The Lesson of Library History

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Some librarians seem to be obsessed with technology and its relation to  their own obsolescence, maybe because they falsely believe that librarians are slow to adapt to technological change. In the counterfactual world of luddite librarians, perhaps libraries would become obsolete. But we’re not living in that world.

Last week I was complaining about the hyperbolic and apocalyptic rhetoric emerging from so many librarians, and it was somehow interpreted as a commentary on libraries and emerging technologies or a response to Library 2.0, leading to this hyperbolic and apocalyptic comment: “If libraries are slow to adopt ‘faddish’ technologies (whether or not they fade in a few months) they will quickly become obsolete (in the view of patrons) in this on-demand age.” I have a feeling most of this rhetoric isn’t motivated by a fear that libraries will become obsolete as by a fear that librarians will, but that would have to be the topic of another blog post. Regardless, I wasn’t talking then about technology and libraries, but about hyperbole. Now I’m talking about technology and libraries.

First, I just don’t understand this fear of obsolescence. What is this fear based on? My commenter seems actually to think that if all libraries are slow to adopt whatever technology is hot at the moment, then people won’t use libraries. There’s no evidence or argument to support such a hyperbolic statement. Would anyone these days claim that a library is going to become “obsolete” because it’s not represented in Second LIfe? This view also offers an extremely reductionist account of what libraries do for people. (Note: though I know my posts sometimes get traction in the library world at large, it should be clear from the title of the blog I’m talking about academic libraries). As long as scholars are doing academic research, libraries will not become obsolete. Will libraries change? Definitely. Will things be vastly different in 20 years? Probably. But the future of academic libraries is as dependent upon the future of higher education and the commercialization of scholarship as it is on instant adoption of any given communication technology.

Just as I don’t understand why anyone would think libraries are becoming “obsolete,” I also don’t understand the assumption that libraries are slow to adapt to technology. It seems to me librarians have long been adapting to technological change and using technology to improve library services. This article by Robert M. Hayes from the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences on the history of library automation should dispel any notion of librarians as musty luddites. (The article is behind a pay wall.) MARC, DIALOG, OCLC, RLIN–all created in the late 1960s! Libraries were creating OPACs in the 1970s. How many department stores had online searchable catalogs in the 1970s? From microfilm to digitization, from punch cards to OPACs, from the telephone to IM, librarians have been adopting new information technologies for decades to provide library users with improved access to information. Far from lagging behind, they’ve been pushing the technology to its limits in their search for improved library services.

The article is a reminder that technological change has been ongoing in libraries for decades and that there are information and technical services components of such change. It’s easy to focus on popular fads like Facebook while forgetting that some of the most exciting and useful technological change in libraries is behind the scenes. The entire technical infrastructure of libraries is still evolving, and some of the most important technological innovations that benefit library users are invisible to them. Users of academic libraries gain a much greater benefit from a link resolver than from Twitter.

Sure, there has always been resistance. The article has a great quote from a 1971 College & Research Libraries issue: “In sum, our experience with the computer in library operations has been one more replay of The Emperor’s New Clothes, and what we were led to believe were distant mountains laden with gold, available merely by boring a drift in the slope, turn out, upon close inspection, to be the hairy buttocks of the well-fed computer industry. And from such a source we have gotten exactly what we should expect.” But what should be clear is that while there are obvious dead ends (such as library catalogs based on IBM punch cards in the 1950s) to feed such resistance, the resisters in the aggregate always lose.

They always lose because they’re always in the minority and in general they’re always wrong. The early adopters are also in the minority, and they’re often wrong in the particulars, but error spurs innovation as surely as success. Technological innovation doesn’t hit every library equally, making nonsense of claims about “libraries” becoming obsolete if “they” don’t adopt some change wholesale. There aren’t universal solutions to universal problems. What we have, and what we’ve always had in librarianship, are librarians working away in various places experimenting and exploring, trying to figure out if some new technology will improve library services. When they show that it can, word gets around, the idea spreads, and other librarians give it a try regardless of the resistance. “We’ve never done things this way” loses force against “This worked at other places, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t work here.”

One relatively recent example is chat reference. By the mid-90s, IM was starting to become much more popular. The technology was starting to improve. By the late 1990s, libraries were experimenting with it. It was all the rage at conferences 10 years ago, and a dead topic 4 years later because it was the norm. Now it seems odd if an academic library doesn’t have some form of chat reference. When it comes to other social media, we’ll see the same thing. If something is proven successful elsewhere, librarians at other places will adopt it quickly, just like they’ve always been doing with technological innovations. And these days the return on investment on many projects is much clearer and more immediate than 40 years ago. It’s a lot easier to adopt virtual reference solutions or create a library Facebook page than it is to retrospectively convert your card catalog. On the other hand, it’s difficult to create major digitization projects, but libraries are creating them anyway.

Hayes also addresses those who say libraries will become obsolete. Here’s his take:

There are persons who forecast their demise, in the perception that they will be replaced by the wealth of resources becoming available through the information technologies; such voices have been heard for at least the past three to four decades….

The likely picture, though, is very different from that of those who wish to get rid of libraries. Libraries are essential and will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. Instead of being overwhelmed by technologies,they have absorbed them, made them economic and effective, and served as the basis for testing and proving them. It is also a fact that the effect of electronic information resources was to increase not decrease the use of the library. The various forms of publication are complementary and mutually supportive rather than being substitutes for each other. The use of any of them leads to increased use of the others, and the library serves as the agency for access to all of them.

Libraries are not going to become obsolete. That statement is more provable than its contradiction, because at least I have precedent on my side. The claim that libraries will become obsolete for whatever reason has nothing to support it, and certainly not the false belief that librarians don’t adapt well to technology. They’ve been doing it for decades and doing it successfully. If you wa
nt to see how librarians will adapt to technology in the future, just see how they adapted in the past. The lesson of library history tells us to expect adaptation, innovation, improvement, resilience, and endurance. I find that a more positive and more believable statement than any amount of panicky hyperbole.

Preaching and Persuading

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My last post generated considerably more interest than usual, and I’m not entirely sure why. it’s possible there were some alleged potential reactionaries. The possibility of such is implied in Tim Spalding’s commentary on his blog::

I expect your post will get wide circulation. It says something that hasn’t been said before as well. But if it prompts librarians to dismiss technology’s impact on the future of libraries, it will do great harm. Instead, I hope people use your essay as a way to "kick it up a notch" intellectually, get past the small stuff and confront the very real changes ahead.

What puzzles me was how anything I’ve written could prompt "librarians to dismiss technology’s impact on the future of libraries." I’m not even sure how anyone could do that. My point was more that no one technology is going to be the future.

My approach and those of the librarians I’ve critiqued might be formulated as one between preaching and persuading. There’s an evangelical tone distinctly present in some of this. It’s always a stark dichotomy. Do what I tell you the future is or libraries will die! It’s so hyperbolic it’s hard to take seriously. I, for the most part, am the converted, and I still find the preaching grates on me.

One contrast would be the way other librarians approach futurizing. For example, I’m thinking of Steven Bell’s and John Shank’s "blended librarians" initiative. I’m not sure I agree with that approach, but what I like about it is that instead of going gaga over whatever trend, he presents serious criticisms and reasons to change in particular ways. He has an understanding of the ways academic librarians could lose relevance and suggestions for ways in which they can create a future where they have more relevance. There’s nothing apocalyptic or hyperbolic, but neither is there any attempt to avoid serious thinking on the problems we face if we don’t make some serious changes.

Preaching just isn’t effective in the workplace, where reasoned analysis and a feeling for workplace politics is necessary. If I started signing my emails with "The Future is X" my colleagues would think I was putting them on. If I went to a meeting and tried to implement a change based on the claim that "this is the future!", there would be some eye rolling but not much support.

A couple of posts ago I put my approach to change. Changes have to be specific and they need reasons based on a common mission. What are we supposed to be doing and how can we do that better? Will this new tool or organizational change help us accomplish our mission? How? If people are agreed on what the goal should be, and it’s clear how introducing change X will accomplish that goal more effectively without creating havoc, they’ll be more likely to accept it. Politics is about compromise and progress often consists of gradual but constant change.

If you want to lower morale and create chaos, by all means come storming into your workplace with sweeping revolutionary changes that upset everyone and try to implement them because this is the "future." To discuss contentious issues of change and try to move forward, hype doesn’t help. Hype hurts. Hype alienates as much as reaction.

And then there are the reactionaries. I doubt they’ll find much support in my writing, but I’ll say what I think about them. Andy Woodworth put in a different way one implication of my position. My opposition is to all future hyperbole and all reactionary stances. The radical and the reactionary have very similar mindsets, both uncompromising. Andy phrased the ends of the spectrum as "We are okay as we are" and "We need to change now!" None of our libraries are perfectly okay as they are, and none need to change everything immediately.

I think about my library and its services. One thing I can’t help but notice is that there are some things we do exceptionally well, partly because we have the resources and support we need. There’s a lot of individual and focused research support for the students, for example. It would be difficult to improve this part of our work. As a librarian here, I would resist changes that would take time away from that, especially if the reasoning was based on "we have to change now!" That wouldn’t make me a reactionary. That would just make me sensible.

Other things could definitely be improved. I would like to see us take advantage of newer technology for search and discovery, and I think we’re moving in that direction. Just because of the size of our collections, we have a lot of great resources that are hard to find, or that aren’t findable from one place, such as an OPAC. But information technology is getting to the point where it can help make more of our collection more findable by library users. Regardless of the time, effort, and coordination it would take to implement such changes, they would be worthwhile. If we can improve this without making something else worse, then we will have implemented a useful change that would greatly benefit our users. I would be critical of any attempts to resist a positive change because we’re okay the way we are. I can point to specific problems library users including me have, and what’s more I can point to solutions.

Change isn’t made by a blog or from a conference podium. Changes are made in offices and conference rooms, in whispered hallway conversations and lunchtime banter.People are persuaded less by bold proclamations than by calm conversations and careful evidence. But the people doing the persuading need to think concretely and strategically. The moral support they might get from true believers is useful in its place, but more useful are arguments, evidence, and strategies of persuasion.

And these arguments and evidence must be particular to a given library. Nothing is the future for libraries because libraries are all different. The pressing changes needed in my library are not the same as the ones needed at the public library down the street. Futures have to be envisioned in particular places to solve particular problems and negotiated with particular audiences, but it’s hard to make a big name for yourself with that sort of thinking.

Nothing is the Future

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Prognostication isn’t something librarians tend to be good at, just prone to. We often have to hear about the future of libraries from people who aren’t, it turns out, from the future. (Or at least I don’t think they are). The future of libraries is Second Life. Wait, I mean Facebook. Or maybe it’s Twitter. It’s librarians in pods. Etc.The beauty of talking about the future is that it never happens.

Because someone has chosen to bombard RUSA listservs with notices of new iPhone apps and the like, I’ve been forced to see more statements about "the future" recently. Apparently, "the future is mobile." No doubt it will also be "fast paced" and "challenging" and "constantly changing" as well. It’ll probably be an exciting place where we’ll all have to adapt quickly or else die off, but also a place where savvy librarians won’t see problems, only opportunities for solutions. And there’ll be flying cars.

The kindest interpretation of statements like "the future is mobile" or "the future of reference is SMS" or "the future is librarians in pods" or whatever is that the librarians are trying to create that future by speaking it. The incantation will somehow make it so. At the very least, perhaps everyone will believe it’s true, even if it’s not, and that’s good for speaking invitations. After all, the future never arrives, so it’s not like we can verify it.

The less kind interpretation is that the authors of such statements are reductionist promoters, reducing a complex field to whatever marginal utility they’re focused on and claiming that this is the future, while simultaneously promoting themselves as seers. They’re hedgehogs with their one big thing, but perhaps aren’t aware it’s their big thing, not the big thing. I suppose it’s all part of "branding" themselves. I should be jealous. I don’t think I have a brand.

The obvious and most likely statement is that nothing is the future, as in no thing is the future, period. Anyone who tells you different is just plain wrong. With technology, it should be clear to anyone who bothers to see past their obsessions that formats and tools die hard. Some people like to imply that if librarians don’t take up every new trend they’ll become like buggy whip makers. I should point out that there are still people who make buggy whips. Buggy whips aren’t as popular as they once were, but they’re still around. There are even buggies to accompany them.

Communications technology seems to drive speculation on the future of libraries. There’s some new tool–Facebook, IM, Second Life, the telephone, cable television, etc.–and it’s going to revolutionize libraries. Except it doesn’t. If the new technology succeeds at all in libraries, it will join most of the older technologies rather than replace them.

What older communication technologies have gone away completely? The oldest is probably the letter, but libraries still get letters. Real letters, on paper and everything. Some of them are even handwritten. They’re not as popular as they used to be, but that’s only because we now have an electronic equivalent. I don’t know if the telegraph was ever a way for patrons to communicate with libraries. I doubt it, but if so I guess that one’s dead. The telephone is probably next. People still call libraries. A century and more after it became popular, and people are still making phone calls. Amazing, but true!

They still email, too, even the young ones. Just letters in another form. I’ve heard some vague claims that these kids today are doing nothing but texting, and they don’t use email. Maybe that’s true in high school, but it’s not true in college. Students email me all the time for help. It’s a reliable medium where significant questions can be asked. A student just emailed me to set up a research consultation. She sent a 254 word email that included a two-page attachment. It’s difficult to ask serious research questions in a text message. I have no problem with SMS reference, and I think we’ll be adding it soon. But if there are students for whom a library without SMS reference is invisible, they probably aren’t very good students anyway and no amount of reference will help them succeed.

What’s next? Maybe those static query boxes on websites. Our library has several of those, and they’re used by all sorts of people, from students to scholars in foreign countries. They’re probably not going away. Then there’s chat reference, which I find a bit unwieldy for some types of questions, but ideal for others. That one’s still pretty new in the scheme of things, though, so it will probably be a long time before librarians pretend that some new technology revolution has killed it.

If librarians still interact with their users through letter, telephone, and email, there sure seems to be a lot of past in this future. There’s always a lot of past in any future. We are living in the past’s future, and we still have most of it with us. What is the chance that our future will somehow be different?

I’ve used "mobile" just as one example. The same could be said of various service or organization models. You can plug in any term you want, and know that when anyone tells you that thing is "the future," they’re wrong. And to be clear, my criticism isn’t of any particular services or trends. If there’s a new, popular way for librarians to communicate with or reach out to library users, by all means librarians should adopt it, or at least experiment with it. My criticism is the hype and the reductionism, and the implied claim that some librarians really know what the future holds, and that it just happens to be centered around whatever they happen to like at the moment. Maybe they’re convincing themselves, but they’re not convincing me.

 

Ten Years In

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After I wrote a draft of this post, I discovered the blog made the LIS News 10 Librarian Blogs to Read in 2010, which is a nice way to start the year. Now I suppose I’ll have to keep blogging for 2010.

It seems to be the season for reminiscing, and somehow I can’t resist. We may or may not have begun a new decade, but I’m beginning a new professional decade. I graduated from library school ten years ago this month and began my first professional library job a few days later. Since I started this job eight years ago this month, the majority of my professional career has been at Princeton. The good news, for me anyway, is that I’m fine with that. The environment here can be challenging in ways both good and bad, and it’s certainly not a warm and fuzzy place to work, but so far it’s been a place where self-direction and autonomy are supported and even necessary for any success, and where the standards of library support for teaching and learning are very high. Unsurprisingly, it’s also a place with a lot of intelligent and knowledgeable librarians, which is also good.

I’ve been trying to think about what’s changed in the profession in the ten years I’ve been a librarian, and I’m having trouble coming up with many things. This might sound silly, but for me librarianship hasn’t changed as dramatically as it has for some more senior librarians. I am unable to recall with relieved nostalgia the days of card catalogs, or DIALOG, or CD-ROMs as dominant forms of information retrieval. By the time I was a librarian the Web was booming, Google already existed, and Wikipedia wasn’t far behind. The days of librarians as authoritative controllers of access to information were already gone, and I never went through the Kubler-Ross relationship with Google and Wikipedia so many librarians did. I also came along when constant change in information technology was the norm rather than the exception, so I’ve never had to adapt to that fact. If I weren’t comfortable with constant learning and frequent change, I wouldn’t have become a librarian ten years ago.

The search for scholarly information hasn’t changed much, though, at least in the humanities. There’s more full-text online, but that was an obvious trend ten years ago. In the humanities, scholars are still reading books and chasing footnotes, despite the new media surrounding us. I read occasionally about libraries without printed books, but it’s pretty clear that no serious college or research library will be print-bookless for a long time. And as long as the DRM and preservation problems are solved, it won’t bother me a bit if we go completely digital.  For me the book is just a storage for information. If something improves on the extremely useful codex, then so much the better.

The biggest change I’ve seen is with communication, and that one will be obvious to anyone reading a blog. If nothing else, my cell phone is a lot smaller and does a lot more than it did ten years ago. It’s a lot easier to communicate with other professionals than it was ten years ago. Blogs were just taking off, but by the time I began this blog two and a half years ago, the system was entrenched and easy to use. Add in all the other social media that librarians use, and it’s clear anyone can communicate with anyone else in the style they prefer. Blogs especially have given librarians the opportunity to discuss serious issues in a thorough but informal manner, and they’ve allowed humanistic librarians like me an outlet for professional writing that was mostly missing from the previous library literature.

They’ve also given us unprecedented public insight into the profession Ten or twelve years ago I would have loved a blog or three that gave me a feel for what actual academic librarians were thinking about. reading, and doing, the issues they thought important, something that was deeper and more personal than either the scholarly literature or the approved commentary in the major library publications. I’ve tried to do that with this blog. Despite the general title, it’s usually pretty clear that I’m not speaking for all academic librarians, or posing as the voice of the profession, but instead presenting what this librarian in this job with these issues and interests thinks about. Combined with a few other blogs from other academic librarians doing various library jobs, the curious can get a much better idea of what we do than was possible when I started library school.

The blog has changed me as well. I started it as an experiment. I’d been using library blogs as a way to understand the profession a little better. I was aware of their possibilities, not just as outlets for professional communication, but for professional growth. What I wasn’t sure of was whether I’d have anything to say worth saying, or whether anybody would bother reading, both of which were essential if I was to continue. I learn a lot and think through ideas by writing this blog, but if nobody ever read I’d just write in my journal and not bother anyone. Following E.M. Forster’s line, "how do I know what I think until I see what I say," it turns out I had nascent thoughts on the profession I wasn’t aware of.

Another change for me is that I have the freedom and security to do the professional development I want rather than what is supposedly good for my career. I don’t need tenure, so if I want to write, I just write here, and if I feel like writing an article I’ll write an article. I’ve been giving more public talks and workshops the last few years, but always things I want to do or that I learn from, not because I think I need exposure or another line on the CV.  I enjoy taking on projects now that I’ll learn something from, because I have the freedom to say no if I feel like it. I don’t do things because they’ll "keep my options open." I try to do them because they’re worth doing. I have more freedom to follow my intellectual passions and professional interests than I ever thought I would have. I’ve also learned that I only enjoy or value success if I succeed on my own terms.

When i started out, the path to success everyone seemed to agree on was hierarchical and managerial. That’s how librarians supposedly advanced. Many librarians still think like this. "First you do this, then you become head of that, then you move on to become AUL of this other thing, and finally director!" I was told something like that by a professor in library school, a professor who of course followed no such path for himself. Now I know that’s not the only path to success, and certainly not the only path to professional fulfillment. Rather than aiming for some supposedly worthwhile administrative slot, I think the goal should be mastery. Instead of thinking about the future, I want to do things well in the present and see where those things lead. For all I know, the end goal will be the same, but the path is much more interesting and less predictable.

So that’s me ten years into the profession. I wanted to end with some big lessons I’ve learned, but I’m not sure I can list any that are general to other people. I’m still learning my way, and that because librarianship is an art as much as a science, the virtue to develop is phronesis, or practical wisdom, and that takes a lifetime of practice. Ten years isn’t a lot of time when there’s so much to learn.

Leading Change

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Recently, I’ve been thinking about a lot about organizational change. I’m not a manager, and possibly not much of a leader, but here are some of my thoughts. 

Change is such an ambiguous term, much like moving forward, because in some sense everything is always changing. As Heraclitus might say, I never step into the same library twice. The rush and flux of working life always changes and adapts, sometimes to the point where if you analyze an organization you can only ask, "How in the heck did we ever get here?"

I’m assuming that any directed change should lead to improved performance related to the organization’s mission. This sounds like the kind of thing everyone can get behind, like freedom or justice. Many of the articles I’ve read over the years, or pleas for change I’ve heard, don’t get much more specific than that. They assume agreement on a mission, and agreement that any specific change will help accomplish that mission better, without connecting the two. Coming up with a mission is easy in academic libraries. Coming up with reorganizations and changes is also easy. The problem is linking them together in a persuasive way.

As I see it, the core mission of academic libraries is to build collections and facilitate their use to support the scholarship and teaching of the university. Collection development, cataloging, reference, outreach, digitization–it’s usually pretty clear how these things support our mission. We have the ends, the problem is figuring out the best means.

Assuming that we have a shared mission, to promote useful change, we have to ask at least four questions at the beginning.

  1. What are we not doing now that we should be doing to support the mission?
  2. What are we doing now that we can do better to support the mission?
  3. What are we doing now that we should not be doing?
  4. And how do any proposed changes answer those three questions?

If we can’t answer those questions, then there aren’t any good reasons to change, and we will be forcing change for change’s sake. There are good reasons to oppose such change. For one, change is disruptive and stressful, so before we change, we should be very clear that it is worth the disruption and stress. Also, we must analyze our situations carefully to make sure we won’t be eliminating something we don’t understand but that serves a useful purpose. Sometimes situations look poorly organized, when really they work but we don’t understand how. The biggest reason to oppose such changes is that they take time and energy away from serving the core mission of the academic library and devote it to other things.

Answering those questions can sometimes be very difficult. It takes a lot of experience, understanding, and analytical ability to answer them. Let’s assume some bright people have answered those questions. Where do we go from there? Identifying necessary and productive changes is but the first step, and not as difficult as implementing those changes.

If you want to avoid a confused and discouraged staff or a toxic work environment that will be unpleasant and unproductive, you can’t coerce change. You’ve got to persuade the relevant people that change is necessary and worthwhile. This seems to be the point where a lot of people fail, primarily through a lack of rhetorical skill. To persuade others, there are a few things you need to do:

  • Demonstrate a thorough understanding of the situation
  • Appeal to shared values or premises
  • Demonstrate how those shared values or premises lead to your conclusions
  • Address objections and counterarguments in a credible, but sensitive way
  • Show respect for your opposition and a little humility, because there’s no way you’re entirely right and they’re entirely wrong
  • Focus on your positive message and not get lost in useless criticism or defensiveness
  • Focus on results, not attitudes
  • Remember that threat hinders communication

This last one is especially important. No matter how credible your arguments or positions are, you can’t persuade people who feel threatened. The goal of rhetoric isn’t to win arguments, but to gain agreement on a set of propositions or a course of action, and that’s very different. If people feel threatened, they won’t even hear what you have to say.  It’ll just come out, "blah, blah, blah." Threat works both ways, though. Managers wield more power than lower level employees, but managers are people, too. They have worries and feelings, and they want to be respected and well treated. (I’m excepting the subset of managers who are just plain malignant and incompetent. They deserve all the disrespect they get.) To have people stand around constantly denigrating them is harmful professionally for them and the organization, but also for them personally. And when managers feel threatened, they too stop listening. Either way, discussion and deliberation stop.

Avoiding threat isn’t easy, though, because in some situations people naturally feel threatened. Knowing that change is disruptive and stressful means that calls for change can easily be considered threatening. Knowing there’s a boss who can force you to do things you don’t agree with can be threatening. Defusing that threat and leading change takes analytical and communication skills of the first order. Seeing criticism and dissent as necessary catalysts to constructive change rather than just angry resistance is difficult for us all. It seems to be  human nature that we think we’re right regardless of our reasoning and we have trouble understanding how anyone can possibly disagree with us.

But even the above list is very general, and assumes that the people involved are capable. The first suggestion requires that someone not only actually understand a situation, but is able to demonstrate that understanding to others. Remembering that threat hinders communication is abstract. The difficulty is knowing in practice when and how people are feeling threatened and having the skill to disarm that threat. That ability is the result of phronesis, or practical wisdom, and not something that can be learned from a bulleted list.

In earlier posts I’ve tried to disambiguate leader and manager. A manager can very easily call for change, and often can enforce it. But to identify worthwhile changes and persuade others to embrace them despite the stress involved, and to do this whileinspiring confidence and unity and without creating a toxic work environment, requires a leader.

Teaching Humanities Reference

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In the spring, I’ll be doing two things I never thought I would do: teach online and teach in a library school. I’ll be teaching arts & humanities reference online for the University of Illinois’ Graduate School of Library Science. I took the same class myself about eleven years ago when I was in library school at Illinois, but I think things have changed quite a bit since then.

I’m writing not to make a news announcement, but to run some ideas by you. I know many of you do humanities reference at some level, and quite possibly teach it, and I would love to have your opinions on some ideas I have (comments or emails welcome). I’m not going to divulge some of my specific ideas about what I want to do with the course, because even though I have the basic outline already formed, I’m still tinkering with specifics. Instead, I would love your advice about the principles governing it.

When I was in library school, reference courses were heavily driven by reference questions that had specific answers. Ready reference might be too slight a term to cover some of these, but they were still mostly factual queries that could be answered if you knew the right obscure or standard reference work to consult. The days of ready reference have passed, though. I remembered only one specific question from the course I took, and I remember it being difficult to answer because only one relatively obscure reference work addressed it in any detail. I Googled that question recently, and the top result was a Wikipedia article–complete with citations–giving a fairly good answer. I almost never field factual questions from students anymore, and this seems to be the trend with most librarians I talk to.

So first of all I think humanities reference has changed from being question-driven to being project-driven, at least in colleges. From students at all levels, I’m asked not for answers to questions, but for strategies of research. It seems crucial for my work not just to know that X database or Y book might cover a field or have an answer, but to be able to map a research strategy for a specific research question or project. Do you find that to be the case?

Sometimes this is a simple matter. "Search MLA for some secondary articles on your novel." But usually it’s much more complex, and might involve searching databases in various fields, thinking about various ways to approach the topic, different avenues of exploration, different ways of conceiving the question depending on what resources we find, etc. This is especially true as the students engage in interdisciplinary work.

To do this requires a lot more than the ability to search databases or know where to find answers or isolated secondary literature.

The requirements below are a bit jumbled, but my hypothesis is that to provide good humanities reference, a librarian should have:

  • Knowledge of the organization of information in the various humanities
  • Familiarity with the essential reference tools and indexes
  • Basic understanding of scholarly communication in the humanities
  • Familiarity with the ways scholars in different disciplines approach sources or use information
  • Some knowledge of the digital humanities
  • The ability to guide research projects, not just answer questions
  • A conceptual understanding of research projects in the humanities
  • The capacity to read and understand scholarly books and articles in the humanities

If you’re a humanities reference librarian, does this sound right based on your own work?

I realize different environments require different levels of skill and knowledge. I’ve done most of my humanities reference in what amounts to liberal arts colleges at the undergraduate level, and I’m sure it’s different answering basic questions at a community college or helping high school students research their essays. However, a course in humanities reference should prepare library school students to work with undergraduates in the humanities at a minimum. I would think the reason for taking a specialized reference course would be the hope or expectation of having a good understanding of the field, rather than a cursory glance that would be useless in practice, and in my opinion this knowledge (at least at a basic level) is necessary.

 So far I’ve thought of a number of specific ways in which to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to do good reference work in the humanities, but would be grateful for any advice you have to offer.

 

Not Economics but Justice

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LIS News led me to this blog post from Conservative Librarian, written by an academic librarian at Purdue. I’m all for librarians participating in popular political discourse, but I think this post trying to make "An Economic Case Against Homosexuality" has some rhetorical and logical problems.

The author opens by saying that "as a Christian," he agrees "with the biblical condemnation of the homosexual lifestyle." He realizes that making such a claim based on his interpretation of his holy book means nothing to any but the choir. It’s as if I said, "as a Christian, I agree with the biblical imperative to love your neighbor as yourself." Who cares? John Rawls argued that to make political arguments in a pluralist society, we need to use public reason, that is, common reason available to us all, not partial reasons available only to those who share a particular prejudice. It’s also the standard by which academic discourse is generally judged. The author apparently recognizes this problem, and thus tries to make the "economic case" against homosexuality.

Unfortunately, the claim of his provocative title falls apart almost immediately, as he’s forced to consider "other aberrant forms of sexual expression." Otherwise, the argument, such that it is, makes little sense. For example, one of the "economic cases" against homosexuality is the amount of money the U.S. has spent on AIDS treatment and research in the past few decades. There are no sources cited, and a couple of uses of "probably" rather than hard numbers, but if we consider what the U.S. has spent worldwide on AIDS it is probably a lot. I agree. However, the biggest AIDS epidemic for a long time has been in Africa, and has nothing to do with homosexuality. Hence, the resort to "other aberrant forms of sexual expression," which in the AIDS argument seems equal to "heterosexual promiscuity in Africa and elsewhere." All this money being spent on AIDS, even if it has nothing to do with homosexuality, could have been spent on other diseases. I suppose there’s a point there. It’s not a point against homosexuality, though. Note some of the money has been spent on needle exchanges. The needles have nothing to do with sex–homo, hetero, or otherwise.

Then comes this claim: "Our ongoing U.S. political debate over health care reform also needs to factor in the economic costs of  homosexual and other sexually deviant behaviors on our health care system in terms of pharmaceutical drugs, tainted blood supplies, and requiring doctors and nurses to treat sexually transmitted diseases which would be less likely to occur if people practiced chastity outside of heterosexual marriage and monogamy within such marriage." We could wonder what those costs might be, but the motivation to consider them in the way phrased has stepped outside the boundary of public reason. Sex outside of marriage is much more likely a norm of sexual behavior, which would make abstinence the "deviation," unless one’s assumptions come from a religious base rather than the evidence of what people actually do. STDs are apparently widespread in the U.S. It might be the case they’re from deviant sexual practices, but there’s no reason to assume that doctors not treating them would have been busy treating other things. We could easily reverse this and argue that it’s a good thing we have all these STDs that need treatment; otherwise all those doctors and nurses wouldn’t have as much employment.

The next paragraph is the one that really threw me, though. Here it is in full:

Anyone who studies prison conditions knows that AIDS is a reality in many correctional facilities due to the occurrence of rape. I’m not sure how systematically the Justice Dept’s Bureau of Justice Statistics keeps track of prison rape statistics or other instances of same sex sexual assault, but that also has economic implications not to mention the psychological trauma experienced by all rape victims.  I have seen one Bureau of Justice Statistics study indicating that 90% of prison rapes are from male on male sexual activity.  This particular problem was serious enough to cause Congress to pass legislation in 2003 creating a Prison Rape Elimination Commission which issued its report earlier this year.  The presence of sex offender registries, which require significant law enforcement staff time and expense to update and maintain, is another demonstration of the high economic costs of sexually deviant behavior.

Now we’ve moved well beyond any economic argument against homosexuality. "Sexual deviance" as defined by the author now includes homosexual sex, extramarital sex, prison rape, and the broad range of behaviors known as sexual offenses. Collapsing all these into the same category is conceptually problematic unless one has left public reason behind once more. To say that a stable and long-cohabiting but unmarried heterosexual couple are the equivalent of prison rapists or child molesters doesn’t make much sense morally or philosophically. Regardless of the conceptual problems trying to relate all these disparate behaviors, what "economic implications" are there about prison rape? There’s a claim, but no evidence or argument whatsoever. And even if there was, why would we need to make an economic argument against prison rape or child molestation? Surely most of us could agree that prison rape or child molestation is bad regardless of our stances on economics. This guilt by association is a poor excuse for an argument.

The author then gets slightly back on track by discussing same-sex partner benefits. This at least has some relation to homosexuality and possibly to economics. He claims that providing same-sex partner benefits "drives up insurance costs for these companies" and "requires these companies to pass on the costs of their goods and services beyond normal inflationary trends." Maybe. I don’t know. There’s no evidence cited. "Additionally, it also probably makes it more difficult for them to expand their businesses and create additional jobs in an economy coping with near double digit unemployment rates." There’s that probably again. Maybe it would. Wouldn’t all benefits do this, though? Why not eliminate all health care benefits, if economic efficiency is all that matters?

The oddest thing for a blog post from an academic librarian is a questionable citation to an alleged study–"Corporate Resource Center’s study Do Domestic Partner Benefits Make Good Economic Sense? (available at their website)"–only there’s no link and I could find no evidence that such a center or study exists. Why not just link to it? The question is irrelevant, anyway, but having a citation one could actually track down is a minimal academic requirement.

The post ends talking about further problems with the "homosexual lifestyle," despite the fact that many of the claims about "economic consequences" haven’t been based on homosexuality at all. The only economic issue specifically regarding homosexuality in the entire post is the claim that businesses expanding coverage makes it difficult for them. That’s the case for any benefits at all, though. If companies dropped all their health benefits, they’d be more profitable. Tens of millions of people would suffer horribly, but economic arguments don’t address that.

Besides the red herrings, the real problem with the argument is that, while pretending to rely on public reasoning, it relies on the wrong type of public reasoning. It’s making an economic argument when a political or moral one is appropriate.

One could make an "economic case" against all sorts of rights. For example, one could have argued during the civil rights debates in the fifties and sixties tha
t ending Jim Crow would have economic costs. Ending Jim Crow and spending money to enforce equal rights cost money. So what?

Males under 25 are the most dangerous drivers on the road and cause the most accidents. Should we forbid them to drive? People who eat red meat have a higher chance of getting heart disease, which is a tax on our health system. Should we ban meat? The divorce rate for evangelical Christians is higher than for any other religious group and for agnostics and atheists? Think of the economic costs in terms of divorce lawyers, property loss, increased chances of impoverishment for single mothers with children, not to mention the costs of dealing with the psychological problems divorce can cause in children. Should we ban evangelical Christians from marrying and having children?

Despite the apparent attempt to use public arguments not based on the Bible, the exercise in this blog post is misguided. Using economic arguments in a political debate only makes sense if the persons in the debate share common values, because there’s no value in economics besides efficiency. There’s a persistent belief among many Americans that economic arguments trump political or moral arguments, but that logic isn’t carried through consistently. It’s only applied when the supposed economic argument benefits their political side.

This attempt at public reasoning ultimately fails. Economic arguments are about the most efficient means to an end, but they’re pointless unless we agree on the end. Besides, questions of rights aren’t about economics; they’re about justice, whichever side you’re on.

 

Creationists Come to College

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Most of you might already have heard about the creationist edition of The Origin of Species that an evangelical Christian ministry will be passing out on college campuses in November. I first read about it here. U.S. News has a pair of dueling blog posts from the creationist introduction writer Ray Comfort and the director for the National Center for Science Education.

I’ll have to reserve judgment completely until I actually see a copy, but based on Comfort’s blog post and the Kirk Cameron video promoting this, the creationist introduction by Ray Comfort sounds like it’s going to be a whirlwind of fallacious reasoning.

Supposedly it claims that Charles Darwin was a racist and didn’t like women. That’s a standard ad hominem attack that’s a fallacy if it is used to try to discredit the person’s views on other things. Darwin’s personal views aren’t relevant to the theory of evolution.  If a Christian minister has sex with children or murders someone in cold blood, does that mean God doesn’t exist?

Or there’s the Hitler connection. Every muddled thinker likes to bring Hitler into an argument if they can. Far from clinching an argument, it usually just shows the irrationality of the person making it. From Comfort’s blog post: "It also has quotes from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf showing Hitler’s undeniable links to evolution. Of course, Hitler also used Christianity to further his political agenda, but my point is that…." There’s no need to go on. His point is that he’ll use the evidence to support his criticism but ignore that it also undermines his own position, a very convenient double standard. Confirmation bias or suppressed evidence might be the fallacy.

There’s further suppression of evidence. This one was spotted by the Salon article. "[Cameron] then narrows in for the killer point: ‘A recent study revealed that in the top 50 universities in our country, in the fields of psychology and biology, 61 percent of the professors described themselves as atheist or agnostic.”\’ True, though he fails to point out that the same study found only 23.4 percent of college professors overall declare themselves atheist or agnostic. College: still pretty damn godly!" I wish I’d written that.

One major fallacy is the false dichotomy of this creationist’s claims. "An entire generation is being brainwashed by atheistic evolution without even hearing the alternative," Cameron intones in the video, as if there were only these two options, and in exactly the form he proposes [my italics]. Since this is a church that apparently believes that Catholics aren’t Christians, astounding ignorance about the world’s possibilities shouldn’t surprise me. One very likely possibility is that the students have in fact heard "the" alternative and found it wanting.

Resting on this false dichotomy, the whole project is based on the belief that debunking The Origin of Species somehow proves that creationism is true. This fallacy is known as argumentum ad ignorantiam, the argument that because some proposition hasn’t been proven, then some other contradictory proposition is therefore true. But Darwin and the creationists could both be wrong. Some creationists act as if The Origin of Species is the "Bible" of evolutionists, but that’s projecting the way fundamentalists think onto the way scientists think.

I’m not at all surprised by this lack of reasoning ability. I took a look at the Living Waters Ministry site. They produce something called the Evidence Bible that seems to be devoid of any actual evidence. Fundamentalists of any religion are always guilty of the begging the question. They assume as true what needs to be proven for their argument to proceed. Begging the question is the essential fundamentalist fallacy.  A standard example of question begging offered in classes is this circular argument: "The Bible is true because God says it is. God exists because the Bible says He does."

Living Waters directly addresses this charge: "The ‘circular reasoning’ argument is absurd. That’s like saying you can’t prove that the President lives in the White House by looking into  the White House. It is looking into the White House that will provide the necessary proof." Actually, it’s not at all like saying that. There is plenty of observable evidence that the President lives in the White House, evidence open to public inspection and verification. Merely looking into the White House wouldn’t prove that the person in there was the President or was actually living there. Trying to rebut the charge of question begging with another fallacy–the false analogy–doesn’t get very far. (The answers regarding Bible versions are downright dissembling. If you get that far, pay attention to the weasel word versions

Cameron seems very concerned that students come to college as creationists and leave as "atheists." I doubt that most students who come to college as theists of some sort leave as atheists. Is there any proof of this? This is like those claims that the students carefully indoctrinated into right-wing doctrines by their parents are then indoctrinated into left-wing doctrines by their leftist professors. That one is merely assumed but not proven as well. The creationist one in particular is guilty of the fallacy of persuasive definition, that is, of defining something in a way that seems neutral but is in fact very loaded. Anyone who doesn’t subscribe to this particular intellectually limited version of Christianity is somehow not a Christian. Belief in the Nicene Creed isn’t sufficient for the this particular cult.

Persuasive definitions are a fondness of Comfort’s, it seems. His U.S. News post says "The Introduction also defines an atheist as someone who believes that nothing created everything—which is a scientific impossibility." That’s a very peculiar definition of atheist, but then again people incapable of meeting rational arguments on their own ground must resort to this kind of move. Does anyone believe nothing created everything?

What a college education should do is knock the fallacious reasoning out of someone and instill a capacity for critical thinking. These creationists demonstrate that they are incapable of sound argument or scientific reasoning, which puts them at a disadvantage when coming onto college campuses. The enterprise is loaded against them from the start because they are trying to use  the tools of science and reason against their main practitioners without understanding how they work.

What I find either amusing or sad (depending on my mood) is that these creationists think there is actually a debate and they’re just not being heard, if indeed they do think this and are not merely being disingenuous. Obviously there isn’t any debate. To have a debate, one must share some premises, and there aren’t any shared premises. One must also demonstrate a willingness to be persuaded, rather than confining one’s mind inside an unfalsifiable ideology. At the very least one must have shared standards of evidence, and this is completely lacking.

They think there is a scientific debate between creationism and evolution, but the debate is whether the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, and literally true Word of God. That’s a religious debate, though, not a scientific one, and it’s been tried and found want
ing by the vast majority of educated and intelligent people open to an examination of the evidence for a few centuries now. There’s no battle between science and religion. In this case, there’s just a battle between fundamentalists and modernity.

It’s ironic that creationists try to dispute evolution because it supposedly has no evidence to support it (which the evolutionary biologists deny, but then again they would, wouldn’t they!) when the creationist position not only has absolutely no evidence to support it outside of the Bible but has to ignore what scientific evidence there is. This is only a problem for creationists if they attempt to persuade people for whom science, reason, and evidence are important. Begging the question works on people who can’t think clearly.

I wonder what will happen if Cameron and the LIving Waters visit my campus. As far as I can tell, Princeton is a remarkably tolerant place for people of reasonable views. Perhaps they’ll encounter prominent Catholic, conservative professor Robert George and tell him he’ll burn in hell because he’s not a Christian. Given his ability and his willingness to engage adversaries calmly and critically, that might be an interesting discussion, indeed.

There’s no use arguing with fundamentalists. That’s a lesson I learned the hard way. In my home state of Louisiana, I used to be accosted by fundamentalist Christians asking if I was "born again" before they began selectively quoting the Bible at me. Back in the day when I had more time on my hands, I would engage them in discussion, to no end. Usually they couldn’t even defend the Bible well, much less their other claims. (Seven years of Southern Baptist private school–don’t try to trade Bible quotes with me, buddy.)

I’m not trying to argue with Comfort or against this edition of Darwin. He sensibly asks why angry atheists would want to suppress this book or rip out the introduction. I’m not an angry atheist, so I have no such desire. If one of the books somehow ends up in my hands, I will, in my capacity as religion bibliographer, definitely add it to the collection. it will make a nice curio someday for a religion scholar studying quirky manifestations of fundamentalism in America.

Shortest-Lived Genre in Book History?

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Selecting titles for off-site storage in a large library is sometimes a trip through the history of fads and passions. Years ago, I sent off a number of titles on atheism from the 1960s, thinking that subject probably wouldn’t be a craze again. Less than a decade later came Dawkins et al., so I’m definitely no seer.

However, I do have a proposal for the shortest-lived genre in book history: A Guide to [Whatever Subject] on the Internet. Ten or fifteen years ago this was a hot genre, and now the notion of using a book as a guide to websites just seems archaic.

Dealing with the Pusher Man

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We’re discussing some of our journal packages from large publishers, so I’ve been thinking a lot about them lately. Those who work in or have paid much attention to collection development for the past couple of decades are aware of the impact serial price increases have had on library budgets. I think this has been one of the most pressing issue in academic libraries for a long time. In general, I believe libraries should pull out of most package deals with publishers and go back to managing subscriptions on a title by title basis, as well as have the willingness to cut those titles with exorbitant price raises. This provides libraries their only bargaining power with publishers.

I’ve heard a number of librarians over the years claim that Elsevier or Wiley or Springer or whomever were “evil,” and I can’t say I’ve always been more generous in my appraisals. It doesn’t help us to bemoan our fate or ask why the publishers act like they do. They do things for the same reason all corporations do anything: to maximize profit. Why this big increase? To maximize profit. Why that pricing model? To maximize profit. That’s all the “evil” publishers like Elsevier do, and they do it well. As long as they’re not being fraudulent (like publishing advertising as medical scholarship), they’re no more evil than any corporation. Publishers aren’t there to be information providers. Providing information is just the way they make money. I think scholarly information is a public good and should be kept out of commercial hands for the most part, but that’s certainly not going to happen. Blaming commercial publishers for maximizing profits is like blaming fish for swimming.

We’re never operating in an equal bargaining position, partly because journals aren’t commodities. Each journal is a monopoly. We can’t unsubscribe from Brain and choose Mind instead just to save $10,000. Publishers know how unlikely we are to sacrifice key titles. Many years ago they tried to maximize their profit by raising journal prices at four times the rate of inflation. When libraries finally cracked and started cutting subscriptions, they got us to give up all control and agree to multi-year packages where they would raise the prices each year by only twice the rate of inflation, and we agreed to ease our pain. Then they threw in a lot of stuff we neither want not need and pretended they were doing us a favor, while in reality they were just trying to get us hooked so we’d do anything they asked later just to keep getting our fix. Plus, now we’re charged for “access,” and don’t even own anything that we can preserve in some cases. They were performing as rational agents in the marketplace. The question is, can we?

It doesn’t do any good to try to bargain with publishers if we have nothing to bargain with. They’ve seen for 20 years how willing we are to make deals which benefit them more than they benefit us. The only way to have any bargaining power is to get out of the packages and resume control title by title. Someone might ask,  what if they go back their old ways and start raising journal prices exorbitantly? The only answer is that we have to cancel the journals they do this for, and with hindsight know that moving into multi-year packages won’t solve our problems, either. If we’re not willing to go back to title by title control, and we’re also not willing to cancel subscriptions even to high profile journals if they start raising prices exorbitantly, then we have NO bargaining power whatsoever, and probably never will. Unless we do this, there’s certainly no use in trying to fix the blame on the publishers; we’ll have only ourselves to blame.

There has probably never been a better time for libraries to start acting more aggressively in the marketplace. Librarians have been putting the case against commercial STM journal publishers for years, and the faculty don’t like it when publishers do this stuff any more than we do. But now libraries have an even better reason to act. Libraries and universities are under enormous financial strain, and this is the perfect time to try to regain our bargaining power. This is the time to stop paying for packages containing a lot of titles we don’t want, don’t need, and don’t use, and to take back what control we can. It’s no use damning the Pusher Man. The only way to deal with the Pusher Man is to push back.