud or a Koran, which belch forth against Jesus Christ and our religion a thousand blasphemies infinitely more dangerous than those of the heretics; since God permits us to profit from our enemies. . .; since they an be prejudicial only to those who, lacking the basis of right conduct, suffer themselves to be carried away by the first puff of wind that blows, and seek out the shade of a beanstalk, and—to conclude in a word—since the intention which determines all our actions for good or ill is not vicious or hardened, I think it nether an absurdity nor a danger to have in a library . . . all the works of the most learned and famous heretics. . . .” (27-28)

How hard it must have been at that time to defend such a library, I thought upon first reading it. A Catholic librarian defending a comprehensive research library owned by a Cardinal during the Reformation. The defense isn’t that the books are right, or even good, but that they exist and are part of the world, and educated, enlightened, unprejudiced minds should read to learn and test their beliefs rather than just to confirm their prejudices. What a daring idea for its time.

Naude was enlightened for his age, and he’s still enlightened for ours. Consider stories like this, about a "conservative" blogger and dim thinker who toured the White House and discovered (gasp!) books on socialism in the library, and thus concluded Obama might be a socialist. Ooooh, those scary socialists! Imagine the poor education and lack of reasoning ability it would take to consider such a thing at all problematic. I’ll ignore the fact that anyone who thinks Obama is a socialist doesn’t know much about socialism. (No President who hands 30,000,000 new customers to big insurance companies is a socialist.) Instead, consider the mindset of someone who obviously believes that people read books to confirm their prejudices and not to learn. Owning or even reading a book on socialism is prima facie evidence that one is possibly or probably a socialist. I suppose reading Inside the Third Reich makes one a Nazi. For such people, education is nearly impossible, because of the unwillingness or inability to encounter ideas contrary to their own.

This sort of crude, ill informed belief isn’t confined to the right, by any means. One of my writing students–a good liberal whose very poor understanding of conservatism was based entirely  upon reading David Brooks’ columns in the New York Times–was in my office and once asked me about my political beliefs. Specifically, he wondered if I was a conservative because I have several books on conservatism on my shelves. Politics drives this sort of blindness more than other subjects, perhaps, because it would never have occurred to him to see all the books on Plato and ask if I were an ancient Greek philosopher. His reasoning became quite clear in the ensuing conversation. Only political conservatives would read books on conservatism, just as liberals read only liberals and his libertarian friend read only Milton Friedman. Thoughtless liberals may not be enemies of Enlightenment, but they’re not necessarily friends or examples. He probably has the Alvy Singer Defense ("I’m a bigot, but for the left, fortunately"). Or there was my socialist friend in library school who refused to read The Wealth of Nations because it’s "capitalist, isn’t it?"

The pattern is the same, and is much like the cloistered, stultifying mindset that Naude was battling in the early 17th century and that Enlightened libraries actively resist. Open inquiry and intellectual freedom are cornerstones of Enlightenment thought and foundational values for most libraries academic and public. The reason we collect books on all subjects isn’t because we are neutral and just want to represent all points of view. The false neutrality might make it easier to win local political battles, but it’s a value that’s incompatible with another value championed by librarians: intellectual freedom.

Intellectual freedom isn’t a neutral value, but instead one of the constellation of Enlightenment values that support research universities as well as academic and public libraries. In academic libraries, we don’t build extensive collections of the sort Naude envisioned because we’re neutral, or because we think every
idea should have equal representation and be considered equally useful or valid. We build those collections to support the habit of open inquiry and the increase of knowledge. If I buy books promoting totalitarianism, it’s not because I think totalitarianism is right or true, and in fact think it’s utterly imcompatable with the foundational values of libraries in a liberal democracy as well as being an assault on the nature of human beings. To the extent that public libraries serve as the "people’s university," their collections serve the same purpose, to allow at least the possibility of open inquiry even if few take advantage of it. It should clear from examining our country and culture that there are always plenty of people hostile to open inquiry, intellectual freedom, and reading to learn rather than reinforce their prejudices. When those people write books, we collect them so that open minds can be informed about them, not by them, and can test their beliefs against the arguments of those who wish to shut down argument.

Knowledge and Reference Effectiveness

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A couple of people were very quick to criticize this statement in my last post: “But it seems to me that for advanced research a librarian who knows nothing about the topic itself won’t be very useful.” The offending implication is that reference librarians who aren’t subject specialists or who don’t have advanced degrees can’t do good reference work, which isn’t the case, with the related and quite good point that a big part of reference work is negotiating with the patron, not just having a lot of knowledge about a subject.

Points happily granted.

So I want to revise my question. It might help to make a few distinctions. First, by area, I mean one of the general large divisions in academia: humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, etc. These could also perhaps be called cultures, following C.P. Snow. These areas, or cultures, have different methods, objects of study, assumptions, foundations, and shared knowledge.

By field, I mean a subdivision within that area: English, Sociology, Physics, etc. I also want to distinguish between queries which have a definite answer–no matter how complex–and more substantial help providing guidance on a research project, work that is necessarily more open-ended. For the sake of argument, let’s call these reference help and research help, even though in practice we know they’re mingled and we’re fine just calling them reference. I make this distinction because there is an obvious difference between answering a question and providing guidance in a research project. I was and am talking about research help.

My revised question is: When providing advanced research help, do you think reference librarians in general (or you in particular) are equally effective in both 1) areas or fields they know well, and 2) areas and fields about which they know nothing?

A follow-up question could be, how do you know, given that often you don’t know what you don’t know? (For example, I know that I know almost nothing about engineering, but I know there is such a field and roughly what it does. However, there must be gobs of subjects that I’m not even aware of, and thus I don’t even know which of them I don’t know about.) This question could probably be studied empirically with various reference assessment tools, but I’ll leave that job for the tenure-track librarians.

For my own part, I think I’m less effective the further I get from my area of greatest knowledge–the humanities. In fact, there are areas, such as engineering, about which I know so little that I wouldn’t know if I were providing effective research help at all. My knowledge about the field is so limited that I don’t see how I could possibly feel confident. The assumptions, approaches, methods, etc. are so foreign to my education that I have no subjective way of measuring my effectiveness. In fact, the further one gets from the humanities, the less it even makes sense to talk about research help. Natural scientists don’t do much of their research in the library, but in the lab. For the humanist, the library is the lab.

This changes as the areas move closer to the humanities. There are fields within the social sciences I’ve studied from interest or enjoyment, especially political science and sociology. The field of law is similar for me. In those fields, I’ve learned enough to have some idea of what I don’t know. I understand my strengths and weaknesses, and thus I have some way of knowing how effective my research help can be. I know when it’s time to refer to someone with greater knowledge. Political theory and qualitative sociology? I’ll give it a whirl and feel comfortable. Economic data? Referral time.

For the humanities, there is hardly a field about which I don’t have at least some minimal knowledge. For this area, I will include literature, history, philosophy, and religion. I know a lot about these fields because I’ve been reading widely–if not always deeply–for over twenty years. And to be clear, I’m not talking about credentials and degrees, but just knowledge. One of my commenters rightly pointed out that a PhD and no communication skills a bad reference librarian makes. I agree. I don’t have a PhD. I just read a lot of books and am intensely curious about the subjects. In the humanities, I know very well my strengths and weaknesses. I have a very good idea about what I don’t know.

This plays out when I work with students. The farther the research project is from my main area of knowledge, the less comfortable I am that my work is effective. I’m not even sure how I’d know. And what’s more, the work I can do in other areas takes longer for me and for the patron, and I still can’t guarantee my effectiveness, because I don’t know enough about the fields to know what I’m missing.

Thus, my own answer to the question is, No. I don’t think reference librarians are equally effective for research help in areas they know well and areas about which they know nothing. Also, outside of an independent assessment, I don’t see how anyone could possibly know if they were, given what they don’t know they don’t know.

And if the answer generally is, No, then that lends support to my previous speculations that both background knowledge and swotting up for a research consultation make one’s research help more effective. The more I know about a topic, about its context, its background, the better I am able to offer guidance, discuss alternative research strategies, and recommend sources. Perhaps I am the exception, though. Perhaps most other librarians believe they are equally effective in all areas. I tend to think that if one is really equally effective in every area, then it really means one is ineffective in every area, but I could be wrong.

How Much Preparation?

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One of the assignments for the arts & humanities reference course I’m teaching is a research consultation. The assignment is an email question from a student seeking research help while preparing to write a research essay on a given topic in an upper-level undergraduate course. The questions are very closely modeled on actual questions, and in a form that I’ve received multiple times over the years from students. Often enough these would end up as in-person consultations, but for the purpose of the course the students write responses offering research help. 

I can say that so far my students’ work has been for the most part outstanding. There are two rounds of consultations (Literature OR History; Art OR Music). The students write a response to the question and a secondary explanatory response to me, and I’ve found the explanations more useful and insightful for my purposes than the consultations themselves. The literature question involved finding a particular controversial essay from the 1970s a professor had mentioned, with no title or author given, only the context of the question. Everyone who chose the literature question found the controversial essay, and everyone found it by a different route, which was interesting to see.

Today I was struck by a question in one of the explanations sections. The student knew almost nothing about the topic in question and had to spend an hour or so learning more about the topic before the search process could even begin. The question to me was how long do "real" reference librarians spend educating themselves about a topic before they start answering a question. 

My answer was that it depends. I have often spent an hour or more doing preliminary research on a topic for a student consultation if it’s on a subject I know little or nothing about. Given the diverse nature of the topics I see from students, it’s fairly common that I have to do at least some. In fact, this is sometimes the most enjoyable part of my work. Is this common? I’m assuming that reference librarians who deal with advanced research projects in the humanities would often spend time doing this, but I could be wrong.

All depends on the context, I suppose. There are topics I see frequently enough that I’ve done the necessary work before. Often there are topics about which I already know a good deal about just from broad reading over many years. Occasionally there are topics so close to my own intellectual interests that I could probably provide a good working bibliography from memory. This preparation is generally unnecessary with lower-level research projects. For short first-year writing seminar essays, I can usually pick up enough from context to guide the student effectively.

But it seems to me that for advanced research a librarian who knows nothing about the topic itself won’t be very useful. Formulating search terms and approaches to a topic requires knowledge of more than just abstract library research skills. Like good collection development, it requires at least some knowledge of the subject, even if the knowledge is gleaned quickly just before the consultation. Not only does it make it easier to find relevant sources for the topic, but it also allows the librarian to communicate with the student in an intelligent way about the topic. This is related to the arguments in Reading and the Reference Librarian (that I discussed here), which argues that wide and deep reading on a number of relevant subjects makes one a more effective reference librarian. I’m not sure all reference librarians would agree with that, especially the ones that don’t read very much, but I’ve seen the results in my own work. In addition to that reading, I would definitely add the question-driven background research that at least some librarians routinely do before consultations. I think it’s good practice, but I wonder how common it is.

Notes on the Serials Crisis

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I’ve also been wanting to enter the discussion Meridith Farkas started over Ebsco getting exclusive and expensive control over a journal her community needs. On a number of collection issues, lately I’ve wanted to just link to Barbara Fister’s columns in the Library Journal and comment, "Yeah, what she said," especially since in this case she’s partly said what I’ve already said in Dealing with the Pusher Man, including a comment on journal title monopolies with title comparisons that sounds awfully familiar.

But what I have to say is related to part of the  Ithaka Faculty Survey 2009, 

Let me back up, though. There are a lot of things I think librarians have done right in the past few decades. Unlike some, I think they’ve been adapting and adopting and changing for a long time. But there’s one problem that librarians have tried to solve for thirty years and failed. When it comes to the so-called serials crisis, librarians have screwed the pooch. (If you’re unfamiliar with the phrase, then read or watch The Right Stuff, ideally both.)  And you know what? It’s not our fault. To slightly adapt Chuck Yeager, sometimes you get a pooch that no one cares is being screwed. 

Consider this "finding" from the Ithaka survey: "Despite several years of sustained efforts by publishers, scholarly societies, libraries, faculty members, and others to reform various aspects of the scholarly communications system, a fundamentally conservative set of faculty attitudes continues to impede systematic change." Like the other findings, this one will hardly come as a surprise to librarians.

Librarians have been cutting serials and complaining about vendors for a generation at least, and working diligently to educate academics about the economics of scholarly communication for over a decade. Even I once gave a talk to faculty showing how the rise in STM serial prices made it harder for junior professors in the humanities to get tenure, and I hadn’t been a librarian for that long. The problems are obvious and there for anyone with eyes to see. No one wants to see but librarians, and even if they did see there’s nothing they could do about it. The problem is systemic to academia and it’s tied to the tenure process. Professors want to publish in the best journals they can to get tenure or gain a reputation. They have every incentive to keep publishing in the top journals and no incentive to published only in open access journals or low cost journals. There are journals libraries "must" have, and enough libraries will get them to keep the system going. The entire academic tenure system in the United States would have to change its goals and incentives for the "serials crisis" to end. That’s not a change that will be driven by librarians.

I want to compare this to another systemic "crisis" in academia, the rapid and continuing decline of tenure track jobs in the humanities. This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education and this one in the NYT are the most recent thing I’ve seen on the issue on the very off chance it’s unfamiliar to you.. The underlying causes are different. The overproduction of of humanities PhDs for 40 years is driven by many causes, but the result is the same. There are too many PhDs for the jobs available. Everybody knows it. Everybody complains about it. Nobody can do anything about it. And no one in power wants to, anyway.

I’m also reminded of an encounter from my days at a liberal arts college. I was the liaison to the English department among others, and one of the English professors once requested the library purchase a very expensive microfilm set to support a portion of her research. I would have liked to, because she seemed to be doing some interesting work. But it was much too expensive for our budget and I had to turn her down. Visibly frustrated, she complained that the college expected her to do research, but couldn’t pay to support that research. This is an issue William James called the PhD octopus, and Jacques Barzun recognized as the drive in academia from the 1940s on to make sure that every institution of higher education from research universities to junior colleges had PhDs teaching the courses. The PhD is a research degree, and once upon a time wasn’t necessary to teach undergraduates, especially lower level undergraduates. But colleges wanted PhDs to seem more important and compete with others. 

Traditionally, liberal arts colleges focused on undergraduate education. In practice, they still do. But their professors are now required to research like professors at research universities without the support. It’s a systematic issue. Everyone knows about it. People complain. No one cares. And if they do, they can’t do anything about it anyway. When you have hundreds of PhDs competing to teach freshman composition, then there’s a problem with the system. However, once more it’s a systematic problem built up over decades, not one that can be easily solved. 

This is also why despite my frustrations, I don’t blame the vendors. For the most part, they’re not acting unethically just because they act contrary to the morals and desires of librarians. Librarians want to provide people with the information they need. Vendors want to make money. To paraphrase Adam Smith, it’s not from the benevolence of Elsevier, Ebsco, and Sage that we expect our journals, but from their regard to their own interest. They’re not necessarily evil or unethical, but they don’t operate by librarian standards. To keep expecting them to, and to be frustrated when they don’t, is a problem with our expectations rather than their practices. Watching some librarians try to deal with the behemoth vendors as if they have the same values as librarians reminds me of Dr. Johnson’s saying that marriage after divorce is the triumph of hope over experience. 

Keeping that in mind, we still get some value for our money or we wouldn’t be working with the vendors at all. It would be very expensive for libraries to deal separately with every publisher and impossible for them to host online content individually in the way vendors can. Barbara Fister pointed out that in an informal survey a lot of librarians were happy with Ebsco. If we were really that unhappy, if we weren’t getting value for our money, then we’d do things differently. The time might come when that happens, but I suspect the vendors would know when that was happening and would adjust accordingly. A dead addict can’t pay for a fix.

Meredith had a follow-up post wondering whether some organization on our part could battle this "Goliath." ACRL? Tried weakly and failed, though they helped educate a lot of librarians on the issues. Consortia? I don’t see it happening. Consortia are there to negotiate prices and deal with vendors. When it comes to the painful and likely impossible decisions that would have to be made to solve this problem, consortia are only as strong and willful as their individual members, and in my experience will balk only at systematic outrageousness, not at something as relatively minor as one journal becoming much more expensive. It can happen. I saw it happen last fall as one vendor proposed a ridiculously high price increase for a consortium. In fact, "Dealing with the Pusher Man" was an adaptation of an internal ema
il I sent arguing against accepting that deal. The vendor attempt fell through, but it was because the price hike was so outrageous as many libraries were cutting funding that it just wasn’t possible. Vendors know when they’ve pushed libraries to the brink, so they pull back, all with the goal of maximizing their profit. 

I think dealing with increasing costs and the loss of control that comes from accessing information rather than owning it is one of the most serious ongoing problems for academic libraries, both for budgeting and preservation issues. Other than fight guerrilla battles here and there as circumstances permit, there’s not much we can do about it, though, because while it’s one of the most serious problems for libraries, it’s not one of the most serious problems for academia. Libraries don’t drive research; research drives libraries. We’re just the research support arm of an academic Leviathan. We can do our best to understand the issues and explain them to others as necessary, but until most faculty and university administrations think there’s a huge problem, libraries can do very little. Even if it was viewed as a major academic problem, the root causes would have to be addressed over a period of years or even decades to begin solving it.

So what can be done? Very little, and it’s not our fault. I suspect there are other issues that will overwhelm higher education long before librarians’ serials crisis becomes a truly academic crisis. Already we can see the warning signs. The liberal arts and sciences are losing ground in higher education to be replaced by professional programs that people will pay for because supposedly they will get jobs. We’ll see more programs in business, education, nursing, maybe even librarianship, and geared to training practitioners rather than training future researchers. This intersects with more trends in higher education: the increasing reliance upon adjunct labor, the slow disappearance of tenure-track jobs, and the rise of distance education (at the moment aimed mostly at professional degrees or practical training). Adjuncts teaching 4/4 loads won’t be doing much research or publishing.

What will a world of higher education modeled on the University of Phoenix look like? There will be fewer doctoral programs, especially in the liberal arts and sciences. Thus, there will be fewer graduate students to train. With the decline in graduate enrollments, there will be less need of research professors to train the grad students as they engage in their own scholarship and publishing. Thus, there will be less scholarly publishing and less demand for scholarly journals. Instead of the proliferation of esoteric and hyper-specialized titles we’ve seen in the past few decades, we could instead see a reversal where there aren’t enough specialists to support those journals. 

As higher education remakes itself into a marketable, profit-driven exercise in pragmatic job training, the problems we see now will gradually disappear, no doubt to be replaced by new problems that we also can’t solve. All we can do is educate ourselves, explain our cause, and lookout for skirmishes we can win. And maybe hope, because sometimes hope does triumph over experience. 

Notes on the Ithaka Faculty Survey

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I’ve been wanting to write on the Ithaka Faculty Survey 2009. but I’m not sure I have time for more than selective comments This is the latest in the series of surveys that seemed designed to show how irrelevant librarians are becoming because while faculty used to see the library as a gateway to information, they now find the buyer role much more important. Thus, we librarians need to do something.

Here’s the first main finding:

1) "Basic scholarly information use practices have shifted rapidly in recent years, and as a result the academic library is increasingly being disintermediated from the discovery process, risking irrelevance in one of its core functional areas;" 

The phrase "risking irrelevance" makes this sound bad, but I can’t see where this is a problem. The details aren’t any more fear-inducing. "As Figure 1 illustrates, the library‟s physical edifice and catalog have declined steadily as starting points for research. The research process is no longer likely to begin with a face-to-face consultation with a librarian, a visit to the library‟s special collections service points, or a search of the online library catalog. Rather, faculty most often turn to network-level services, including both general purpose search engines and services targeted specifically to academia" (5).

Why would we think that more faculty talking to librarians first or coming to the library building first would be good for anyone, including librarians? If the faculty came to librarians at all before, it was because resources were hard to find. Disintermediation is exactly what we should want. According to Figure 1, almost half of faculty begin their research with a subject-specific database, which is almost certainly paid for by the library, linked to the library’s website to enable easy access, and either providing the full text of resources the library subscribes to online or citations of books and articles the library has in print or will have to get through Interlibrary Loan. Thus, the library is still the "gateway" to resources far more often than the leading questions of the Ithaka survey would indicate.

About a third now begin with a "general purpose search engine" (gee, I wonder which one), which would merely duplicate the function of a subject specific index for anything behind a pay wall, plus link out to lots of free resources that we don’t even have to purchase and catalog. This is a good thing. I don’t mind at all being disintermediated for faculty beginning research. Academic librarians have worked very hard to make sure that the resources we have are easily available. Disintermediation has been our goal, and it looks like we’ve been very successful. Far from signalling some problem, this indicates to me a job well done by librarians. This is the decline of the "gateway" function of the library, but as Figure 7 shows, 59% of respondents still find the gateway function very important.

According to the survey results, faculty now find the "buyer" function more important than ever, with 90% of them indicating this function as very important. This is made to sound dire as well. "While the buyer role has always been important to the most faculty members, it is now by far the most important of the three" (9). Ah. By far! Here I might be betraying a research library bias, but the buyer role has always been by far the most important thing libraries do for faculty, and in a world of pay walls that’s going to be the case for a very long time. This becomes even more important when we consider faculty with research interests that can’t be satisfied by English-language books and journals.

This also seems a good thing. It at least means there is a function the library performs that 90% of faculty see as very important. Any thoughtful faculty member, if presented with a discussion rather than very focused questions, could easily see that "buyer" is never a category by itself, but often necessarily includes "gateway" as well. For a lot of material, someone has to select it, buy it, make it accessible somehow. "Buying" is more than just handing over money, unless you’re buying from Elsevier, in which case it is.

In addition to the "buyer" and "gateway" roles, there are also "teaching support" and "research support" to give us something to worry about. 

"A roughly equal share of faculty members rate these roles as very important, and the importance of both of these roles is rated at almost exactly the same level as the library‟s gateway function [about 60%]. Neither receives anything close to the universally high importance expressed about the library‟s buyer role. In the absence of tracking data, it is impossible to speculate whether recent library investment in these roles has positively affected their value to faculty members or if they will over time come to be among the most widely valued roles of the library (although analyses stratified by years in the field or faculty rank do not show noteworthy patterns)" (10).

In this case, the statements themselves are worded to get low responses.

The library supports and facilitates my teaching activities (which we refer to as “teaching support”)

“The library provides active support that helps to increase the productivity of my research and scholarship” (which we refer to as “research support”)

Given the questions, I’m surprised even 60% acknowledged them as very important. How do libraries directly support and facilitate teaching? Library instruction. Course reserves. Research guides. Sometimes classroom space. Nothing else is coming to mind at the moment. There’s lots of indirect support, of course. Reference. Collection development. From a professor’s perspective, teaching doesn’t have much to do with the library. 

And notice the way the second statement is phrased: "active support." What does "active support" mean? I buy materials requested by faculty, answer their library questions, solve their library problems. Are those too reactive? Maybe I could do their research for them and provided bulleted summaries of articles for them. No, that would still be reactive since they’d have to tell me what they’re working on. Maybe if I pestered them in their offices until they gave me some work to do, that would be active. Or, could it be that these particular questions are too vaguely worded to drive any generally applicable change? 

Some might read the Ithaka report as a sign that librarians are doing something wrong or that they’re "risking irrelevance." Instead, I think the report shows we’re doing something right, and at worst that something is too hidden from outside eyes. Providing the librarians are actually doing something, it shouldn’t be too difficult to show the usefulness of that work if pressed. I can read this as a call to engage faculty more and explain our work, but even without that, the librarians aren’t irrelevant.

There is the argument that irrelevance is in the eye of the beholder, and that if faculty view the library or librarians as irrelevant, then they are irrelevant. But most faculty don’t see the library as irrelevant. The 90% that see the buying function as very important tells us that, and the buying function entails a lot of other functions.

Also, the faculty are not the only users of the library, and depending on the library might not even be the primary users. More students than faculty use the library, and they have different needs. If some of the same questions were asked of them, the answers might change. Do librarians provide active support for their research? Research instruction, online and in-person reference, consultations, workshops, outreach–
many of the public services of academic libraries are designed to provide active research support to students. When it comes to their own research, the faculty are the experts. Many of us work to educate students to the point they don’t need us anymore, not to make ourselves more necessary. This would seem foolish from a professional perspective if there weren’t always new groups of students. Our job is to make ourselves unnecessary in any direct way.’

Because it’s focused on faculty, the Ithaka survey ignores a distinction I’ve notice in my own work and read from others. There is split between the major library needs of faculty and students. Faculty need libraries to buy materials for their research. Students need support services to teach them to do research and find the materials the library already has. This report confirms for me this statement about the faculty. Do they think the buyer function is overwhelmingly important? Of course they do! And so do I. That’s mostly what faculty need, and I’m mostly in a position to fulfill that need. 

We need a parallel survey of students, but that’s more problematic. To get a fair comparison, it couldn’t be all college students, because that category is an incoherent mess these days. It would have to be students actually working on research projects. Ask them about the gateway function and research support of the library, and I think the responses would be more favorable than those of the faculty. What little I’ve seen on the topic indicates that after starting with Google and Wikipedia (which is pretty much what I do these days), students working on research papers visit the library website next. We are their gateway to scholarly information, and when they don’t need us as a gateway anymore, we’re still their buyer.

 I wanted to comment on another part of the report, but I’ll spare you now and save it for a post on pooching the serials crisis.

 

Libraries Never Change

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While doing some research for a project on libraries and Enlightenment, I ran across an article by Grace O. Kelley on the "The Democratic Function of Public Libraries" that presents some familiar criticism:

The library, even more than other institutions, seems not to have been altogether a true part of the social process. In some way, it has been switched out of the current of social change, occupying a niche or eddy of its own. For a long time it seems to have been but slightly affected by the forces which have been changing the rest of the world. One looks in vain in histories of culture and education for studies of the modern library as an active force which is making its impress upon the social fabric. Due to the nature of its organization and of its service it has been possible for it to continue to function largely on its original indefinite ideals and, in a sense, to let the modern world go by….

Not only our knowledge of the world, but the world itself, keeps changing from day to day. "The inescapable drive of change under the accumulation of ideas and traditions, under the relentless impacts of science and invention," make a fixed regime impossible. "An industrial civilization founded on technology, science, invention, and expanding markets must of necessity change and change rapidly." Any institution which does not change too, adapt itself to the times, and become part of the onward "drive of change," will be pushed aside to be left perhaps for a time to make a harmless life of its own. 

The most interesting thing for me about the article was when it was written. It’s from The Library Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Jan., 1934), and yet it seems as timely as today’s headlines, blog posts, or conference presentations. I left out a middle paragraph that helps fix the date of the article more.

On the whole, the public library still has its eye on a state of society which it considers to be more or less permanent in nature. It is academic in its ideals, and to it the world’s "best books" of literature and fiction are still of superimportance; it seems sometimes "unaware of the words, thoughts and things that science and invention have brought" but which in the long run must be heeded. The effect on general reading of the auto, the radio, the talkie, the news-reel, the tempo of modern life and of the machine age in general, is only confusedly sensed.  
I almost wrote that this paragraph dates the article, but I don’t think that’s true. The effect on general reading of the talkie and the news-reel is still probably "only confusedly sensed."
What has changed isn’t the criticism of libraries for not adapting rapidly enough to social and technological change, but the assumption of what changes they should be making and why. The problem, according to this article, was that public libraries had no clear concept of their clientèle, and thus offered reading that may or may not have been appropriate. However, the purpose of the library was to offer reading, especially reading designed to further the education of the masses in a democracy.
Kelley makes a lot of the distinction between public and special libraries. "The primary aims of both relate to knowledge: in the case of one, to the spread of the fruits of knowledge among the people; of the other, to the extension, through aid given to research and study, of the boundaries of knowledge." Public libraries weren’t adapting fast enough to the specialization of knowledge, and were with public funding attempting to supply reading of interest only to specialists. Instead, she argued, libraries should be supplying general reading that makes the rapidly increasing specialist knowledge accessible to the public. In fact, "librarians may well encourage writers to couch their findings in understandable and illuminating form, and, at the same time, improve their own equipment and facilities for distributing this product freely to eager readers." At first I thought this placed an unrealizable goal before librarians until I considered the enormous expansion of reference publishing in the decades after this article was written. 
This isn’t a serious issue now, if it ever was one, so that’s at least one problem we’ve solved. The practical concerns of the time are as dated as the principles and hopes. Kelley, also writing in a time of economic uncertainty, was still hopeful in a way I’m not sure we would be capable of today, even if we were prone to think in her terms. Here’s her concluding paragraph:
For we can have faith to believe that the intelligent reading of worth-while books on important matters that are of mutual interest both to the reader and to the author will result gradually in a clearer understanding of the changing concepts of society and all of its problems. This in turn will lead to a more effective and enlightened control over social conditions, increase the probability of happier and more successful living, and in this way justify the vision of democracy.
It’s an attractive vision in some ways, but one I doubt many librarians would believe these days. There are certainly plenty of worth-while books on important matters being written, and to some extent even read, but few still have any faith that more people reading good books (or even being more educated, for which "reading good books" is just a metonym) will lead to a clearer understanding of social problems or a "more effective and enlightened control over social conditions," and even less faith that public libraries are an essential part of that process. 
This snapshot of library criticism from 75 years ago shows us both that libraries have in practice and principle changed dramatically in that time and in unpredictable ways. The only thing that hasn’t seemed to change is the relentless criticism we apply to ourselves and our profession, the insistence that we are out of touch somehow with the larger world, that we’ve been "switched out of the current of social change, occupying a niche or eddy" of our own. Unless we assume that libraries suddenly began changing and adapting in response to this article in the Library Quarterly, we have to assume that such wasn’t true then, and we have no real evidence that it’s true now. What we have instead are insubstantial panics and false prophets of doom, and in this area it’s true that libraries haven’t changed at all.

Change and Resilience

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By odd coincidence I was discussing resilience as a psychological trait over lunch with a friend last week and then noticed a CFP about resilience and libraries. It struck me that we librarians talk a lot about change but little about the resilience necessary to adapt. A search of Library Lit confirmed my suspicion. A keyword search for change yielded over 10,000 hits, but resilience had only 15 hits. That rigged search doesn’t actually prove much, but you have to admit it makes a nice contrast.

Out of curiosity I searched for book on resilience and stumbled across Building Resiliency: How to Thrive in Times of Change, by Mary Lynn Pulley. This book had two major things going for it: 1) it was in ebrary, so I didn’t have to leave my office to get it, and 2) it’s only 26 pages long so I could read it in one sitting. The book seems aimed at managers who are taking on new management tasks and are feeling Peter Principled, though that’s not quite how the book puts it. Having known some Peter Principled managers in my day and always anxious to avoid being Peter Principled myself, I could sympathize.

Pulley (who has a fantastic name for someone trying to lift you up) has a "Resiliency Worksheet" at the end that lays out the nine themes of the book as a 7-point Likert scale. Below are the themes with the most resilient responses.

Acceptance of Change

I am comfortable with change. I see it as an opportunity to grow as a leader.

Continuous Learning

Change provides a chance for me to learn new skills and test new ideas. I like to build on the lessons of the past – my successes and my disappointments.

Self Empowerment

I regularly assess my strengths. I keep my eye out for work assignments that will let me build new managerial skills and develop as a leader.

Sense of Purpose

I like to think that my work reflects my personal values. I try to make decisions based on what’s important to me and balance that with the organization’s mission. 

Personal Identity

I really like my job, but it doesn’t define who I am. I have other pursuits outside of work that are just as important to me as my job.

Personal and Professional Networks

I really appreciate my family, my friends, and my colleagues. There have been many times that those relationships have helped me out of a jam. I like to stay connected to those people who are close to me and take a personal interest in their lives.

Reflection

I make some room each day to reflect on my decisions and actions I like to look back to see if there was another choice I could have made. 

Skill Shifting

My skills could prove useful to this organization in another role. I can translate my experiences outside of work into developmental opportunities. 

Relationship to Money

I like things. Doesn’t everybody? But I don’t want to get caught in the trap of working long hours and taking on extra assignments in order to pay for things that don’t really reflect my interests and values. I make my money work for me. I think about my purchases before I make them. 

If we leave out or revise things like "building management skills" or "developing as a leader" then I tilt heavily toward the resilient end of the spectrum. Given that one of my mottos is "there is opportunity in chaos," this isn’t surprising. The least resilient responses were the ones that accepted the least responsibility for one’s life and actions. "Change makes me uneasy." "I want to stick with what I know best." "If this organization wants me to develop, it has to give me some kind of plan." "It’s my life the way it is – I can’t just change it around to make it into something else." "There are always so many things to do." Resilient people know they are responsible for their decisions, while the least resilient people live in what existentialists call bad faith. They don’t accept their freedom of choice; they just want to be excused.

Despite our frequent demands for or obsessions with change, we don’t pay enough attention to the anxiety such demands and obsessions invoke in some librarians. We do occasionally discuss what sort of people successful librarians need to be these days, but not necessarily how we get there. In addition to focusing on technical or organizational changes, we should also draw attention to what traits people need to adapt to these changes and how those traits might be developed. What breeds resilience in some and not others, and is there anything libraries can do to create resilient librarians?

I’m just asking the question, but I don’t necessarily have an answer. Personally, I’d recommend a good course of philosophy based on my experiences overcoming adversity and depression when younger. Where some have therapy and prescription drugs, I had existentialism and beer. Existentialists believe that we are responsible for our own actions and define ourselves by our choices and that no one is essentially a winner, a loser, a hero, a coward, or a librarian. We are the projects we choose, though we try to escape from the responsibility by pretending other forces control our lives. However, though it might develop resilience, I’m not sure a regimen of existentialism and beer would work for everyone, and I’m pretty sure the beer without the existentialism would do no good at all.

There’s also the motivational and self-help literature, which often recommends the same attitude of self-control. It’s not surprising that some self-help literature contains similar ideas about personal responsibility. Of course, I exclude the so-called self-help of the 12-step variety exemplified here, which is just another manifestation of bad faith. Truly helping oneself requires personal responsibility, self- empowerment, and self-direction. According to Building Resiliency, so does being resilient during times of professional change. 

I knew at least one manager who just wanted obedient sheep, but that’s the exception in my experience. Most people probably think it a good idea to have resilient employees who take responsibility for their development. What’s not clear to me is how that can happen.  Sometimes the literature on change will include something on motivating people, but motivation only goes so far. Even if people are motivated they might still not be resilient, and the traits listed above can’t necessarily be motivated. Resilient people take responsibility for themselves and their development. Could one create an organizational culture that would provide such motivation, when resilient people are resilient even without such a culture? Can one really motivate people to be more resilient when the point is that resilient people motivate themselves?   　

Ultimately, I think the resilient traits Pulley lists mark an important distinction between professional and unprofessional work. By that I’m not exactly talking about "professional" librarian versus paraprofessional/ library assistant/ library worker/ whatever so much as the way one approaches work. Professionals–whether managers or not–do most of the things in the list. They accept change, empower themselves, find their own purpose, build their own skills, learn continuously, etc. They don’t wait for others to tell them what to do. They accept responsibility and take control of their work. That was as true for my work when I was a circulation clerk as it is now. 

Sometimes lists like this pop up in library articles or blogs. It’s no great secret what’s necessary, but it’s not clear how everyone can get there, even with a resiliency checklist and some recommendations for action. Resilient people are made, not born, but the professional question might be whether one can make them when they really have t
o make themselves.

Humanism and Libraries

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Those who weary of the unreflective pragmatism pervasive in librarianship should appreciate Andre Cossette’s Humanism and Libraries: an Essay on the Philosophy of Librarianship, newly translated from the French by Rory Litwin for his own Library Juice Press.  The slender volume is a clear, refreshing discussion of the philosophy of librarianship, and Litwin should be congratulated for making it accessible to English-speaking readers.

Humanism and Libraries makes a distinction between library science and library philosophy and tries to establish the definition and aim that unifies all libraries and provides their philosophical foundation. Library science “is the theoretical construction of objective relationships among the activities of librarianship,” and should be contrasted with philosophy, which “is the theoretical integration of library practice as a unity, the encompassing understanding of the meaning of the profession.” Library science studies the activities of libraries, while library philosophy explores their underlying unity and justifies their function in society. Because of their practical training and pragmatic tendencies, librarians tend to function without a coherent philosophy, which isn’t fatal for daily operations. “For librarians, the fact of not having a coherent professional philosophy does not prevent them from being motivated by ideas and principles, but these bear more resemblance to religion than to a genuine philosophy.”

He asserts that a philosophy of librarianship would need a definition of librarianship and a set of goals for all libraries. For the definition, he claims inspiration from Jesse Shera and proposes the following: “Librarianship is the art and science of the acquisition, preservation, organization, and retrieval of written and audio-visual records with the aim of assuring a maximum of information access for the human community.”

This seems simple enough. It’s the discussion of aims that becomes complicated. The aim is crucial, because Cossette takes a teleological approach to library philosophy. “The vast human project of the Library can only be evaluated according to the aims toward which it is directed.” Though I disagree in part with his assessment, I’m in agreement with the approach, as it is exactly what I proposed in my essay on “Technological Change, Universal Access, and the End of the Library,” where I argued that “part at least of any philosophy of the library must include thinking about the telos or end of the library. We must ask and try to answer the question: what is the end of the library?”

Cossette examines three possible ends: preservation, education, and information access. Some have considered the aim of libraries to be preservation. Cossette makes the excellent point that “if the role of the librarian only consists in preserving texts he is merely a technician and can not be considered a professional, nor scientific.”

Cossette also denies that education is a sufficient end, but his reasoning is much shakier here. He first denies that education can serve as the end of the library because it’s “classist.” “In maintaining the illusion that the ultimate goal of the library is education, thinkers in library science perpetuate an ideology that is inseparable from the division of society into classes, which exists in the interest of the dominant class. This bourgeois librarianship, which aims to disseminate high culture, to grant access to the treasures of civilization, is alienating for the vast majority of working people…. This librarianship is classist also for the reason that it universalizes a system of values that belongs to the dominant class.” This objection seems weak for a number of reasons. Something being “bourgeois” isn’t a philosophical objection to an idea as the ultimate goal of an institution. Libraries are perhaps bourgeois institutions, and there’s an end on it. If access to the treasures of civilization alienates the majority of workers, then so much the worse for the workers. However, the biggest weakness is that Cossette’s definition confuses education with indoctrination or perhaps acculturation. Libraries as educational institutions don’t “disseminate high culture,” or at least that’s not all they do.

In addition to denying education as a possible end of libraries, he has a serious problem with the notion of librarians as educators, which a lot of academic librarians consider themselves to be. He’s opposed to the idea, quoting Kenneth Kister that the “educator is mainly interested in critical analysis of the material involved, whereas the librarian is largely concerned with such services as acquisition, organization, retrieval, and distribution of that material.” He argues that just because librarians teach people how to use libraries doesn’t make them educators. Librarians who believe they are “have a poor sense of the fundamental nature of librarianship. They have neglected to take account of what all types of libraries have as a common goal: the maximal dissemination of information.”  (This is his end for libraries.)

He claims that “Librarians are not engaged in a pedagogical situation, which means they are able to play a role that is completely different from that of a teacher, whose function is normative, hierarchical, and distanced. His fundamental role consists of providing the information requested by the reader, as rapidly and effectively as possible. In academic and school libraries, it is plain that users require, in the majority of cases, information for their educational needs. But it would be an abuse of language to claim this as a reason to call a library an educational institution or a librarian a teacher. The aim here is merely to teach students how to access information.” (My emphasis.)

But is this true? I don’t believe it is. Academic librarians teach people both to access and evaluate information, and collection development librarians also build library collections not just by including some works but by excluding others, which often involves some sort of intellectual evaluation. Cossette is so dedicated to defending his primary claim about the end of libraries that he ignores what academic librarians actually do.  Librarians as educators upsets Cossette’s scheme because then academic librarians and special or public librarians couldn’t claim to be experts in the same field of expertise. Such a rigid definition itself fails to take account the possibility that all libraries might not have a common goal.

He concludes with the fairly banal point that the telos or goal of libraries is the maximal distribution of information.

The contemporary library becomes a service for information retrieval with the aim of providing all people with pertinent information toward educational, cultural, utilitarian, recreational, or other aims…. It is not a question of imposing on readers this or that type of information as a pretext for fulfilling a supposed educational or cultural mission. Rather, the librarian leaves it to the user to determine the purpose of his information request and accords him the full freedom to choose for himself the information that he will use.

Elsewhere, I’ve called a version of this the Universal Access Principle (or UAP), “ the proposition that libraries should provide free access to all information to all persons all of the time.” At the time I argued that this principle is confused. “The belief underlying the UAP allows for no evaluative choices, and yet it is used to justify an evaluative choice–i.e., that citizens should be taxed to support this principle. It is founded upon a radical ethical relativism, asserting that we have no way to decide what is good or bad, and thus we must let individuals decide for themselves, but then it decides for them. Specifically, it decides for the citizens that it is good for them to underwrite ethical relativism.” I’m not sure I still agree with my previous assessment, especially the claim about ethical relativism, but I agree with the basic point that the UAP claims a neutrality that cannot possibly justify it as an end of the library. It claims to be value neutral, but is cryptonormative instead. And the hidden norm isn’t the ethical relativism I once thought, but instead Enlightenment liberalism.

Even after deciding upon the UAP as the telos of the library, Cossette sneaks education and acculturation in through the back door when he addresses the role libraries play in informing citizens and helping free the oppressed.  “In providing needed information to all citizens, especially the most disadvantaged, the library lends its support to the realization of democratic ideals: it contributes to the formation of an informed electorate that is capable of rational decisions.” This is definitely not the goal of neutral information providers, and if this is the essence of libraries then there can be no libraries in totalitarian states. He says that ”librarians working in democratic libraries are professionally neutral in facing political, moral, and religious problems that divide readers. If there is controversy, they defend intellectual freedom.” However, the defense of intellectual freedom is not a neutral political position.

This section concludes by bringing in more voices affirming the non-neutral neutrality of librarians. “They provide free access to all to a collection that contains controversial texts and ideas. The impartiality is made possible by their professional ‘indifference’ to all competing opinions. ‘If he [the librarian] has no politics, no religion, and no morals, he can have all politics, all religions, and all morals.’ The contemporary library is a center of liberalism, ‘but its function is not to preach it but to be liberalism in operation.’” The ideas quoted so approvingly don’t make much sense, though. Librarians can’t defend intellectual freedom and have no politics, and though it makes political sense to claim so librarians aren’t really professionally impartial about ideas or books. A library that is the “center of liberalism” cannot possibly be neutral. Cossette affirms as much when he finally discusses libraries and humanism in his conclusion. Libraries are humanistic because they aim toward creating a certain sort of human being. “How can we call a service that aims for the creation of autonomous individuals who are sufficiently well informed to bring about all of their various projects anything but humanistic? … The work of librarianship is truly a human endeavor, that is to say an activity of humankind for humankind, that has as its end the well being of humankind.”

Earlier, Cossette had claimed that the end or goal of libraries was the maximal dissemination of information in a neutral manner, but even he can’t maintain that as the end. In the conclusion, we are told the end is the “well being of humankind,” and its well being in a very particular way—the creation of autonomous individuals informed enough to complete their various human projects. That’s an awfully ambitious goal for librarians who are supposedly neutral. Obviously, the UAP claims neutrality, when in fact it isn’t neutral, but aims to create a liberal culture of free autonomous human beings. This is where I think Cossette and the “neutral” liberals he quotes are confused. If the UAP is the founding philosophical principle of librarianship, then libraries are not in fact neutral and can’t possibly be. They are necessarily institutions of education and acculturation—to create educated, informed liberal democratic citizens. Librarians may build collections housing diverse views, but they don’t believe those diverse views, and they are not neutral about them. Some of the ideas are better than others, and librarians help decide that. Cossette wants to have the library be neutral towards information while claiming that neutrality serves emancipatory goals, but that’s disingenuous. Libraries as he conceives of them are institutions actively participating in the Enlightenment project of human liberation through education and tolerance. It’s educational, critical, and bourgeois. It assumes that critical thought is as necessary as information, and helps provide both. Though beginning as an Aristotelian, Cossette turns Kantian in the end.

Cossette’s definition and ultimate end of librarianship assumes that all libraries have something in common, the library-ness of the library, as a Platonist might say. He has to spend so much time deriding the educational claims of academic librarians because if they are educators in any meaningful sense then they have something peculiar they might not share with public or special librarians.  However, by the time he concludes with the humanistic, liberal end of libraries, this attempt at unity is no longer necessary. By undercutting the supposed neutrality of librarians, he has reintroduced an educational role for both academic and public librarians. Though public librarians sometimes deny their educational role and affirm their neutrality, some occasionally embrace an educational and cultural mission. That’s the point I got from the Darien Statements (which I evaluated here).

I disagree with his attempt at unification, because academic and public libraries have different, though sometimes overlapping missions. There may well be no library-ness of the library to examine. This doesn’t mean there can be no philosophy of librarianship, only that such a philosophy will have to be more complicated than providing access to information. Ultimately, I agree with Cossette’s conclusions that we can only understand and philosophize about libraries by understanding their place in a society and culture. The end of the library cannot be an end in itself, but must reflect the ends of society. By acknowledging the role of libraries in liberal democracies, Cossette says as much himself.

Though I’ve found much to criticize (and left many interesting arguments untouched), I highly recommend Humanism and Libraries. If it weren’t so thought-provoking, I would never have addressed it in the first place. Regardless of whether one agrees with all of Cossette’s methods or conclusions, taking the journey with him through this discussion should give any librarian much food for thought.

LibGuides for Library School

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I just had one of those epiphanies in which I realized I hadn’t written for a while. I’ve been meaning to, but have been preoccupied with teaching "Introduction to Sources and Services in the Arts and Humanities" online for the UIUC library school. It’s not so much the time commitment, which is considerably less than teaching a writing seminar. It’s more that I’ve been thinking about the course, but writing about it while teaching seems inappropriate. For the curious, it’s going okay so far. I’ve had a few successes and definitely made a few mistakes.

One success was choosing to have my students prepare a library research guide for an upper-level undergraduate course in the humanities. I knew I wanted to use something like LibGuides, and when talking about it with a colleague he suggested contacting Springshare, which turned out to be a great idea. I wrote Springshare asking if they could set up a domain for my course so that the students could learn to use LibGuides, and pointed out the mutual benefits (they get some free publicity and maybe get to hook students on LibGuides, and my students get to use the product that has become something of a standard in academic libraries in the last few years). Slaven Zivkovic from Springshare responded quickly and warmly to my request, and as far as I know my library school course is the first one to have its own LibGuides domain.

I’ve written favorably about LibGuides a couple of times before when it was a newer product. My enthusiasm for it hasn’t changed. It’s no surprise to me why so many libraries have subscribed, since LibGuides delivers a great product at a great price. Also, as my experience shows, Springshare is responsive to the library community in very positive ways. I don’t normally plug products on the blog, and at this point I’m not sure LibGuides really needs plugging, but I do want to give a hearty public thanks to Slaven and the folks at LibGuides both for making a very useful product and for letting my students use it.