Another Essential Skill for All Librarians

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Once you get on the guru train, it’s hard to get off. That thing just barrels along regardless of reason and good sense. So here goes one more guru post. The title promised a skill, but as with rhetoric, it’s really more that you develop a set of skills through this line of study. Analytical skills, critical thinking skills, problem solving skills. Surely these are necessary for all librarians, and if you want to develop them to your utmost, you’ve got to study philosophy. When a lot of people think about philosophy, they think of great historical philosophers, or perhaps of something like a “life philosophy.” But philosophy is also, perhaps mostly, a method, not a body of knowledge. It’s a method for thinking clearly, asking questions, and solving problems.

To get an idea of what sort of skills philosophy can develop, we can do a brief survey of some philosophy department websites that try to explain the benefits of philosophy over some supposedly more practical major. Here’s what they say at Harvard:

Philosophy is a discipline requiring skills in reasoning and writing. Thus, the study of philosophy helps a person to develop the abilities to:

  • Read texts closely
  • Analyze positions critically
  • Uncover tacit presuppositions
  • Construct cogent arguments, and
  • Explain and argue in clear persuasive writing.

These skills are extremely useful in many other disciplines beyond philosophy and for a range of careers, such as law, computer science, business, medicine, writing, the arts, publishing, and many others. The abilities to write well and to “think outside the box” are in high demand from employers, and will serve students well in their post-college life.

 

Don’t those sound like skills that would be useful for librarians? Here’s another list from Florida State:

The study of philosophy enhances one’s ability:

  • To think, speak, and write clearly and critically,
  • To communicate effectively,
  • To form original, creative solutions to problems,
  • To develop reasoned arguments for one’s views,
  • To appreciate views different from one’s own,
  • To analyze complex material, and
  • To investigate difficult questions in a systematic fashion.

Communicating effectively? Forming solutions to problems? That’s pretty much my job. Are those skills as well developed in you as they could be after a rigorous study of philosophy? I suspect not, which is why you should go study philosophy, after you study rhetoric but before you study something else, because this is my guru train and I’m not allowing any other riders. Regardless, you can’t know until you do it, so do it. If you’re not yet persuaded, here’s another good list of reasons to study philosophy. It teaches you:

1. How to read critically (i.e., a book, magazine article, newspaper, P&L statement, web traffic report, etc.).

2. How to write well. (this could be an email, letter, report, blog, or living will).

3. How to debate and speak in front of large audiences.

4. How to create impromptu arguments and analysis (this may be the number one business skill of all time and Iíd hire someone with this skill set versus a Harvard graduate any day).

5. How to figure out what is right and wrong (ethics) and identify with different sorts of people and cultures (this is critical in the modern workforce, think how different your job is from what you see on Mad Men each week).

6. How to apply logic to any problem.

7. How to think strategically or see the “big picture.”

8. How to think about a problem by deconstructing the big picture and looking at the details.

Isn’t that what we want? Big picture librarians who can also look at the details? People who can create impromptu analysis or apply logic to any problem? People who can identify with different sorts of people and cultures? All these are essential for effective librarians. Finally, here’s a summary from the Princeton philosophy department about the study of philosophy and your future:

Skills acquired by concentrating in philosophy can thus be useful for a variety of careers. But the main benefit lies in learning to think in an organized way about confusing and controversial questions; to treat one’s beliefs as serviceable as they are but capable of improvement; to react to criticism not with outrage or fear but with a willingness to state the grounds for one’s views and to listen to and learn from the views of others. These are habits of thought useful not only in a career, but in life.

Imagine if more librarians could react to criticism not with outrage or fear but with a willingness to state the grounds for their views and listen to and learn from the views of others. That would be refreshing indeed. Useful not only in a career, but in life. All I can say is hear, hear!

So we have a range of skills developed through the study of philosophy: critical thinking, analysis, problem-solving, clear and organized communication, a balanced temperament to criticism that ultimately leads to better solutions to problems. Every one of these are essential to a career in librarianship, and the rigorous study of philosophy improves these types of skills perhaps more than any other field. Critical thinking, communication, and problem solving: boiled down to its essentials, that’s what my job is all about. That’s probably true for a lot of you as well. Thus, to be a better librarian, you should go study philosophy. Right now. Every one of you.

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Now, it might seem that with the post on rhetoric and this one on philosophy, I’m merely talking about areas of study I’m relatively knowledgable about, emphasizing skills that I’m relatively good at, arguing the almost irrefutable point that everyone would benefit from having these skills, and then telling you every librarian needs these skills at a high level. That’s exactly what I’m doing. That’s how the guru argument works.

Let’s go back to the example that started me off on this little series, whether all librarians need to learn how to code proficiently. I say no, and I’ve yet to see a persuasive argument for that position. What I’ve seen are librarians saying how useful coding skills have been for them. How could I argue with that? I’ve seen librarians saying coding skills might be good for all librarians to learn. Okay, I can possibly agree with that. Lots of things might be good for all librarians to learn, like rhetoric and philosophy. I haven’t seen this particular claim, but I might even agree that all librarians would be improved in some way if they learned to code proficiently. Every acquired skill enhances us somehow, and teaches us to view the world differently and increase our ability to function and solve problems. But none of those claims support the view that all librarians need to learn to code proficiently.

The same claims could be made about numerous skills, in particular the kind I’ve been talking about in these last two posts. There’s a difference between saying, “learning this might benefit librarians,” and saying, “all librarians need to learn this.” The first is moderate and potentially good advice. The second is immoderate guru-speak. “I do this. It helps me. Everyone else needs to do it, too.” The problem is, we have a finite amount of time, lots of things to learn, and specialization within libraries that doesn’t require everyone to have the same skills in the same capacity. I was speaking about this with one of our digital projects coders last week. We concluded that just as I don’t have to be able to write code proficiently, he doesn’t have to be able to teach research skills to students effectively. (He also, by the way, thinks the job ads are increasingly looking not for librarians with some coding skill but for people with hard core coding skills to then come work in libraries, which reframes the whole librarian coding argument into one about “feral librarians.”)

What I’ve been trying to do is expose the problematic reasoning behind guru-type claims about any skills or knowledge or future predictions for librarians. They’re all suspect, and the more hyperbolic they are the more suspect they become. I don’t see how you could reasonably deny that the skills I’ve addressed in these last two posts would benefit you both professionally and personally if you spent years acquiring or improving them. And yet you still probably think that you have better things to do, and that you know what’s better for you in your job than I do.

You might be right, but by guru logic you can’t make that claim, because the guru knows best. All such claims rest on something the guru can’t prove but that you can’t quite disprove. After all, unless you know what the guru knows, how can you really know that you don’t need to know what the guru knows? You get along fine in your job without learning some particular set of skills? No, you just think you do!

Instead of wading into pointless arguments, I want you to see beyond the hype and curious reasoning, and have been trying to show you how. Oh, and the reason I’ve been able to do this? Rhetoric and philosophy. Go study them. Every one of you.

An Essential Skill for All Librarians

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If I can’t beat the gurus, sherpas, and assorted sages, I’m going to join them. Today I’m going to tell you, fellow librarians, the most basic, core skill that all of you need, more important than coding, cataloging, database searching, or anything else. It’s a subject barely taught in library schools, and yet mastery of it will do more for your career than just about anything actually taught there. What is librarianship really about? It’s about communication. And where there’s communication, you need rhetoric.

Rhetoric has a bad reputation among people who don’t know better and people who should know better. It’s probably because of that hypocrite Plato, who maligned rhetoric as supposedly less ethical or true than philosophy while using numerous rhetorical techniques to communicate his ideas. Consider the Allegory of the Cave: brilliant, effective, and a total rhetorical manipulation of the audience. It’s why Plato is so much more pleasurable to read than Aristotle, even though Aristotle was a lot more savvy about rhetoric.

What is rhetoric? Aristotle defined it as “the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion.” Thinking of it as a form of argument, we might add Chaim Perelman’s definition of argumentation from The Realm of Rhetoric: “The aim of argumentation is not to deduce consequences from given premises; it is rather to elicit or increase the adherence of the members of an audience to theses that are presented for their consent. Such adherence never comes out of thin air; it presupposes a meeting of minds between speaker and audience.” But rhetoric is much broader than just argumentation and persuasion. The rhetorician Andrea Lunsford defines it as “the art, practice, and study of human communication.” (See some more definitions here.) As the art and practice of human communication, what could be a more basic element of librarianship than its study.

Think about all the communication that goes on in libraries every day: phone calls, meetings, emails, IMs, negotiations, reference questions, performance reviews, grant proposals, instruction sessions, research guides, cover letters, job interviews; every one of these interactions is about communication with an audience for a purpose and could benefit from improved rhetorical skill and knowledge of rhetorical theory and techniques.

One of the simplest rhetorical skills is often the most forgotten: consider your audience. Good communication is all about connecting with a particular audience, but plenty of librarians when writing or speaking think it’s about conveying information. If they write it or say it, that’s enough. I’ve seen this numerous times in library instruction sessions over the years, where librarians think their duty is to present information, when really their job is to connect their audience to the information presented. There’s a difference.  How many librarians have you seen go into a room of 18-year-olds and deliver a canned talk in a monotone? Or bury a LibGuide in an avalanche of dense prose? Or write and publish a dreary article no one would every want to read? Or give tedious and irrelevant answers to questions during a job interview? Painful stuff from people who haven’t considered their audience.

Consider other rhetorical concepts, kairos for example. Kairos is, roughly, knowing when to speak. It’s knowing the proper time to intervene in a conversation or a crisis. People who just blurt out what they’re thinking whenever they think it aren’t as effective in persuading others as people who join the conversation at the proper time with a proper consideration of their audience and their purpose for speaking. How many librarians deliberately think about the proper time to speak and then do so? How many of you think about the distinction between the logical, emotional, and ethical appeals and when to use the appropriate ones when working with other people? Or think about the assumptions behind people’s writing or speaking, or the patterns of their arguments that are often more revealing of their motives and goals than what they seem to be saying? That might sound abstract, but thinking about that stuff and applying it can be very useful in understanding and operating in a workplace or organization.

I can say with some assurance that my study, teaching, and practice of rhetoric has helped me more in my career than anything else I’ve ever learned. My ability to communicate effectively in speech and writing has been essential and beneficial to my work. Whether it’s participating in meetings, working with students, or stymieing machinations, rhetorical techniques have always come into play. There is no escaping rhetoric. There’s only good and bad rhetoric. And yet probably 99 out of 100 librarians haven’t read Aristotle or Perelman or Lunsford or Corbett any other rhetorical theorist, much less deliberately practiced rhetorical techniques. Even some of you right now are probably thinking, oh, that might be important, but surely not all librarians need to study rhetoric. Yes, you do. Every one of you.

Think about some policy or service you want to implement. It doesn’t matter how good it is, someone in charge has to be persuaded to implement it. That’s your audience. Think about what it’s like to be that person. Put yourself in that person’s shoes and ask what would persuade you then. Everyone wants something, but they all want something different. Change too little or too slow angers one group in the library; change too much or too fast angers another. Who’s resistant to the change you want to make, but whose consent you need? Are they not persuaded by your passion for change? Is the problem their conservatism or your rhetorical failure? I know what you’re going to say, but can you be sure?

Before you learn whatever new thing you’re planning to learn, learn rhetoric first. Then practice it for a few years. You’ll thank me later.

Wandering Free and Easy

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This is sort of a follow up to my post on ignoring gurus and sherpas, which one person described as “odd” while reading it got another person “hot under the collar” and made yet another person “cranky.” Since the last two people seem to more or less agree with me, then I must be doing something wrong. One problem is that there were two discussions going on in the post, one about coding for librarians and one about not following gurus and sherpas. They got mixed together, and as often happens when I say that I don’t do whatever tech thing someone thinks I should do and yet I get on just fine, people get cranky because they think I’m claiming that no librarian should do that tech thing or perhaps even that I think that thing isn’t valuable for any librarians to do. I truly don’t understand that interpretation, but there it is. Maybe it’s my tone.

So let’s avoid the tech talk. Here’s really why I don’t follow sherpas or sit at the feet of gurus: I, in the  words of Fleetwood Mac, go my own way. I march to the beat of my own drummer. I follow my own muse. I cultivate my own garden. I live and let live. Okay, I’m out of cliches. As it’s put in what’s becoming one of my favorite books, the Daoist classic book of Zhuangzi (or Chuang Tzu), I wander free and easy, wander where I will, or go rambling without a destination (depending on the translation).

That means I don’t follow conventional wisdom or the wisdom of crowds. I don’t do things because they’re cool or trendy or popular, nor do I do things because they’re traditional or conventional or just the way they’ve always been done. I don’t do things because someone who isn’t me and doesn’t live my life tells me they need to be done even when I’m pretty sure they don’t need to be. I also don’t fall into the hipster trap of reacting against the popular or the trendy and trying to be ironic while still actually being concerned with what other people are doing or thinking. I honestly don’t care. I’m not a follower or a fan boy or a fashionista. My mother used to say in exasperation, do what you want to do because that’s what you’re going to do anyway. I did and I do.

This isn’t a professional position so much as a personal disposition reflected in most areas of my life, and I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. Even in high school the bulk of my learning was done outside school, and I followed my passions without a concern for what the world or the culture thinks is important. I don’t judge myself by other people’s standards, and I try (and this is much harder) not to judge other people by my standards. If I’d lived my life by what other people thought I should have done to be “successful,” I wouldn’t have majored in English in college, and then double-majored in philosophy. How impractical! I wouldn’t have gone to grad school in English. Even more impractical! Library school was practical, but it’s not exactly what the culture considers the beginning of worldly success. As long as I have access to a research library and the opportunity to learn about whatever I want to learn, I don’t really care what the world thinks is successful. A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and a research library beside me in the wilderness, then wilderness were paradise enough.

In my personal life, it’s led to me espousing unconventional views and having unconventional habits. For example, I don’t eat meat because I have ethical objections against factory farming and the treatment of animals (and yet I don’t think animals have rights as such, which makes me unconventional even in unconventional circles). I don’t proselytize about it or try to make other people feel bad for eating meat, and yet over the years I’ve encountered many people who seem to be personally offended by my not eating meat. Those people weren’t wandering free and easy. I haven’t watched a television show with commercial breaks since 1987. I don’t like anything interrupting my narrative and I refuse to pay for cable and Tivo, so until the rise of Netflix I just didn’t watch any TV. And yet, as with not eating meat, I’ve met people who seemed to be offended that I didn’t do the popular thing they did. They took my lack of interest in conventional activities almost as an affront, as if I’m judging them harshly for doing whatever it is that I don’t do, when really I couldn’t care less how they spend their time. Those people weren’t wandering free and easy. People like that seem to validate their own beliefs and actions by the standards of other people. I don’t bother and am much happier for it. We won’t even get started about my religious or political beliefs.

In my professional life, this attitude has manifested itself in various ways. I avoided tenure-track librarian jobs because I didn’t want people telling me that I had to write library literature or get fired. When I write, I write because I want to, and I write what I please. I’ve thwarted tyrants and fomented rebellions to make sure people don’t impose conventional or trendy nonsense on me. I’ve fought hard for things I believe in and fought just as hard against things I don’t believe in. When left alone, I leave alone. When pushed, I push back.

This isn’t to say I’m a sociopath or a rebel. If I believe rules and conventions are good, I follow them. One of the things I like about working in academia is that I believe in the mission of higher education and of the libraries that support teaching and research. I never have the thoughts I’m starting to notice in some friends as we approach middle age, that maybe what I’m doing isn’t worthwhile. I think it’s worthwhile work, and if I didn’t think so I’d do something else. I do what I do because I believe it’s worth doing, not because social convention tells me it’s what I should do. Living in the world without compromising (another bit from Zhuangzi) isn’t a matter of fighting everything the world has to offer. It’s about finding the place in the world where you feel most comfortable, adapting the world as you can, and letting the rest go.

I’ve gone my own way and followed my own interests with little regard for what others think I should do for my entire life. And you know what? It’s worked out pretty well for me, even by the conventional worldly standards that I don’t care that much about. I’m healthy and happy. I have a loving family. I have a great job that I like a lot and that I’m pretty good at. I have good friends and good colleagues. I continue to learn, grow, and develop in ways that I enjoy and that benefit other people. I look around, see what I think is worth doing, give it a try, and then continue or not as I see fit. And I think that whatever conventional success I have achieved has a lot to do with how I’ve lived my life. I was never a grade grubber or a self promoter or a status seeker.  I don’t deliberately seek the approval of others, but I’ve found that if I do what I think is right and appropriate as the situation arises and try to do it well, the approval often comes. Wandering free and easy has led me to many good places, and I’m unlikely to give it up now.

That’s why I ignore anyone or any group that tries to define me or what it is that I do, or to tell me against my better judgment that I really should be doing what they think is important instead of what I think is important. I’m happy to learn from anyone willing to teach, but I  ignore anyone trying to preach. And I decide who’s worth learning from and what’s worth learning. The preachers don’t work my job or live my life. There’s no way they can know what I need to know better than I do myself.

If I were a guru or sherpa, which I assuredly am not, I’d tell you that you should live your life this way, too. It’s psychologically freeing. A lot of the stuff that people fear or fret about or get upset over don’t bother me at all. As Groucho Marx says, they roll off me like a duck. If other people do things differently than I do, that’s fine with me. However, it’s not up to me to tell other people how to live their lives or do their jobs. Live as you please, work as you like, preach all you want. Just try not to be to upset when I don’t follow you, think like you think, or do as you do. I’ll do the same.

 

The Basic Skills of All Librarians

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In response to my last post, someone asked me “what are the basic skills that all librarians should have, if any?” There are several possible responses to that. The evasive response would be that if library schools can’t seem to figure out that question, the I certainly won’t be able to do so. However, I find that I can’t answer the question as it’s phrased because it needs more clarification. The phrase “basic skills” is deceptively simple, yet I think it can cover at least two different meanings which both determine how one might respond and lead to confusion and disagreement where perhaps none exists. Both basic and skills need some clarification. So here goes.

Basic in the phrase “basic skills of all librarians” can mean either 1) a basic set of skills that all librarians should have, or 2) a set of skills that all librarians should have at a basic level. I might disagree with either interpretation, although I agree with Lane Wilkinson’s argument in response to my last post that there are probably sets of skills that all libraries should have available. Though I might disagree with either interpretation, I’m more open to the second interpretation, which means we have to define what we mean by skills.

As with basic, there are at least two different meanings of skills at play here, a hard sense and a soft sense. In the hard sense, to have a skill means to be able to do something, it means knowing how and not just knowing that. In the soft sense, it means something more like knowing that, or knowing a bit about, or even being aware of. For example, let’s take a skill common in and essential to academic libraries: cataloging. To have cataloging skill in the hard sense, one must be able to catalog materials with some proficiency and efficiency. Cataloging in the hard sense is a skill developed over time and presumably improved over time. Cataloging as a skill in the soft sense means something like knowing how catalogs work, being aware of minimal cataloging standards, or something along those lines. It’s the kind of knowledge of cataloging that, say, reference librarians would need to get the most of of searching OPACs.

We can also interpret coding as a skill in a hard or soft sense. By coding as a skill, we can mean that the person is fully capable of efficiently and proficiently writing code to develop some digital object, OR we can mean that the person is aware of the basics of coding. For example, I couldn’t just sit down and start writing code of any kind. However, I know how code works and generally what it does. My last post mentioned html, and I know a bit of that as well. Just yesterday I had to go into the html of a website I was making and adjust the html because there were some problems with the margins that the editor wasn’t fixing right. I couldn’t write it, but I knew what to look for, I spotted the problem, and I fixed it. Does that mean I have “skill”? I usually interpret skill in the hard sense, so I’d say no. I do a lot of things well. That’s not one of them. Someone totally unfamiliar with how any code or markup language works might say yes.

With these distinctions in mind, let’s break “basic skills of all librarians” into two phrases: 1)  Basic Set of Skills of All Librarians, and 2) Basic Skills of All Librarians. Let’s interpret the first phrase in the hard sense, that is, a basic set of skills (in the hard sense) that all librarians should have. This means that all librarians should have these skills, and they can actually employ them usefully, efficiently, and proficiently. Let’s interpret the second phrase in the softer sense, meaning that there are some number of things that all librarians should have at least a basic minimal knowledge about. As for coding, personally I don’t have skill in the first sense, but I do in the second.

We can apply these distinction to the initial question. Now, are we asking (in my terms) “What basic set of skills should all librarians have?” in the hard sense, or are we asking “What are some basic-level skills of all librarian?” in the soft sense? Our answers might still differ, but at least we’re clearer on what we’re talking about.

Answering the first question, I’d have to say “none.” I can’t think of any library-specific skills (in the hard sense) that all librarians should have, while again agreeing that there are skills that all libraries should probably have. No library operates on this principle, and the larger the library the more specialized the skills get. In smaller libraries, librarians might need minimal proficiency in a larger number of skills, but no one will achieve complete proficiency (skill in the hard sense) in everything necessary to run a library. There’s neither the time nor the necessity. If that’s what people mean when they say “every librarian needs to learn coding,” then it’s very easy to point out the fact that every library in existence gets on without all the librarians having this skill (in the hard sense).

If instead we’re asking “what are some skills or knowledges that librarians should have or be aware of in at least a minimal sense?”, then my answer might change. I would still be very reluctant to claim that there were too many skills in the soft sense that all librarians should have. The world of librarianship is too complicated and diverse for there to be many. I might include things like knowing how catalogs and databases work, understanding the role of libraries in the support of students and faculty, or some other very general things. Regardless, it’s this second question that I think is the most useful one to discuss. Coding might be a good candidate for inclusion in that list, but only if we’re clear on what we mean by basic, skills, and even coding. I’d still say no, but I’m much more likely to be persuaded by others if this is the sense we mean.

Why I Ignore Gurus, Sherpas, Ninjas, Mavens, and Other Sages

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I read Roy Tennant’s recent post on why you shouldn’t learn HTML with some amusement, since I would have given the same advice in the late 1990s when I was starting library school and Tennant was writing his book on helping librarians learn HTML. When I was in library school, there were advocates, possibly inspired by Tennant’s example, who were pretty sure that we’d never be successful librarians without knowing HTML, which at the time wasn’t the quaint idea that it seems now. With reluctance and curiosity, I attended a couple of workshops that were going to teach me HTML and provide me with the necessary skills to become the successful professional librarian I hoped to be. I even have a book on the shelves in my office on HTML, acquired during library school and quite possibly unopened until this day. My HTML knowledge then and now consists of being able to steal the code I need to fix any problem I might encounter with a web editor or content management system. I can’t remember the last time I needed even that much knowledge.

The advice to learn HTML (or CSS, or [insert the code du jour here]) is well meant, and possibly well taken. Every once in a while I get the urge to pick up a new skill and give it a try. Last January I signed up for one of those learn-to-code websites (Codeacademy, I think), and I went through the first few lessons before I assured myself that a) it bored me and thus held no inherent interest, and b) I don’t need to learn it because I don’t see a need for it. I don’t need to learn it, and I didn’t need to learn it 15 years ago, because there are other people and other tools that learned it for me. I didn’t need to learn much HTML because I had Netscape Navigator, with its combination browser, email client, and HTML editor (for you younger librarians who might never have used Netscape Navigator, you can try SeaMonkey to see what it was like. It’s a continuation of the Netscape project and gives that old school Navigator feel). Then I had Dreamweaver. Now I have LibGuides or Google Sites or SeaMonkey.

I also ignore the advice of the gurus et al. because I knew early on that if people had to learn how to code to use computers, the personal computer business would never have been successful. I can even roughly determine when I came to this realization: the fall of 1985, during which I was enrolled in my high school’s mandatory computer science course. It was also just after I had been given my first personal computer, the pitifully weak but durable Apple IIc (discontinued by Apple in August 1988, but discontinued by me at the end of my first year of grad school in August 1993, when it was replaced by the boxy little Apple Color Classic that carried me through 1997).

The teacher assured us that the class was necessary so we could learn about computers so we could get good jobs someday, because computers were the future. Something or other is always the future. In order to guarantee our place in the competitive future, we learned to program in BASIC and FORTRAN. No, I shouldn’t say that. We were taught to program, but we didn’t all learn. I learned important skills, like getting really cute girls who were into computer programming to help me with my homework, but I can’t say I learned to program very much. I learned how to tell my computer to stream “HELLO” across the screen, which is pretty much the extent of what I learned to do during last year’s brief excursion into codeland. Back then, I knew what I needed a computer for, mostly writing, trying (and failing) to play text-based computer games, and viewing the most ridiculous pornography I’ve ever seen (and that includes the kind with people dressed up like animals or superheroes). None of those things required me to learn to code, just like none of the things I do with computers now–which is a lot–requires it.

If I’m a heavy computer user who doesn’t need to know that stuff, and most people who use computers don’t know or need to know how to code or even have extensive computer knowledge, why are there always people telling us that we do? It’s the same reason why social media “gurus” or “sherpas” tell us that we need to embrace some new social media site or risk…really, I don’t know what we might risk, but it’s supposedly something dire. I guess we’ll risk not being “with it” or “happening” or whatever the current slang is to describe people desperate to seem acceptable to some in-crowd or another. The reason isn’t because we need to learn how to code or embrace Twitter or whatever. It’s not that we need to learn something; it’s that they need to say something.

Sometimes this thing they say is instructive, insightful, and honestly felt. I can’t find it now, but before I tried my last coding jaunt I read a great article by someone who pointed to all sorts of practical uses he had for his coding knowledge. Some program wouldn’t work, he would work around it. He had some tech problem? He would code his way to a solution. I was impressed, and thought, yeah, that sounds really smart. And after a few lessons I realized he was a man with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. He solved problems with code because he had code in his toolbox. He probably solved problems I would never realize I had, because he could. This isn’t to take away from his knowledge and skill. I was impressed by both that and his argument. It’s just that I don’t have those problems, and if I do I’d solve them some other way.

Based on my experience, I know the gurus’ giving advice about things I must learn is wrong. I can learn those things, and I might even benefit from that learning, but I don’t have to and will probably do just fine without learning them. I don’t follow sherpas and gurus because I prefer to go my own way. Leaders need followers, but I’m not much of either. I’ve found that it’s much easier to develop skills as I need them than to be told that some skill will benefit me because the teller has the skill and reaps benefits. If I had needed to learn to code for work, I’d have done it. The thing is, that’s true for most skills. I can’t code worth a damn, but I write pretty well and am a tolerable public speaker. Yet I would never tell people that unless you learn to crank out a coherent thousand-word essay quickly or give a good impromptu talk, you’ll never be much of a communicator and thus not much of a librarian. It’s important, because communication is the future.

Communication is the future. That sounds pretty catchy. Maybe I should try this guru thing after all.

EMP Drops the Lawsuit; Richardson Doesn’t

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Edwin Mellen Press dropped the lawsuit against Dale Askey and McMaster University, saying “The financial pressure of the social media campaign and pressure on authors is severe.” I’m glad I could contribute a little to that campaign.

[Update: shoot, I wrote too soon. EMP dropped one of the lawsuits, the one naming McMaster and Askey. There’s another one  by EMP founder Herbert Richardson just naming Askey, but no word on whether it will be dropped as well. We can only hope common sense will prevail.]

A Postscript from Another Perspective

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I kept thinking about my earlier post after I finished it, revisiting it because something about it bothered me, and after a lot of thought I finally figured out what it was. I think my argument about how academia regards scholarly publishers and journals as signs of quality is more or less correct. What bothers me is that in my relatively dispassionate analysis I gave no clue as to how much the situation disappoints me.

Academics use publishers as status indicators without necessarily considering the quality of the publications, just as they use schools, programs, and degrees as status indicators regardless of the quality of the individual scholar. I once heard a prominent scholar mocked (not to his or her face) for having a PhD from a state university. A professor I knew once compared two academics meeting for the first time to two dogs sniffing each other’s butts. Sniff, sniff, oooh, a Harvard PhD. Sniff Sniff, a book from OUP. Granted this isn’t necessarily what happens in the scholarship itself, where superficial stereotypes might give way to consideration of merit in other’s works.

Librarians usually lack the status consideration of professors, at least about some things. As long as an MLS is accredited, few people care what university it’s from, unlike academics considering the origin of PhDs. Some librarians have institutional status anxiety, I guess. I was talking with another philosophy librarian from a university library in the south. He joked that some of his colleagues might see the “Princeton University” on my badge and think, “hey, you could probably come down here and run our jerkwater library.” Trust me, I couldn’t. But I’ve served on numerous ALA committees with librarians from all sorts of libraries, large and small, academic and public, and I’ve never noticed anyone responding to anything other than the quality of their participation, not what employer is on their badge or where they got their MLS from.

However, libraries have pretty much given up control over the quality of their collections.  It’s worst with scholarly journals, i think. As the Big Deals have squeezed out so many choices, librarians have had to give up a lot of that control. We don’t really select many journals anymore, and those we do select we don’t really own. With approval plans, especially in larger libraries, we do relatively little of the individual selection, relying upon vendors to pick and choose for us and send things to us. There are obvious reasons our selection of books and journals must be this way, but we’ve still given up so much control.

Dissatisfaction and unhappiness often come because people can’t reconcile their expectations of reality with reality itself. I try to take things as they are when nothing can be changed and avoid that fate. Thus, I might accept libraries giving up control over their collections or the fact that academics and librarians often make judgments based on superficial signs because there’s nothing I can do about it. But I don’t have to like it or try to justify it. I thought about just deleting the post and starting over. Instead, consider this a postscript.

Signs Taken for Wonders

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Reading through some of the commentary on the Mellen/Askey case, I ran across a comment from the ACRL Board of Directors’ statement of support for Askey:

I find this whole debate to be nuts. Every book is a unique product. Some are good and some are poor. The actual publisher is no indication of quality. Every book needs to be judged on its individual merits. I know of some excellent books published by EMP which have had excellent reviews in leading scholarly journals.

The person who left it obviously wanted the point more broadly known, because he left the same comment at Slaw and Annoyed Librarian. In response to a critical comment on the latter post, the person claims to be an academic who has published with Edwin Mellen, which would make his sensitivity to Askey’s criticisms and librarian support for Askey understandable.

Regardless of who this person is, we can look past the biography and examine the claim on its own merits, just as he would have us do with books. That “every book needs to be judged on its individual merits” seems so obvious as not to need defending. Just as we say one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, we shouldn’t judge a book by its publisher, and in an ideal world we might not. Ideally, we wouldn’t take the signs of quality for the wonder of true quality.

However, to say that “the actual publisher is no indication of quality” requires some argument, because anyone who knows how academia and scholarly publishing work would be unlikely to agree with this immediately. The actual publisher might not be proof of quality, but it is certainly an indication of the quality we are likely to expect from the book, and everyone in academia, from graduate students to faculty to librarians, knows it. If you tell an academic you published a book, the first question is often, “which press?” It matters, and everyone knows it matters. At a university like mine, filled with top scholars in every field, the expectation is that they will publish with the top presses. We see evidence of this in the Leiter Reports post that inadvertently led to the now viral campaign to free Dale Askey. That reports the result of a survey among academic philosophers as to how they would rank scholarly presses. Oxford is the first by a wide margin. In the full survey, Edwin Mellen Press is last by a similarly wide margin. “34. Edwin Mellen Press loses to Oxford University Press by 407–1, loses to Peter Lang by 73–39.” In academic philosophy, there is no doubt that a book from Oxford or Cambridge would automatically get more respect than a book from Lang or Mellen.

There are numerous reasons for this expectation, perhaps not all of them fair. Over time one can see that the recognized top scholars in that field tend to publish at the top-ranked presses. Also over time, the quality of the books generally coming out of the presses builds the expectation that if a book comes from OUP, it’s probably good of its kind. That could be an unfair assumption, and I can think of one recent philosophy book from OUP that has come in for some serious criticism from numerous reviewers. That book, though, is published by someone who is outstanding in his field and has published numerous high-quality works in the past, so even if it isn’t good (and I haven’t read it so have no opinion), people would expect it to be of high quality.

Which brings us to another sign of possible quality, the reputation of the scholar in addition to the reputation of the press. The top scholars and researchers in any field generally gravitate to the top-ranked presses and journals for their field, but they might very well publish with a less respected or even unknown publisher and their name would still be an indicator of what to expect. What’s more, there are good reasons sometimes for scholars to do this. An argument I’ve read regarding publishers like Mellen, and that I have no reason to disbelieve, is that they might be more willing to accept work that is pushing the boundaries of the discipline in ways that make mainstream scholars uncomfortable, and thus make the likelihood of publication with the top publishers in their field less likely.

The reputation of a press or journal or scholar developed over time are signs of quality, and it might be unfair to consider them as wonders of genuine worth. That reputations are indeed developed over time is a good reason to take the signs for wonders, though, even if it turns out the signs sometime mislead. We see the process at work very concretely with scientific journals as well, where instead of informal polls or blog posts, we have things like impact factors that are supposed to judge the relative impact of the journals, and which are judgments that librarians and researchers take seriously when deciding what to purchase, where to publish, or what counts for tenure. How often things are cited is another sign of their relative quality, and one that it makes sense to take seriously, even if “high impact” journals might occasionally publish awful articles and even if journals no one reads or cites publish the occasional gem. And the researchers who publish lots of articles in high-impact journals are more likely to get tenure than the ones that publish in low-impact ones.

That’s the argument for why it makes sense to take signs for wonders, even if the signs are sometimes wrong. It’s not perfect, and it’s not always fair, but generally it works.

However, it doesn’t really matter if it works, because it’s what all academics do anyway. Academia fetishizes signs and takes them for wonders. We’ve seen how it works with presses and journals, but it works with everything. Consider the rankings of universities and colleges, or the academic programs within those colleges. The US News and World Report rankings are notoriously used as signs of relative quality among schools, with thousands of students applying to schools merely because of their high rank. The lower-ranked schools sometimes complain about the rankings and their flaws, and they’re right. But that’s the way it works.

The same philosopher who conducted the survey for philosophy publishers also surveys philosophers on philosophical graduate programs for the Philosophical Gourmet. If you got a PhD from the programs at the top of that list, you’d be more likely to get a tenure track job at a good college or university than from programs at the bottom, or that didn’t make the list at all. Why? For one thing, when search committees are looking through huge stacks of applications, where candidates got their graduate degrees is going to be a way of weeding them. Is that fair to the brilliant candidate from the University of Nebraska who is competing against candidates from NYU, Rutgers, Princeton, and Harvard? For that matter, is it fair that New York investment bankers would rather have graduates from Princeton than the College of New Jersey? No. But that’s the way it works, and everyone knows it.

Or consider the very existence of the PhD. The PhD is a research degree that over the decades has become a prerequisite for academic positions for which little to no research is expected, from teaching at small colleges to academic administration positions. PhDs usually aren’t required for librarian positions, but they’re often still considered a sign of some kind of quality, and candidates with them will have a leg up even if they are otherwise thoroughly mediocre. For the non-research positions, the reputation of the graduate program often doesn’t even matter. The PhD from anywhere is a sign.

So there are good reasons why we might take signs for wonders and the practical reality that we do in fact do this all the time in academia. For libraries in particular, there might not be anything else we can do. Tenure and search committees might be able to read all the publications of a candidate up for review, even though they might also just rely on the reputations of the publishers and journals as a sign of quality. But librarians can’t read all books they buy, especially in larger libraries. I might firm order several hundred philosophy and religion books a year, with hundreds or even thousands more coming in on approval. Other than by direct request, there’s no way other than signs of possible quality for me to set up approval profiles or firm order books en masse. To say that presses can’t be judged on their reputations or that each book should be judged on its own merits, is, from the standpoint of library collection development, naive, just as it is from the standpoint of who gets hired, promoted, and tenured.

The unpleasant truth is that the phenomenon I’ve been describing isn’t just how academia works, it’s how everything works. People want themselves and their publications to be judged on their inherent qualities, but the overwhelming amount of judgment people receive is based on external factors. Where you live, where you work, what you do, where or if you went to school, how you dress, how you talk, what kind of car you drive, and where or if you publish: the majority of people judge you by these signs regardless of what they reveal about your “true” self and its quality. Sometimes that’s the only thing they can do.

[Update: a Postscript to this post.

Edwin Mellen Press Suing a Librarian?

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[Update from Leiter: a statement from McMaster and a petition for Mellen to drop the lawsuit.]

Edwin Mellen Press is suing Dale Askey–a McMaster University librarian–and McMaster University for “$3.0 million dollars as damages for defamation arising from continuous publication on the World Wide web by the defendant Askey.” The alleged defamation occurred in a 2010 blog post Askey–an American citizen–wrote when he was a librarian at Kansas State University. The contents of the action (including the original blog post) are available here. Regardless of the outcome of the case, academic librarians should consider the implications of this lawsuit and its potential attack on academic freedom and the public expression of professional opinions on relevant subjects. Information about previous and potential Mellen lawsuits are below.

[Note: the above is the latest update. Normally I don’t revise posts, but as I want to publicize this case and this is the post getting the traffic, I wanted to be clearer and put to rest the questions I had when writing the original post below. The questions were answered very quickly.

[Update, more coverage from Inside Higher Education. The notice of action is dated June 7, 2012. After 8 months of silence, it’s good this is finally being publicized. And a discussion of the IHE article on Gawker. And from the Chronicle of Higher Education. And from Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.]

[Update: the lawsuit seems to be real. Here is the notice of action by Mellen Press against Askey and McMaster, sent to me by Les Green of Oxford U.]

I put the title in question marks because I have no details of any such lawsuit, but allegedly Mellen Press is suing an academic librarian at McMaster University for giving a low professional opinion of Mellen’s offerings. The claim came in comment on this Leiter Reports post reporting on a survey of philosophers about the best philosophy publishers (where, incidentally, Mellen finished 34th out of 34). Leiter brought the comment up to the top in this post: Shocking attack on academic freedom at McMaster by Edwin Mellen Press? (Note the question mark.)  Here’s the comment in full, from a philosopher at Oxford:

The Edwin Mellen Press may well, as this survey suggests, have the worst quality philosophy list but it tops the league in disgraceful conduct in defense of its dismal reputation.

A professional librarian at McMaster University’s library complained, in a 2010 blog-post, that Mellen was a poor publisher with a weak list of low-quality books, scarcely edited, cheaply produced, but at exorbitant prices. Librarians are expert at making such judgments; that’s what universities pay them to do. And the post made a key point about the public interest: ‘in a time when libraries cannot purchase so much of the first-class scholarship, there is simply no reason to support such ventures.’

No one likes bad reviews; but Mellen’s approach is not to disprove the assessment, pledge to improve its quality, or reconsider its business-model. It is to slam McMaster University and its librarian with a three million dollar lawsuit in the Ontario Superior Court, alleging libel and claiming massive aggravated and exemplary damages. The matter is pending.

The lawsuit is threadbare. With respect to the parts of Mellen’s list with which I am familiar, the librarian’s statements noted above are all true and the quality judgments are correct. (And this survey suggests that would be a common assessment.) Moreover, on the facts in this situation, it is obviously fair comment, and public policy considerations strongly suggest that university librarians enjoy a qualified privilege with respect to their assessments of the quality of the books they consider buying for their universities. It would be a disaster for universities, students, researchers and the taxpayer if aggrieved publishers were permitted to silence discussions of the quality of their publications by threats of lawsuit.

McMaster University’s response to this appalling tactic has been surprising. Public silence. No one at McMaster has spoken in defense of the librarian or the University; no University administrator has pushed back against the crude threat to academic freedom that this represents. (But then the President of McMaster’s list of the seven ‘McMaster Principles’ omits mention of academic freedom.) Are the McMaster faculty, administration, and faculty associations already so cowed by libel-chill that they are afraid to speak up? Or are they unaware of Mellen’s attack? Or—and this is just as worrying—is it that McMaster values its professional librarians so little that it is willing to let them bear the brunt of such harassment, so long as the University itself can avoid vicarious liability?

Let’s hope someone at McMaster forcefully says ‘enough’ to this sort of bullying. Universities have a negative duty not to abridge the academic freedom of their members; they also have a positive duty to see to it that others do not do it either.

I vaguely remember reading a blog post like that and thinking it uncontroversial, if perhaps a bit sweeping. Librarians have opinions about various presses based on long exposure to their publications. Most academic collection development librarians have opinions on way or the other about numerous publishers, and if pressed they could probably present evidence to support those opinions, because professional opinions don’t form in a vacuum. Regardless, suing a librarian for expressing such a professional opinion seems like an unusual tactic for a scholarly publisher, and the kind of thing that librarians, who probably buy the most Mellen Press books, probably won’t like.

There is a history of this kind of thing. In 1993 Mellen Press sued the greatest magazine of academic intellectual life that ever existed, Lingua Franca, over an article that “referred to the Edwin Mellen Press as “a quasi-vanity press cunningly disguised as an academic publishing house.” (St. John, Warren. 1993. “Vanity’s Fare: How One Tiny Press Made $2.5 Million Selling Opuscules to Your University Library.” Lingua Franca, September/October, p. 1ff. See note 8 here.) They lost. As a mirror site for some old LF content states:

OFFENDED VANITY
Warren St. John deems Edwin Mellen Press a vanity publisher capitalizing on the desperation of credential-hungry academics. St. John also finds that the Press’s offshore adjunct, Mellen University,* is little more than a diploma mill. After the exposé, Mellen chief Herbert Richardson, a former University of Toronto religion professor, accuses LF of libel and sues for $15 million. He loses. In September 1994, St. Michael’s College, where Richardson holds tenure, dismisses him for “gross misconduct.”
There is a book about the case. I haven’t looked at the book, but was actually impressed by the publisher: Reid, Paul H., Jr. 2006. The Edwin Mellen Press Versus Lingua Franca: A Case Study in the Law of Libel. Queenston, Ontario: Edwin Mellen Press. [Update: I skimmed through the book, which is by the lawyer who tried and lost the case in a United States court. Near the end, the author acknowledges that American libel laws are very stringent, and that if they had this to do over again, they would have sued Lingua Franca in British court, as British libel laws are much looser than American. I don’t know whether Canadian laws are closer to British or American models.]
More lawsuits might be on the way. This is from a discussion forum at the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Re: Edward [sic] Mellen Press–Any insights?
« Reply #16 on: January 21, 2011, 02:04:48 PM »
I wasn’t sure which of the Mellen threads to use for this post, but this seemed like a decent option. I just received a letter from Edwin Mellen in relation to a conference I attended several years ago. Apparently, there was a session on academic publishing at this conference, and one of the panelists (according to this letter) discussed publishers, mentioning Mellen as one publisher to avoid because their books won’t count towards tenure. (Note that I didn’t actually attend this session or appear on the panel.) This letter is asking for “memories” of what this individual said on this panel about Mellen so that they can “seek adjudication” – I’m assuming that means legal action? I’m rather horrified by this.
If these reports are true, the Mellen Press is suing a librarian for claiming the press has a “weak list of low quality books” and trying to sue (presumably) a professor for opining that Mellen books wouldn’t count towards tenure. But are they true? I don’t know what to say. If the reports are true, it does seem that there’s a lawsuit designed to repress the academic freedom of a librarian expressing a professional opinion. And if so, it’s one of the rare cases that illustrate why even academic librarians need their academic freedom protected. If anyone can give more details one way or the other, please do so in the comments.
*The “offshore adjunct, Mellen University” apparently used to exist. Here’s about all I could find online about it. It’s worth a read.