Cleaning House

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Suddenly I’ve been crazy busy. During the long summer when time seemed to stretch forever and I had plenty of time to do what I needed to do, I would think, boy, I can’t wait for fall to come. The students come back. The weather cools. I start teaching again. Now I’m thinking, boy, this place sure was less hectic without all these classes going on. I’ve been meaning to write here for the past week, but never seemed to find the time. Eventually, I want to write about the Ithaka report on the future of research libraries and a few other things I’ve been reading, but it will have to wait.

I even missed lighter things. For example, I wanted to write about the Ivygateblog’s “Hottest Librarian in the Ivy League” contest. Not that I thought anyone would enter me into the contest, despite my height and good hair. I might stand a chance in an “Ivy League Librarian who doesn’t look too bad in dark clothes and a dim light” contest, but even then I’m not so sure. The contest seems to have been inspired by someone who compared Sarah Palin’s supposed makeover to the “hot librarian effect.” Considering what I’ve been reading about Palin and libraries, it probably wouldn’t please a lot of librarians–hot or otherwise–to be compared to her. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t win the contest. However, though she’s undeniably very attractive, I’m not sure the winner is really a librarian. The whole contest has a whiff of scandal about it, if you ask me.

The Ivies, or at least one Ivy, came up in another post last week I wanted to write about. Over at ACRLog, Steven Bell was exhibiting what looked to me like resentment against Harvard. Resentment is never pretty. He begins, “Does the name Robert Darnton ring a bell? No?” Actually, the name Robert Darnton did mean something to me. He’s a prominent historian of, among other things, publishing and the book, and a Princeton professor emeritus who’s now the director of the Harvard libraries. Bell takes issue with something Darnton wrote about Harvard:

Lesser libraries may rely on Google, JSTOR, and whatever they can harvest from the Internet, but Harvard has a responsibility to keep up with the production of scholarship by increasing its acquisitions of books-old-fashioned books, print on paper…No other university library has contracted such a heavy obligation, because none can compare with Harvard in the depth and breadth of its collections.

It really shouldn’t come as a surprise to any academic librarian that when we talk about library collections, there’s big and then there’s Harvard big. I’ve argued before that the largest and richest libraries have an obligation to collect the human and scholarly record as completely as possible because if they don’t do it, no one will. They have an obligation that transcends their individual institutions and extends to the entire scholarly world. When I wrote that, I was thinking primarily about Harvard, though I’d include a handful of the other largest libraries. The purpose of a research library is to collect as much as possible and make it accessible. Librarians can provide all the great public service they want, but if the collections aren’t there to support research then the library has failed in an important mission. Bell’s response: “Well I’ll certainly sleep more soundly at night knowing that the future of civilization is safe as long as Harvard continues to amass its huge collections.” Frankly, the response astounds me. I’m not sure it affects my sleep at all, but as a librarian and a human being with an interest in preserving human culture, I am reassured knowing that some library somewhere is amassing this sort of collection so that it will be available for future generations. The time frame of a research library, and especially of one like Harvard, is large. Research libraries aren’t just about helping current undergraduates make it through college. They also have to collect and preserve as much as they can for scholars decades hence. To dismiss a serious scholar like Darnton who has a deep understanding and abiding concern for the mission of a great research library with a snide, resentful remark seems inappropriate to me.

Last week, I heard about a discussion among some academics and some academic librarians over who should teach citation skills to students. An “academic” (as it was put to me) thought the teachers should teach the citation skills, because they were the scholars who cited things. Others thought the librarians should continue to teach such skills because they always had. Is this a controversy anywhere? When I started teaching, it never occurred to me to ask a librarian to teach about citation. Guides to MLA, APA, and Chicago styles are in just about every writing handbook around, and since I was usually teaching academic research and writing, it made sense to teach citation format as well. As a librarian, nobody has ever asked me to teach citation styles in the classroom, though I’ve gotten some reference questions over the years. However, our library does provide workshops on Endnote and Refworks, and we’re all expected to be familiar with these tools and with citation styles in general. I just thought it seemed odd that anyone would care enough to argue that either professors or librarians would be the “best” group to teach citation, as if both aren’t equally familiar with them. Even the argument that the academics are the ones publishing is weak, since obviously lots of academic librarians do publish. The library literature isn’t especially great, but it’s not because the citations are incorrect.

Okay, my house is clean now.

The Dumbest Generation?

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“Students, even of college age, have had very little conscious experience of life or books and it is no wonder their minds are bone dry.” Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America, 1945.

I’ve been meaning to write about The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future [Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30] for weeks, mainly because it has such a pithy title, but also because I mentioned it in a post a few weeks ago but hadn’t read it yet. Time passes, though. I got back from a week’s vacation to find a ton of work from both the jobs I work in the Fall plus a dead hard drive on my office computer, then classes are starting and along with them the many presentations and whatnot. Life seemed very busy all of a sudden. And then there’s the problem that I just couldn’t make it through the book, and not because I was too depressed by how the digital age has corrupted us all.

Now I’m even more belated, because yesterday’s A & L Daily linked to a two–part column by my favorite CHE columnist on stupidity in these kids today which mentions Bauerlein’s book among others. I haven’t had time to read those, either, and definitely feel that I’m falling down in my obligation to stay informed. Nevertheless, I want to forge ahead and just mention some things that struck me about The Dumbest Generation.

I wanted to like this book. I’ve written before that I’m a sucker for any hypothesis about the world going to hell in a handcart since whatever bad thing happened: Eve eating the apple, Caesar destroying the Republic, Luther destroying Christendom, European settlers killing indigenous Americans, Yankees defeating the Confederacy, Hitler killing everyone in sight, or the latest tragedy–the advent of the “digital age.” I always have a suspicion that the historical period I’m living in is the worst one except for all the historical periods that have preceded it.

And with the sole exception of movies, I’m definitely something of a cultural and intellectual snob, so I’m happy to look down at the hapless masses and say with the cultural critics, “oh yes, you can’t possibly have a worthwhile life if you haven’t read X author or aren’t familiar with Y artist or can’t hum the introductory movement of Z symphony.” Everyone seems to have different standards of snobbery, but for argument’s sake I’ll suggest the complete works of Shakespeare (check!), Albrecht Durer (check!), and Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony (check!). There, ain’t I cultured. But it could be Joyce’s Ulysses (check!), Picasso (check!), and Bruckner’s seventh symphony (check!). I have this pathological desire to know everything about history, literature, philosophy, politics, religion, music, and art, but I’m willing to admit that not everyone shares my passions and that doesn’t mean they’re dumb. They’re just hard to hold conversations with.

As I said, I wanted to like the book, and there are many good things about the book, but I couldn’t accept the argument.

First of all, as I wrote in the previous post, I’m skeptical of the whole enterprise of evaluating 18-year-olds by the standards of middle-aged college professors. Partly, that’s because I remember what I was like at 18, and partly because I haven’t noticed any drastic difference in students, though admittedly I see a limited number of them. However, I started teaching freshmen at the University of Illinois in 1992, and out of the few hundred students I taught there, I recall only a couple who had the sort of intellectual curiosity that one might find in graduate students or faculty. They were very ordinary 18-year-olds, and most of them were intellectually mediocre. And this was in the days before iPods and laptops, when professors were still suggesting their students “word process” their papers, when I assumed anyone with a cell phone was a doctor or a drug dealer.

Let’s also consider just ordinary people out in the world when we start thinking about the kind of intellectual curiosity and engagement with ideas and culture–or lack thereof–that some people complain about. Is it that college students are getting dumber? Or that most people are already dumb, and that more of them are going to college as standards lower? I don’t have an answer, but it’s a legitimate question. If we take a look at the most popular television shows, movies, games, magazines, websites, etc. for every age category, are we intellectual snobs going to find much to impress us? I live a pretty sheltered life these days. Just about every adult I know has at least a master’s degree, and often two or more or a PhD. I just don’t meet many uneducated people. What are they like? Most people don’t even go to college, so I have no idea what the ordinary person is like. Have we always been in decline because most people have never heard of Shostakovitch or can’t explain the Monroe Doctrine?

Some quibbles aren’t with the premise, but with some of the arguments in the book itself, though. For example: “Even if we grant the point that on some measures today’s teenagers and 20-year-olds perform no worse than yesterday’s, the implication critics make seems like a concession to inferiority. Just because sophomores 50 years ago couldn’t explain the Monroe Doctrine or identify a play by Sophocles any more than today’s sophomores doesn’t mean that today’s shouldn’t do better, far better” (30). So, in some ways the kids aren’t getting any dumber at all, but because we’re so much more advanced now and they spend so much time in school and have computers and such, the kids should somehow care about the Monroe Doctrine more than their predecessors. Why is that exactly? Because they more access to cultural information, they thus have a reason to take advantage of that access? I just don’t see the connection. Teenage culture is what it is. I think my previous question still stands. When you’re a teenager, if you can play the blues on a Strat, what difference does it make to you who’s on the Supreme Court?

Or consider the interpretation of the results of the National Survey of Student Engagement, which showed that from 2003 to 2005 (which seems like a small time frame to me) college freshmen and college seniors seemed to be reading slightly more books. This is a “disappointing improvement” because their college experience hasn’t turned them into scholarly people, like all those scholarly people running around everywhere in past generations (55-56). “Compare this attitude,” Bauerlein suggests, “with that of young Frederick Douglass.” “Or that of John Stuart Mill.” Comparing the intellectual engagement of the majority of college students or even American citizens with brilliant and eloquent men like Douglass or Mill hardly seems relevant. What do we learn by saying that most people don’t have the intellect of such men? We learn that the people who make those comparisons have spent a lot more time reading great books than they have paying attention to what most people are really like. I myself would feel most at home in a world of Douglasses or Mills, but that’s not how life is, and it’s even less like that when one leaves academia.

The book has a series of these irrelevant comparisons. “If cognitive talents rise correspondingly with the proliferation of screens and the sophistication of shows and games, why hasn’t a generation of historically informed, civically active, verbally able, and mathematically talented young adults come forth and proven the cultural pessimists and aged curmudgeons wrong?” (92). This is a typical move in the argument. Some foolish group claims that such and such technology is making everyone smarter. Obviously it isn’t. Thus the kids are somehow dumber. But this isn’t a problem with the kids or even the technology, but with the hype. The criticism shouldn’t be directed against kids and adults who do the same unintellectual things they always have–only now with shinier gadgets–but instead against anyone stupid enough to believe that a child is going to learn better or know more because their information comes from a computer rather than a book. Criticizing techno-hype isn’t as much fun, apparently, as claiming that we’ve just raised the “dumbest generation.” I don’t get the impression that Bauerlein believes the hype, though. It’s just a way to score points. However, just saying the kids aren’t as smart as some people claimed they would be doesn’t make them dumb, or even dumbest.

He asks his students to sit down with their friends at dinner and and as an experiment use some big words to see what happens. They balk at this, thinking their friends will avoid them, or more likely think them pretentious jerks. This “demonstrates that the social settings of adolescence actually conspire against verbal maturity” (155). That comes as a shocking revelation to anyone who has never been an adolescent, but should it for the rest of us? Isn’t there something to be said for discourse communities? Adolescent boys don’t talk like college professors. Neither do grown men sitting around drinking beer and cheering a football game. Neither does anyone else for that matter. Most people don’t have very large vocabularies. That’s just a fact. Most communication takes place with a minimum of words. Unless one wants to be able to articulate sophisticated thoughts or critical insights, or is in love with language, or perhaps just wants to impress other academics, an extensive vocabulary just isn’t required. Blaming teenagers because they don’t sound like educated college professors just seems like another irrelevant comparison. I can feel his pain (I once cringed when someone teaching at Princeton pronounced the “ch” in “inchoate” as the “ch” in “church”), but it doesn’t mean most people have or ever have had large vocabularies.

Finally, I couldn’t finish the book. It’s a quick read. Bauerlein is a fine writer with, I believe, good and serious intentions. There were more statistics and studies quoted, but I just couldn’t get past what seemed a flawed premise: that because teenagers today aren’t as intellectual as college professors, despite their increased access to culture through digital means, they’re somehow dumber than teenagers in the past or most adults today. The book is a great exercise in how to create an imagined crisis and boost sales, but I’m not sure it tells us about any significance between today’s college students and the allegedly smarter generations that have come before.

Research Libraries Support Research

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I’ve long thought that the concept of “library” isn’t a very coherent one. The small town (pop. 300 or so) public library that serves my grandmother and the very large research library I work in are both called libraries, and yet their staff, collections, and mission couldn’t be more different. There are also often large differences in outlook even among academic librarians. Sometimes this is a teaching versus research difference, and sometimes a service versus collections difference. Few librarians seem to move completely to one side or another, and I certainly don’t, but the tensions are undoubtedly there in the profession, and often in the same library.

I’m thinking about this because of the juxtaposition of topics I’ve encountered so far today. This morning I attended a presentation by Bernard Reilly, President of the Center for Research Libraries. He discussed a lot of the initiatives currently underway at CRL, including a number of their digitization projects. One of them involves Latin American newspapers, and as part of an effort to make the materials more useful to the libraries in the region digital copies will be made available to those libraries as well as to CRL libraries, though not freely on the Internet. My favorite quote was that this project is “built on the assumption that an Internet cafe is not a library.” Though the CRL hopes to digitize a lot of material in the coming years, I seriously doubt that everything they have will ever be digitized. I wasn’t aware until today of how much of it isn’t even cataloged yet.

To the undigitized, and possibly never digitized collections of CRL, add the archives scattered across the globe. Then the book collections that aren’t now, and may never be digitized. That’s a lot of material that will never be freely available from an Internet cafe or your laptop, or even your university should they have the money to pay for such things.

Now let us turn to a blog post at ACRLog I read just after the presentation–Library as Place–For Air Conditioning Books. In it Steven Bell comments on a presentation by Adrian Sannier, Chief Technology Officer at Arizona State University. Bell excerpts a couple of tasty quotes. Here’s part of one:

If you were starting [an educational institution] today, how many books would you have? I know what I would do. I’d have none. I’d have zero. Well that would change my cost picture relevant to you and that would make my university’s knowledge so much more accessible to you both when you’re there and when you weren’t there. That kind of reinvention is what we’re talking about.

About that, I’m not sure what to say, except it wouldn’t be much of an educational institution, but more on that later.

Here’s part of another juicy one:

Burn down the library. C’mon, all the books in the world are already digitized….Stop air conditioning the books. Enough already. None of us has the Alexandria Library. Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, Indiana. Those guys have digitized their collections. What have you got that they haven’t got? Why are you buying a new book? Buy digitial….How many people are using the indicies we’re all paying so much for….

Bell certainly realizes how ignorant (or perhaps deliberately provocative) Sannier is about book digitization and higher education, though he opines that maybe some IT people have it in for us librarians. Bell’s response is that If “academic libraries are being dismissed as one big book air conditioner then we better start doing some of our own transforming to make sure our operations are lean yet productive, and that we have the data to prove to the top administrators that our libraries deliver the best service for the tuition dollar. It must be shown that academic libraries directly contribute to students achieving learning outcomes and persistence to graduation.” That’s certainly a sensible approach, but there are other considerations to make about Sannier’s poorly informed presentation.

First of all, I find it difficult to take even remotely seriously. Dr. Sannier is no doubt a bright and competent man. He has a PhD in computer science, and before going to ASU worked with computer systems both in academia and private industry, according to his bio. My assertion isn’t that I don’t take him seriously as a professional, only that I can’t take him seriously as an expert on university research or teaching more broadly, that is, outside of the technological and digital portions of it. Obviously Google has not digitized all the books in the Google Book project libraries, and just as obviously the copyrighted ones they have digitized are not freely available online. Obviously also, as Bell note, curricula differ widely among educational institutions, and it’s not at all clear that even the complete collections available freely online at some of these libraries would satisfy all comers, which of course we know isn’t going to happen anyway.

I’d like to watch the entire presentation, but unfortunately right now I have a spreadsheet of 38,000 nondigitized book titles I have to go through line by line to make location decisions, plus I’m going on vacation next week, so I can barely break away to blog. Perhaps next time I have a free moment, which at this point will probably be New Year’s Day. Still, based on the excerpts as well as Bell’s reaction, neither of them are necessarily taking into account the larger mission of the research library. Bell’s response is to recommend that libraries make the case that tuition dollars are used wisely and student learning outcomes are met and they graduate. That’s all good stuff, and I think natural from a public services AUL at an urban state university.

But teaching students is but one mission of a research university, and not necessarily the most important one, if we judge by what professors get the most rewards for. The purpose of a research university is to research, to create knowledge, to contribute to the scholarly record, etc. This differs by field, naturally. In the sciences, engineering, computer science, and other areas, this may not require anything that can’t be accessed by a computer. In the humanities, area studies, and some of the social sciences, it does, and it most likely will for decades to come, if not forever. Yes, it’s possible that eventually every archive and book collection in the world will be digitized and available to researchers, even if not for free, like some of the collections coming out of the CRL are now available to research libraries. It’s possible, but it doesn’t seem very likely.

Another possibility is that enough material will be digitized that future researchers will just be content with what is digitally available and not worry about the rest. That’s pretty sloppy research, but as we know everyone, scholars included, prefer the good but easily available to the best but difficult to obtain. This could happen, but it wouldn’t negate the ideal of the research university or research library; it would just cheapen it.

It’s this perspective that makes it difficult for research libraries. Sannier rightly notes that no library is a universal library. No one has everything. That’s been the case for decades, though. The CRL, for example, was founded in 1949 to address this issue. That’s why we have cooperative agreements with other libraries. This is not even remotely a new issue. It might seem like a new issue now only if you think everything is digitized. Since most books, archives, etc., aren’t digitized, there’s nothing new being said about the issue. Just claiming it’s true doesn’t make it so.

I don’t think every institution of higher education should be a research university or every library a research library. I also don’t think that large libraries are necessary for most undergraduate education. It’s clear some fields hardly need library resources. Despite its dependence on monographs, a strong liberal arts education could probably be supported by a library of 10,000 books or so, if they were, for example, the 10,000 or so that Peter Briscoe in Reading the Map of Knowledge considers the “core.” And perhaps all those books would be digitally available to a new college today, or at least relatively soon. So, if we’re talking about starting up a new community college, or business school, or liberal arts college, this get-rid-of-the-print-books approach has at least a chance of working, though what liberal arts college would feel satisfied with a library so small I don’t know. Thomas Aquinas College, perhaps. But still, if one wanted to trim the collection to the absolute minimum necessary for a decent liberal arts college, it just might be barely possible. (That’s a lot of qualification, I know).

However, once we turn away from undergraduate education, the whole notion breaks down completely, and for any research university worth the name such a scheme is unthinkable if the library is actually designed to support any research. And the argument that no library is universal only goes so far. No library is a universal library, but it seems clear to me that the top 25 libraries or so plus places like CRL together constitute about as universal library as we are about to get. We can measure “top” anyway we please, whether it’s the number of items, amount of digital content, or financial resources. Regardless, there have to be a number of libraries that do their best to build just-in-case research collections for some fields so that we can all satisfy our otherwise insatiable just-in-time research needs.

A “research library” without print materials and climate control to protect them is an oxymoron. That might not always be the case, and I wouldn’t feel at all bad if the situation went away, but it’s here to stay for a long time to come. Print materials are still needed for research, and the purpose of a research library is to support research. I suppose some would consider me an excessive technophobe or bibliophile for saying that, but such is far from the case. I just want to protect research libraries and the universities they support from the excessive technophiles and bibliophobes that could destroy them if given a chance.

Get to Know Me

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Lately I’ve been wanting to get to know myself better, to really explore who I am, and there’s no better way to do that than by taking quizzes at Blogthings or some other such site. I took a lot of them so that I would know more about myself, and I thought I would share them with you, so you can get to know me, too. If you don’t want to know more about me, don’t read on.

I don’t think I’m the main demographic for these quizzes, because most of them seemed aimed at unmarried young women. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find out if I was a vain girl, or a fit girl, or an “it” girl. I’ll never find out if my boyfriend is cheating on me, or if I have him hooked, or if he loves me only for my body (probably not).

Still, I can find out the really important things about myself. For example, I’m a sexually powerful brainiac with a very high independence level who is incredibly logical and bold when it counts. How many librarians can say that, I ask you.

Those all sound pretty good to me, but sometimes one finds out unpleasant things about oneself. For example, I’m a little anal retentive and 32% gross. Oh, and I’m only an okay listener.

And then there are the things one never really thinks about. For example, I’m not prissy. In fact, I’m “the furthest thing from a princess.” It’s something I’ve never really thought about before, but it’s good to know. Also, it seems I make a good first impression. That’s nice to know as well.

Then there are the things I already suspected. My movie buff quotient is 84%. I’m “a movie buff of the most obsessive variety. If a movie exists, chances are that [I’ve] seen it.” Doesn’t surprise me at all.

There are also the little random things one can find out about oneself, such as from the shortest personality quiz, where choosing which picture you like most tells you a lot about your personality. That sounds pretty scientific to me. According to that quiz, I am “elegant, withdrawn, and brilliant. [My] mind is a weapon, able to solve any puzzle. [I am] also great at poking holes in arguments and common beliefs.” Hmm. That could be.

And there are the things people can find out about me from, for example, my musical taste. My “musical tastes are reflective and complex. [I am] intellectual to the point of being cerebral. [I am] very open to new experiences, and even more open to new ideas and theories. Wisdom and personal accomplishment are important to [me]. [I am] naturally sophisticated. [I am} drawn to art, especially art by independent artists. [I am] likely to be financially well off… and not because [I was] born that way.” I was sure this was correct until that last sentence. So much for science.

Fortunately, I haven’t been ruined by American culture, whatever that is. The quizmasters think I may not be American at all. I feel pretty American, though, so I just don’t know what to believe. Maybe it’s because I “take a more global philosophy with [my] politics, taste, and life.” The problem is, when I start to unpack that sentence, I’m not exactly sure what it would mean to take a philosophy with my taste. Sometimes going through these quizzes I think it’s just possible not only that the makers don’t know what they’re talking about, but that they don’t express themselves very well.

To wrap things up, I’ll just let you know a couple of random things. I’m disturbingly profound rather than profoundly disturbing and my seduction style is the charmer. I just thought you should know.

To Read or Not to Read

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I seem to be reading a lot lately about how people don’t read anymore, especially these young people. On my recent flights, there sure seemed to be a lot of people reading books, but maybe airline travel is restricted to the especially literate, though that wouldn’t explain the four hours I once had to spend listening to the woman next to me extol the virtues of Boyd’s Bears as she traveled to a Boyd’s Bears convention. And you thought library conventions were bad.

It’s a good thing I’m not worried about the kids not reading today, because I’m putting together my syllabus for my writing seminar, which begins all too soon. The reading list isn’t especially heavy in terms of page count. I always considered such courses torture because I’m such a slow reader. In a Victorian novel course I took in graduate school, I’m not sure I finished any of the novels except The Mill on the Floss, and that’s because I had to present on it. It seemed I’d get a third of the way through one of Dickens’ interminable tomes and we’d start on yet another one. Even The Mill on the Floss I had to read so quickly I remember almost nothing about it. I think someone dies.

So the pages are relatively small in number, but dense, especially the Rawls. If you’ve ever read any Rawls (John, not Lou), then you know what a tedious writer he can be. It’s a pity someone so brilliant couldn’t write more gracefully. Still, if the prevailing views of students are correct, whatever are we to do with them? Just now I was trying to decide between a Philip Pettit or a Quentin Skinner essay to represent the republican position. I decided on both, but if these kids today don’t read, perhaps I should just teach neither. Perhaps we should abandon research and writing altogether. Why bother if the kids are so incorrigibly dumb?

From a professor at Illinois who’d obviously been around a while even then I heard about some of the protesting hippie teaching assistants teaching rhetoric in the late sixties. Instead of essays, they’d have the students make collages and such. Maybe we could abandon reading and writing completely and just do that in class. Collages have the advantage not only of looking prettier than essays, they’re also much easier to grade while stoned.

The touchstone of the new aliteracy for some seems to be that the kids today aren’t reading literature anymore. Capital L Literature apparently used to be important to the culture, and everyone who was anyone ran around discussing T.S. Eliot or Allen Ginsberg while drinking cocktails or smoking pot (respectively), or ruminating on the supposed complexities of Beckett or Sartre. The kids just don’t do this anymore, and it bothers some people.

Let’s hope the students get a smattering of great literature during their college years, but otherwise, is it so bad if they don’t read novels for fun? Some of them no doubt will go on to be the educated intellectual types who will lament for the future because the next generation will be so ill read. But if most of them grow up reading nothing more substantial than news or blogs or the occasional magazine, will they be that much different from how most people have always been? Did we ever really live through some literary golden age when masses of people read more not because it was what they wanted to do but because there wasn’t much else to do.

The nineteenth century in England and America seemed to be a relatively literate time, but was there not perhaps a large difference between those who for enjoyment read the John Stuart Mill or Matthew Arnold and those who read the serial installments of The Old Curiosity Shop and flocked to Dickens’ celebrity tours of America? When literature was entertainment, were we any better off as a society? Now that literature is less popular, doesn’t there still seem to be a lot of reading going on? And is the person who daily consumes another genre novel somehow more critical and analytical than the rest of us, more fit to be a citizen than those who skim headlines on Google News or read political blogs?

Perhaps, though, the curmudgeons and naysayers are correct, and somehow this year the students will be worse than they were last year. The dumbest generation goes to college. Apparently I’m not even protected here in my ivy league ivory tower, since if William Deresiewicz is to be believed, one of the disadvantages of an elite education is that it is “profoundly anti-intellectual,” and it also offers too many temptations to mediocrity.

I hope I don’t end up with all the mediocre, profoundly anti-intellectual students in my class. No use fretting I suppose, because there’s not much I can do about it anyway.

Reference Renaissance

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I attended the Reference Renaissance conference in Denver this week, and got back late Wednesday night. In case anyone is ever thinking of flying with me, don’t. It’s pretty much a guarantee that your bags will get lost, or the flight will be horribly delayed, or there’ll be bad storms, or they won’t have any food you can eat (even for sale), or the plane will develop engine trouble just after takeoff and will have to fly in circles for two hours to burn off enough fuel to land again back at the same airport. It’s no wonder I don’t like to travel anywhere if it means flying. When it comes to flying, I seem to have some bad hoodoo.

However, the Reference Renaissance conference was pretty good. I went to a few informative sessions, learned a bit I didn’t know before, met some nice folks. I’m something of an introvert, and typically don’t feel comfortable around people I don’t know, but I got invited to a lunch with several librarians I didn’t know and enjoyed myself. The only drawback to the conference was that the hotel was about 10 miles from downtown, but I did make it in one night for some excellent seafood (I know, in Denver of all places) and at a martini bar had a drink called a Dean Martini, served in an ashtray with a candy cigarette. I know what you’re thinking. Classy!

I gave a presentation I’m tentatively calling “The Iron Cage of Google,” which isn’t the title on the program. The problem was that I didn’t know specifically what I was going to talk about until the week before I left. Titles are arbitrary, anyway. The presentation seemed to go well. I planned it as infotainment, and I think some people learned about at least a couple of things they didn’t know about, plus the laughs came in all the right places. My Second Life joke went over particularly well, so I’m going to have to try to work that one into another presentation sometime. The room was full, but I suspect the audience came to see the practical stuff after me. I’m never sure why anyone comes to any of my presentations. They just seem so obvious. I wouldn’t go. I already know all that stuff.

One of the best things logistically about the conference was the strict time-keeping. I’d had a discussion with the chief planner after I was accepted to speak about time-keeping. (I know her, so I didn’t feel bad about being blunt.) We discussed how annoying it is to have people go over time and then leave other people without enough. I’ve been burned by that before. So she made me the chair of my own panel, as well as another one, plus made cards reading 5, 2, and 0, to be flashed by the chair when the speaker had 5 minutes left, etc. When the 0 card was flashed, the speaker had one sentence to conclude, and then had to stop. All the presentations I saw were timed well, and I didn’t have to use my 0 card at all when I was chairing.

All in all, it was a very practical conference with a lot of engaged speakers. I hope they put it on again next year, preferably somewhere I can travel by train.

Goodbye, Old Friend

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I wanted to write this yesterday, when the death itself occurred, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. The grief was too strong. I arrived at work to an email from a friend, with the simple subject line “AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH.” At first, there was the denial. This can’t really be happening. I couldn’t believe it, despite the evidence. I tried and tried, but the death reports were true. Then came the anger. Anger! And I knew I wasn’t alone. Many of us were angry. Then, of course, the bargaining. Just one more day, please, pretty please, just let me make it through the week! The depression quickly followed. That’s why I couldn’t write about this yesterday. I couldn’t see the screen through the tears. Finally, the acceptance. I wasn’t at peace with the world, but I finally realized there was nothing I could do, and just had to accept it. So I gave up on Scrabulous and added the Scrabble Beta application to Facebook.

It doesn’t work well. In fact, it doesn’t even work. It teased me by letting me start a game, but then went down. I suspect Hasbro created this dysfunctional app so they could argue that Scrabulous was competing with them on Facebook. So they put up this flashy junk that doesn’t work. As of this writing, they have an error message. They’ll be up again, someday! They claim they’re working on streamlining their crappy app for their “official release” in mid-August. Sure.

The most painful part of the message is the final part: “Please continue to let us know how we can make Scrabble – the best word game on Facebook – even better!

– The Scrabble Team”

What suggestions could we have, when we know that Scrabulous was the best word game on Facebook? Are we really to trust the “Scrabble Team,” the team that helped destroy the object of our affection that helped give us pleasure during so many lonely hours? I don’t think so.

But there’s nothing I can do about that, either. I must learn acceptance. I won’t get to finish those games I was playing, the only consolation being that I was losing two of them. My best bingo (SPeLLING for 158 points) will no longer be on record. That’s just the way it is, I guess. Sometimes the good die young.

Goodbye, old friend.

Cuil

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Like many of you, I’ve been reading about Cuil, the new search engine from some former Google employees. I tried a couple of searches, but so far I don’t see why I would use this much. I searched “academic librarian,” for example. Of the eleven hits on the first page, four were to this blog. It’s nice to know I have such “authority,” but I thought four was about three too many. Three of the four hits had pictures of people beside them. I have no idea who the people are, but they’re definitely not me. I also searched “bivens-tatum.” The hits are all relevant, and there’s a nice spread, but again the pictures have nothing to do with me. There’s a picture of some painting by the link to this blog, but this blog doesn’t have any images. Perhaps the image comes from somewhere on the Princeton server. If the top left hit is the most relevant, then apparently a Shakespeare authorship website I made in library school is the most relevant web page related to me. Maybe they know it’s the first web page I ever created, so it has a certain sentimental value.

The layout is presumably to prevent the need to scroll, but I would like an option in the preferences to have more hits on the first page. When I’m looking for information, I want more text, rather than a tastefully arranged page with images scattered across like knick-knacks. I might like the search results better if I wasn’t ego-cuiling, but I don’t think I’d like the layout.

Anyway, there’s my two cents.

Brief Reflections Upon Budgets

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In the humanities, we shouldn’t have to write budget reports. The library should just give us money to spend.

If our salaries were related to our budgets, those science librarians would make a ton of money. Instead of being related to something rational, like height, our salaries seem to be related to some sort of market.

If Europeans want us to buy more books, they really should do something about that euro. That thing has gone up 78% against the dollar since I started this job. One begins to think, hmm, if there’s any philosophy in French or German worth getting, it’d probably be translated and published in America. Right?

Not that I’m much of a one for nostalgia anyway, but I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to be a librarian before Excel.

Procrastination: Complete.

Before I Get Old

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Gloom, like sex, sells, though it’s odd anyone would want to buy it considering that, also like sex, there’s so much of it freely available on the Internet. There’s certainly enough to be gloomy about: a pointless war, mortgage foreclosures, job losses, rich people in New York selling their spare diamonds to make ends meet. Times are hard.

They could get worse, too, if the current generation of students is as bad as some claim. I haven’t read Mark Bauerlein’s new book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, though I remember reading this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education a couple of years ago that’s obviously building up to the book. From the reviews, it sounds like a depressing read, and I gather from the title the problem is with the digital age. Perhaps it’s not just a problem with these kids today, though. Maybe the digital age is making us all stupid, as Nicholas Carr opines in the Atlantic. Maybe we’re turning (have turned?) into a culture of distracted skimmers without the attention necessary to read a book anymore. Perhaps channel-(or web) surfing is an accurate metaphor for our mental lives these days. Is it just our students who come to college as ignorant mouthbreathers panting for the next Facebook status update, or are we all like this now? It seems every week I read yet another article on how stupid we’re all becoming because we revel in distraction. Some naysayers go so far as to point a critical finger at blogs. (Disclaimer: you are now reading a blog. Blogs may be hazardous to your mind. Read at you’re own peril!)

Things may really be as bad as they seem, but somehow I can’t share in the gloom about the kids today, no matter how few of them can identify the Speaker of the House or how many of them know more about American Idol than Nathaniel Hawthorne. I might be more gloomy if I couldn’t remember the state of my own self when I was eighteen. It pains me now to think how woefully ignorant I was, how few books I’d read, how little I knew about all the subjects that I now love knowing about. Wait, no it doesn’t. This occurs to me because I have a birthday this week (don’t bother with presents, just send cash). If turning eighteen is the beginning of adulthood, I have been an adult for almost twenty-one years now.

How ignorant that eighteen-year-old was about all the subjects we claim are important! Perhaps most critics of the younger generation were always brilliant, erudite high achievers, even when young, like some of the wunderkind I see coming to Princeton. Not me. “Underachieving” was a label frequently applied to my meager efforts in school. Though now I have two college degrees in English literature, I’m not sure I ever managed to finish a book I was assigned to read in high school, and I vaguely remember sleeping through a number of my English classes. (My high school English teacher recently befriended me on Facebook, and I’m sure she’d be able to verify my scholastic inadequacies.) I was a lackadaisical student with little interest in learning what all my no doubt well intentioned teachers thought I should be learning. I wasn’t letting my schooling get in the way of my education.

My teachers seemed to like me for the most part, though, so I guess they didn’t take it personally. Well, except for that geography teacher I used to openly mock because of her incompetence. She didn’t like me very much and even had the nerve to call my parents and complain that I wasn’t taking her class seriously, as evidenced by the fact that I’d filled in deliberately fake answers on a quiz. (Trees that lose their leaves are not deciduous, for example, they are merely careless.) Also, I just remembered, the principal considered me a discipline problem because I frequently ignored the school dress code and kept my shirt untucked. Ahh, the simpler pre-Columbine days.

Certainly I learned things, and I read a lot. Though there weren’t many books in my house, I spent hours at the public library. I consumed books and articles on architecture, photography, and blues music, for example, because after a couple of years of photography and journalism classes in high school, I wanted to be a photojournalist. No, wait, after a couple of years of drafting class I wanted to be an architect. I’m sorry, I meant that I really wanted to be Eric Clapton, and I even have a black and white Strat just like he had back in the day. I probably couldn’t have told you who the Speaker of the House was in 1987. Tip O’Neill, perhaps? I could Google it to make sure. And politics? Why would anyone be interested in politics when there was so much architecture and photography around? And if you can play the blues, does it really matter if you can’t name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?

Oh, and television. I watched a ton of it. I’ve watched almost no commercial television since I turned eighteen, but that’s because I’d consumed a lifetime’s supply by then. I planned my life around Thursday nights on NBC. I wanted to go drinking at Cheers and then end up in Night Court, because I had crushes on both Shelley Long and Markie Post. I remember endless childhood Sunday afternoons watching old westerns on KXTX. We got cable TV when I was about six, and it was my friend and boon companion until I graduated from high school and gave up the habit.

And when I wasn’t blowing off my schoolwork, playing guitar, taking photos, or watching television, I was out with friends: going to parties, drinking, hanging out at the mall. It’s hard to believe that there were times when I and my friends had whole weekends with nothing “better” to do than sit around at someone’s house chatting and watching videos. Why wasn’t I reading the politics section of the newspaper? Why wasn’t I informing myself about the world? Why wasn’t I being a good, concerned citizen and steeping myself in my culture? Huh! I ask you that!

Despite all this, I seem to have come out okay, or at least I think so. The child is not always father of the man, it seems. I made it through college and two graduate programs with excellent grades. I’ve got a pretty good job, a loving family, a decent house. Despite almost completely ignoring my studies until college, I’m what most people would probably consider well read. I keep up on current events. I have a smartphone, an iPod, a laptop, and a blog, I email and IM and text message, but somehow I still manage to read a book or two a week on average. I’m now more than twice the age of our incoming college students, yet I don’t feel particularly old. I know almost nothing about contemporary youth culture and I certainly wouldn’t celebrate it, but I can’t bring myself to fault teenagers for doing the things kids do.

Perhaps all of us really are getting stupider, and this blog post is longer than most of us can read. Somehow, I just can’t get that concerned about it. I suppose I should be concerned as a citizen in a democracy, but I’m not convinced our politics are particularly democratic now, so a higher percentage of ignoramuses in a generation probably won’t have much of an effect. It might be that culture is always carried on by a remnant, and there are always bright and passionate people in every generation who manage to carry on and contribute to our knowledge of the world despite the odds.

A friend of mine mentioned he’d seen a recent clip of Roger Daltrey (now in his mid-sixties) singing “My Generation.” We saw him sing it live during The Who’s twenty-fifth reunion tour in 1989, and it seemed to me that he was old then, though he was just a few years older than I am now. It might seem ironic, his singing “I hope I die before I get old,” but maybe it depends on what it means to be old. Are we old when we can no longer understand these kids today? When we think it’s like they’re from another planet, as I recently heard a librarian say? Are we old when we judge the inadequacies of college students by our matured standards? When we no longer remember what unformed youths most of us were? When we actually believe that it’s more important for a teenager to know who the Speaker of the House is than to know the latest television shows? If that’s the case, I don’t want to get old.