Cites & Insights December 2009 1
Cites & Insights
Crawford at Large
Libraries • Policy • Technology • Media
Sponsored by YBP Library Services
Volume 9, Number 13: December 2009 ISSN 1534- 0937 Walt Crawford
Bibs & Blather
End of a Volume,
End of an Era
This is the final issue of Cites & Insights Volume 9.
( The index and title page will appear later, probably
still in November 2009.) It’s not quite a single- essay
issue, but close to it— and I’d like to think that essay
winds up the year on a bright note.
I’d apologize for the absurd length of this volume
( the book edition’s going to be fat). I still have dreams
of aiming for 144— no, make that 192— no, make that
240 pages a year, but instead this is the first time the
ejournal’s passed the 400- page mark. Oddly enough,
that’s partly because this has been a busy year, what
with house- hunting, moving, etc., and I kept trying to
make sure there would be some material ready for “ the
next issue.” And I published large parts of three differ-ent
books, none of which sold very well…
It’s also the end of an era, five years of sponsor-ship
by YBP Library Services, a division of Baker &
Taylor. I’m grateful for the sponsorship and should
note that YBP never influenced editorial content,
something that was made clear from the beginning.
New Sponsor Needed
Cites & Insights needs a new sponsor— and I’d be
happy to discuss a sponsorship that includes Walt at
Random as well. Basics:
The ideal sponsor would have interests in the
library field but, if a business, would be in an
area I don’t discuss— e. g., integrated library
systems, bibliographic services, library schools,
consortia, distributors...
Sponsorship would yield an identification on
the first page of each C& I, a sentence and a logo
on the last page of each new issue, a sentence on
each new HTML version and a sponsorship ac-knowledgement
and link on the C& I home-page—
and, for Walt at Random, a mutually-agreeable
link or ad on all pages. ( The YBP
sponsorship stays on all issues they sponsored.)
We could discuss messages from the sponsor,
signed as such.
C& I readership is substantial. Over a six-month
period ( May 2- November 1, 2009),
there were 206,000 pageviews in 77,000 ses-sions,
including 48,000 full- issue downloads
and 119,000 HTML pageviews.
To my continued astonishment, Walt at Random
seems to be a bigger draw: Currently, it’s aver-aging
more than 4,000 pageviews a day.
Want to reuse selected material on a “ company
site” or have me speak at a company- sponsored
event? That’s certainly possible.
Get in touch with me at waltcrawford at
gmail. com.
I’m not suggesting C& I will go away if there’s no
sponsor. I am saying C& I’s future would be more as-sured
with a sponsor.
Inside This Issue
Making it Work: Purpose, Values and All That Jazz ............ 2
Offtopic Perspective: 50 Movie Comedy Classics 2 .......... 25
New Book Likely
But Still They Blog: The Liblog Landscape 2007- 2009
should be out before the end of the year and possibly
before the first C& I for 2010. ( As I write this, the first
nine of 11 to 13 chapters are in second- draft stage.) It
doesn’t entirely replace The Liblog Landscape 2007-
2008 and that book continues to be available.
The new book covers a more selective portion of
the liblog landscape, although still a large one ( it in-cludes
521 blogs, 41 of them not in the earlier study).
It’s somewhat more narrative, although still heavy on
tables and graphs. It does include brief subjective
comments on some ( but not all) blogs— and those
Cites & Insights December 2009 2
blogs aren’t all described in one humongous chapter
at the end of the book.
Watch for the announcement, either in Cites &
Insights 10: 1 or on Walt at Random.
Making it Work
Purpose, Values and
All That Jazz
I’m not a librarian and certainly not a philosopher—
but it’s hard to discuss real- world librarianship with-out
considering philosophical issues at times. This is
one of those times, although “ philosophical issues”
can overlap into specific practical considerations.
Because MAKING IT WORK essays and perspectives
almost always focus on one or more clusters of related
items, some items definitely worth discussing get lost
in the cracks. The first section of this installment con-siders
a bunch of those, going back as far as October
2007. For these items, “ mixed issues” seems like the
best label— and “ all that jazz” is a good alias, if you
accept that jazz is not frivolity. These are all serious
discussions; they just jump around more than usual.
As usual, most commentary deals with source
material in chronological order within sections, and
most subsection headings ( in italics) are titles of blog
posts or other source material. No, this isn’t a wholly
original “ On”- style essay— and I wonder whether
those essays are the best use of my limited talents.
Coming back to this preface after preparing the bulk
of the essay ( admittedly heavy on quoted material),
I’m delighted to see that it’s largely upbeat, which I
find appropriate for the end of year.
John’s eight laws of library technology
This article originally appeared in one of John Mie-dema’s
earlier blogs and has been retained in his cur-rent
I, Reader. You’ll find it at johnmiedema. ca/ 2007/ 10/
23/ johns- eight- laws- of- library- technology/
Miedema comes to librarianship from IT, specifi-cally
IBM. He found, to his surprise, that “ what I
learned at library school was that I was less interested
in library technology than librarianship.” This post
discusses “ eight rules”; I’m including the rules and
portions of Miedema’s expansions, which are worth
reading and thinking about.
1. It all comes down to data and rules… No one can
learn it all. So just dive in and learn something; in time
you will see that it all comes down to two things: data
and rules… In the end, there is not much new under
the sun. It all comes down to data being sloshed
around by the application of programmatic rules. Con-tent
and syntax. I hope that helps describe the big pic-ture,
and gives you courage to try anything in the field.
2. Organized information is handier than disorga-nized
information. Just like closets. It sounds obvious,
almost a definition of cataloging. Now let me offer this
slant— any degree of increased order is helpful. There
are many methods of increasing order: back- of- the- book
indexes, full- text indexes, controlled vocabularies, tax-onomies,
etc. The thing all of these tools have in com-mon
is that they reduce the state of disorder or chaos in
information to some degree… The task of a librarian in
the information age isn’t necessarily to bring high- end
classification systems to the web. Things like social tag-ging
are catching on because they bring just a measure
of order to large bodies of content…
3. The rate at which data is being recorded is ac-celerating
faster than our ability to manage it…
The information technology industry keeps inventing
new ways to cope with the situation— content man-agement,
business intelligence, tagging, and so on—
but there is another practical option: collect less in-formation.
Will we be less informed? Not if we apply
an old- fashioned solution, the scientific method.
Scientists collect a finite number of observations from
the natural world, apply scientific rigor ( repeatability,
etc.), and make valid conclusions more often than
not. They don’t try to record everything…
4. Librarians should not build their own software
systems [ except as part of open- source teams]. Li-brarians
should experiment with every new technol-ogy
out there. Librarians should become very
technically literate… in order to know what they
want, and what they are getting when they go to a
vendor to purchase a system… Web 2.0 widgets are a
long cry from a software system… Think very hard
about what patrons want; most don’t know… In
truth, design is a two- step between users and ex-perts…
I’ll make one significant exception; open
source development has the potential to harness all
levels of development skills into a worthy product; it
just takes longer.
5. These days there is only one way to acquire a
system: buy a package, and two, custom build it.
[ Paraphrasing: Most library systems aren’t “ finished”
for a given installation.] Just because it’s shrink-wrapped
doesn’t mean it’s a package. Think configu-ration.
Ask your vendor how much configuration is
required. Is it custom programming in disguise?
That’s where the dollars drain out…
6. RSS and XML are cooler than you think. RSS is
a simple Web 2.0 technology that completely changes
our relationship with the web. Instead of having to go
to the web, the web comes to you! If you learn noth-ing
else about Web 2.0, learn RSS… If you want to
Cites & Insights December 2009 3
learn the next most important thing, learn XML, god’s
gift to the web. XML is a character based data format
that allows disparate systems to talk to each other…
7. Print is the next evolution in information tech-nology.
If technology evolved in the order of its im-portance,
then print would be the next big thing.
There’s no question that digital technology is better
for finding information… But finding information is
only half the picture… People talk about the conti-nuum
of data to knowledge. Data is something out
there, on the web perhaps; knowledge is something
in your head. We go through of process of taking in-formation
that’s out there, and internalizing it. That’s
where print is so important… When it comes down
to serious reading, especially of challenging material,
there is no equal for print and books.
8. Library technology is less interesting than li-brarianship.
It is important to remember this. It is
becoming a more distant memory now, but remem-ber
that not so long ago it was believed by many that
digital technology would replace libraries. Librarians
were told they could become knowledge workers in
the private sector…
I could quote more and maybe should ( it’s legitimate
with Miedema’s blog). Do I agree with all of these?
Well…# 3 gives me a lot of pause and I simply don’t
have enough experience to discuss # 5. ( I spent most
of my career designing and writing library systems—
but never as packages to be installed at many loca-tions.)
I would note that a fair number of people still
believe digital technology will replace libraries and
that print books are outmoded— although there, I’m
definitely on Miedema’s side.
What we have here is not a manifesto. It’s a set of
eight observations (“ laws” is an uncomfortable term),
one that encourages librarians to step back and look
at things in broader and more balanced ways. Two
years later, it’s worth a reminder: If you never encoun-tered
this, maybe you should— and if you’ve read it
and forgotten it, try reading it again.
The ALA Code is not enough…
Ryan Deschamps, The Other Librarian, posted this on
February 18, 2008; the full title is “ The ALA code is
not enough: Thoughts and case studies on librarian
ethics” ( Click on “ ethics” in the topic cloud at The
other librarian, otherlibrarian. wordpress. com).
Deschamps notes suggestions that people post the
ALA Code of Ethics on office walls and says, “ Ethics are
extremely important, but I am here to say that a state-ment
of a code is not enough.” He prefers to discuss
four “ things ethical.” Excerpts:
1. Do Not Put Library Values before Core Human
Values. The most important values in library service
have nothing to do with libraries…. In this order,
these are the values you should aspire to:
Integrity— Your word is your bond. You do what you
say you are going to do…
Honesty— You do not lie, even when it hurts.
Accountability— You take responsibility for what
happens under your watch, and refrain from the
blame game when the results do not come through…
Compassion— You never behave as an automaton.
Rules and policies often do cause harm to some at the
benefit to others— you see your job as making the
harm as little as possible when this happens…
Librarians and Library Associations are so often fo-cused
on their status as professions that they miss the
core points related to any public service. Be good first;
be a good librarian second.
I would argue that total honesty is neither always vir-tuous
nor always ethical. There are cases where social
untruths— little white lies— are necessary and valua-ble
social lubricants.
2. Ethics is Hard: The Case of the Justified Whis-tle-
blower
Sometimes, the most obvious right thing to do is, in
retrospect the absolute worst thing to do. The most
serious example I can think of is the issue of whistle
blowing in the public service….
Paraphrasing Deschamps’ argument, he believes it
would be wrong and selfish to call a reporter if you
know a manager is engaging in nepotism— because a
“ media feeding frenzy” could damage the library. De-schamps
says you should only blow the whistle pub-licly
if you’re sure of your facts, higher officials are
informed and doing nothing and “ the problem is of a
very serious, life- threatening nature.” By adding life-threatening,
Deschamps essentially says that no libra-rian
( possibly outside of some medical libraries)
should ever blow the whistle!
This is all to say that the first action that comes to
mind may not be the most ethical action after all…
You have to think before acting.
You should read Deschamps’ full discussion here. I’m
not convinced by the general case, although I agree
with the final paragraph.
3. Ethics Hurts
Here, the “ case study” doesn’t seem to exist, except to
the extent that he’s saying it’s easy for individuals to
“ accuse institutions of heinous acts” and difficult for
institutions to defend themselves. The useful and legi-timate
point Deschamps makes is that it is typically
unethical to breach confidentiality rules in order to
refute an attack.
4. Ethics are Contradictory
Cites & Insights December 2009 4
If you haven’t already figured it out, I have already
said “ honesty” and “ integrity” are the most important
values on one side of my mouth, and on the other
side said “ don’t rat on your boss” or “ don’t tell the
truth about that disgruntled patron.”
That’s the reason why I think ethical codes are so
problematic. Honesty and Integrity ought to be the
default settings for your behavior, but sometimes you
have to change those settings to suit the circums-tances.
( Paraphrased slightly:) Perhaps the fifth and
most important value is Alertness: keeping the mind
open and aware of both small details and the big pic-ture.
[ Which also requires:] Humility.
The post received one comment, primarily putting
down a book on library values. Looking at it not quite
two years later, I think Deschamps is saying important
things— ethics is more about attitude and consistency
than specific professional codes— and I think he pro-vides
reasons for you to think through some issues,
even though you may disagree with his conclusions.
False public libraries
A provocative title and post— by “ Bo” on February 18,
2008 at The letter Z. It’s about DRM, more specifically
“ one particularly pernicious aspect of DRM, and other
digital technologies: the way they limit the devices
you can use to play protected files.”
Bo works in mobile services— which means using
bookmobiles to “ bring services to people with other
barriers to library use: low- income young children,
seniors, and people with disabilities.” That work has
“ made me more sensitive to the ways… citizens are
commonly excluded from public services.”
A co- worker asked me the other day whether I had
noticed an increase in the number of new library ma-terials
that were available only in downloadable elec-tronic
formats. He pointed out that many of our
hard- of- hearing or deaf patrons had only bought CD
players because of the library’s recent decision to stop
buying any new audio cassettes. “ Now they have to
buy computers and MP3 players?” he asked.
Bo notes that DRM isn’t new— and, relating this issue
to a call by one group for public libraries to get rid of
any resources with DRM, quotes my comment on that
proposal ( as reported at LISNews):
Maybe it���s a good idea– maybe public libraries should
not have any resources that contain DRM– but that
does rule out almost all DVD ( and, by the way, almost
all videocassettes, except that the restrictions weren’t
digital), pretty much all subscription audio-book/
music/ etc. digital resources, Playaway, many ( if
not most) licensed databases…
Bo doesn’t quote my final paragraph: “ I’m not wild
about DRM either. But trying to ‘ throw out’ all of it is
essentially arguing for a return to nothing but books
and physical sound recordings.” Bo notes that DRM
gives producers much more control over use of mate-rials—
and argues, I believe overstating the case, that
DRM helps companies in their efforts to
“ make… players obsolete as quickly as possible in or-der
to sell newer models.” Bo cites ATRAC players as
an example. I don’t find the case or the example all
that convincing— ATRAC was discontinued because it
failed in the marketplace, and CD players have been
in production for nearly three decades now. For that
matter, the oldest MP3 players work just fine with
today’s MP3s ( and in this case, DRM was driven out of
a particular marketplace).
But that’s not really Bo’s point. Bo is claiming
something more fundamental:
The more materials libraries collect in electronic for-mats,
with or without the added restrictions of DRM,
the more dubious their status as true public utilities,
and the more they resemble a public service to the
owners of CD and MP3 players.
That’s pretty striking: the condemnation literally in-cludes
everything except books. After all, LPs don’t
work unless you have a turntable ( and CD players are
almost certainly cheaper than turntables ever were!)
and audiocassettes are worthless without a cassette
player ( which probably used to cost as much in real
dollars as today’s cheapest CD or MP3 players). It may
be worth noting that Bo cites an argument on ��� false
public utilities” that seems to say the highway system
is a “ false public utility”— which, presumably, should
not have been built?
As a philosophical statement, I find it wanting.
When we get to the point of suggesting that it’s
against the spirit of a true public library to provide
anything except books, I’d go one step further: There
are lots of people out there who can’t or won’t read
book- length text. Therefore, public libraries shouldn’t
have books either.
Is that an overstatement? As I write this, I can
buy a 2GB MP3 player for $ 19 and a portable CD
player ( including earbuds) for $ 20— or a DVD player
for $ 10 ($ 40 for a complete player, including screen).
Do those prices represent barriers to full public use, at
such a level that it would be a greater good to the
public to eliminate public library purchases of those
media? I’m unwilling to make such a claim. ( Should
public libraries offer to circulate MP3 players or DVD
players or CD players to those who can’t afford their
own? That’s a different question, and I might have a
different answer— for libraries that could actually
identify a significant number of people who will use
Cites & Insights December 2009 5
the services and for whom a $ 10 or $ 20 purchase
would be a legitimate hardship.)
There’s more to the post, and I may be missing
key points.
The story of my profession
This one’s from Iris Jastram, posted April 9, 2008 at
Pegasus librarian. Technically, she’s talking about the
Computers in Libraries conference, her difficulties in
blogging and twittering directly from the conference
and the extent to which this “ lack of communication”
( she was talking with people face- to- face, which cer-tainly
qualifies to me) contradicts “ what I think has
become the unofficial theme of this conference: telling
stories.” Jastram likes stories.
At its heart, Story requires interaction, communication,
and therefore community. I’ve also found that narrative
stirs some deep and vital part of people. We’ll believe a
narrative that hangs together even without the “ evi-dence”
that we train ourselves from school onward to
interrogate. And we’ll often remember evidence- based
narratives but forget all the actual evidence itself. On
the flip side of that, facts without a narrative to tie
them together are just about the epitome of “ boring”
and “ forgettable” for me. And what’s more, Story is fun!
It taps into the not- work- but- fun part of my psyche
and sets my default mode to trust and enjoyment ra-ther
than skepticism. ( Why do you think it takes so
long to teach students to read fiction critically?… be-cause
it’s made up of good stories.)
All this talk of Story has inspired me to be on the
lookout for the narratives we present and narratives
we could present to our communities. I know we do,
and we often even do it intentionally. I’m just inter-ested
in being mindful, myself, of the power of Story
for my library.
But I actually think it should be more than just an in-spiration.
I think this idea of Story should be a great
comfort to those who feel forced to think that the on-ly
way forward is to obliterate everything on which
libraries are built. Quite the contrary. Our history of
service and of meeting our community’s needs is fun-damentally
part of our story. It’s the part that’s im-plied
when we start in medias res. It’s the part that sets
the stage when we begin “ once upon a time.” It’s the
part that, if forgotten, renders the rest of the narrative
stilted, limp, and ultimately boring. Moving forward
is the rising action of the story, not a new story.
I love this, but then I wrote a series of “ marketing”
pieces for WebJunction, back in the day, on telling the
library story and how libraries could tell community
stories. I’ve always thought, and said, that it’s Story
that sets books apart as powerful media— they’re great
ways to tell long, well- narrated stories. ( Yes, I did add
a comment along those lines. And “ media” is inten-tional:
Even narrative books make up several media,
not just one medium.)
John’s seven laws of progressive library technology
Remember “ John’s eight laws” at the start of this essay?
Same John ( Miedema), same blog ( now called I, reader
but still at johnmiedema. ca), posted July 18, 2008. Mie-dema
read and reviewed Revolting Librarians and Revolt-ing
Librarians Redux and decided to offer an “ unofficial
( and uninvited) contribution to past or future vo-lumes,”
suggesting that each generation of library stu-dents
should have its own revolting volume.
I’m going to quote nearly the whole post because
it’s thought provoking and doesn’t lend itself to easy
excerpting.
1. The New Front of Intellectual Freedom is
Relevance. While there are still challenged ma-terials,
the bigger problem today is finding rele-vant
information amidst the abundance on the
web. A problem of plenty seems a good thing,
but it is laced with agendas to obscure facts with
advertising and misinformation.
2. Information Technology is Part of the Prob-lem.
Better search technologies are not enough.
Philosophers have a puzzle they call the frame
problem, the still unsolved difficulty of program-ming
effective relevance criteria for a dynamic en-vironment.
Notice that no one talks about
artificial intelligence anymore. In direct propor-tion
to the growth of the web, information seek-ers
need curated information, librarians.
3. Information has an Identity. Would the qual-ity
of the web improve if information was linked
to an identity? My domain is johnmiedema. ca,
my name and geography. It’s something Facebook
got right, organizing information around profiles.
There is a time for anonymity, but not most of the
time. Information is bound to be better when
someone has to put their real name on it.
4. Information has a Location. Information
seems ethereal, but every byte exists on a physical
disk somewhere in the physical plane. Metadata
supplies a context on data; context is locality; one
cannot escape the local in library. Information has
an impact on the planet; think energy use and
landfills. We better connect the dots between in-formation
and the earth while we can.
5. Information is Ecological. Tweets, emails,
blogs, e- books, print, books, stone tablets. All
have a role in our information ecology. Status
updates lend themselves to tweets, sustained
thinking to blog posts or print. Don’t let the li-brary
blogosphere wither away into tweets alone.
Cites & Insights December 2009 6
6. Code is Political. Does it matter if your code
counts toys or war machines? It is convenient to
talk about “ information”; it sounds so neutral.
But technology changes the balance of power. In
whose hands can it be trusted? Private business?
Non- profits? If having an agenda is a dangerous
thing, which of us is free from danger? Informa-tion
is personal is political.
7. Keep it FOSS. Politics has never been as
simple as left and right, public vs private sector.
Does private interest always poison the well? We
can all collaborate more often through free and
open source projects ( FOSS) that protect the in-terests
of everyone. Be careful. Not everything
open source is FOSS. When it’s FOSS, no one
has the right to yank the plug, ever.
Could I quibble with some of these? Probably— but I
think they deserve your own thought, so I’ll just re-mind
you that, more than a year later, this is still good
stuff worth reading and thinking about.
What do you think you are doing?
An interesting post by Kathryn Greenhill, posted Au-gust
11, 2008 at Librarians matter. This one’s not
about mindfulness but “ about understanding the mo-tivations
of other people, especially those well inten-tioned
folk who get right up your nose.” Or— well,
she uses a phrase that drives me nuts, one she notes
being used frequently by librarians “ who are passio-nate
about new technology and its transformative
power”: “ they just don’t get it.”
One of my stock answers—” Maybe they get it but
just don’t want it”— is apparently not acceptable.
Greenhill believes asking “ what does this person think
she is doing”— as a real question, not a dismissal—
could yield some understanding.
Let’s take a couple of examples.
When you are answering a student question on the
reference desk, what are you doing? If you believe
you are there giving the student the information that
she needs, you will give a very different answer than
a co- worker who believes she is there educating the
student how to find information for herself.
If you’re trying to teach a student to fish on an occa-sion
where the student really just needs the damn fish,
you may be serving both yourself and the student
badly because there’s a mismatch.
If you think that you come to work to catalogue
books, you are going to do things very differently
than your colleague who believes she is there to pro-vide
access to information. If you think you come to
work so you can fund your real passion— restoring
old lawnmowers— you are going to behave very diffe-rently
than someone who comes to work because
they would go around the bend looking after their
small children all day. That’s different from someone
who comes to work because she believes what she is
doing changes lives in a good way, or that doing a
good day’s work is reward in itself.
Here I wonder, frankly… not that there will be differ-ences
but that one perspective necessarily results in
better or more effective work than another. Someone
who regards good work as its own reward may very
well do a less effective job than one who does great
work in order to pay for that expensive avocation.
And then, how about adding in who your co- workers
think they are serving? What if you are in a public li-brary
and think you are there to serve people who
cannot otherwise buy books or navigate information,
when your boss thinks you are there to serve the
councillors on local government who fund your li-brary?
How about in an academic library? What if
you think you are serving the students and need to
be up to date with the technology they are using in
their everyday lives, whereas your colleague believes
she is serving the academics and needs to support the
traditional teaching methods used by these people?
Also good questions— although I’d be saddened to think
a public librarian felt they were there only or even pri-marily
to serve those who couldn’t afford their own
books, that the library is primarily a welfare agency.
I guess that it’s useful to throw “ charitable reading”
into the mix of questions. Looking at what other
people are doing and where you have no information
to the contrary, interpreting it in the best- intentioned
way on their part.
I’d like this better if it didn’t mention “ charitable read-ing,”
which in my experience is a wildly asymmetric
notion— that is, “ you are supposed to read my stuff
charitably, but I’m free to attack you viciously and per-sonally
because of something I misinterpret or overin-terpret.”
Cutting people slack? A great idea— but it
doesn’t work when it only works one way.
I think it’s easy, when you see someone who is not
jumping on your bandwagon, to think it is because
they are uncaring, or wrong, or not passionately en-gaged
in their work. It’s probably worth taking time
out to ask a few questions:
1. Why am I doing this job?
2. Who do I think I am serving?
3. What do I think I am doing?
4. Why is she doing this job?
5. Who does she think she is serving?
6. What does she think she is doing?
7. How could I read what she is doing in the most
charitable possible way?
Cites & Insights December 2009 7
Maybe, just maybe, it would be a useful exercise to
write down 10 different answers to these questions,
and see whether the obvious drops away and some-thing
a little closer to the truth emerges.
Then, how about going back and answering this
question:
8. How would she answer the questions above?
When those questions are done with, you will probably
be better equipped to answer the important question:
9. Where does the bridge need to be built and what’s
the best way to do it?
This list omits questions that should be fundamental
for those touting new things and building bandwa-gons
( which is what Greenhill is talking about).
10. Is it possible that they have a valid objec-tion
to the bandwagon I’m building?
11. Am I sure this new thing is beneficial in this
environment— so sure that my role is to con-vince
them, not to listen to their pushback?
I see questions one through nine all pointing to “ how
do I get this person to go along?”— and maybe that’s
not always the right question.
There’s also the question of whether “ passionately
engaged” is the ideal or even the optimal position for
librarians and other workers, but that philosophical
discussion— which has been raised recently— goes
way beyond this post. Is passion always the ideal? Are
there times when a more balanced, more dispassio-nate
approach might serve everyone better?
Greenhill writes well and carefully and thinks
through her posts. I don’t feel I need to cut her slack—
and if it isn’t clear that I think she’s saying worthwhile
things here, things I poke at while strongly recommend-ing,
then I haven’t written this clearly enough.
Thinking about time
Maybe this relates back to Kathryn Greenhill’s “ What
do you think you are doing?”— philosophical issues
about librarians and others, not libraries themselves.
This one’s from Doug Johnson, posted January 13,
2009 at Blue skunk blog. He begins by quoting five
paragraphs from another blog:
Do you find yourself with too much free time to
devote to your family, hobbies, or charity work?
Do you feel like you’re wasting time reading books,
taking walks, or working on a Master’s Degree?
Is your mind so demented that you believe people
want to read your every waking thought?
Do you want to come home from a full- time job
and then work some more?
If you answered YES to all four, Congratulations...
you have what it takes to blog. And it is quite
possible that you are a moron, slightly creepy, and
in a word… breathtakingly odd ( sorry, two words
… and there is no chance I want to ever meet you
in person). from The PrincipalsPage blog
One of my favorite quotes comes from Annie Dillard
who writes, “ How we spend our days is, of course,
how we spend our lives.” Seems like quite a number
of bloggers have been reflecting lately on how best to
spend their time… [ cites five examples]
So how we spend our days is how we spend our
lives, eh, Annie? I’ve been thinking a lot lately about
how I use my writing time. In an old column on time
management I once asked:
Is this a job that will have a long- term effect?...
too often, the minutia of the job pin us down, like
Gulliver trapped by the Lilliputians, and we make
small progress toward major accomplishments.
Remind yourself that that the big projects you work
on often have more impact on your students and
staff than the little attentions paid to them. Spend at
least one part of everyday on the big stuff.
Am I following my own advice? You have to know
that I have about six primo hours of writing time
each week— Saturday and Sunday mornings. It’s the
only time my brain really works well enough to think
very hard about things. ( I suppose that is why I can
blog any old time...)
Which leads me to ask which sort of writing has the
potential of making the greatest contribution to one’s
profession— books, articles or blog posts? I’m leaning
toward the first. The first of my poor, sad books has
not been revised for a dozen years.
I can’t stop blogging— too much fun and too addic-tive.
I like writing articles and columns, and it is still
a thrill after all these years to see one’s name in print.
But this year I am revising at least one book.
Hold me to it!
I suspect most C& I readers don’t subscribe to Blue
skunk blog, and those who do may have missed the
broader implications of Johnson’s discussion; I know I
did. I also commented:
It depends. I’d like to say books, but I suspect
some of my ejournal issues and essays will have at
least as long- lasting effects as any of my books.
( On the other hand, I would never EVER suggest
anybody emulate my founding of an ejournal.
Never. Sharpen that stake and aim for the heart.)
So, yes, in general, a good book should have more
long- term effect than most any article— and a lot
more lasting impact than a blog post.
I’ll stand by that answer, noting that if I had been sens-ible
and never started this ejournal, much of what ap-pears
here would have appeared as blog posts. Much,
but not all, and the essays that have had the most im-
Cites & Insights December 2009 8
pact ( do I need to cite the one that’s been read by more
people than all of my books put together?) would never
have appeared as one post or a series of posts.
But that’s me. Nobody else writes the same pe-culiar
mix; nobody else should. The next comment
after mine, signed “ Janice,” was strong and very differ-ent.
Portions of that comment, slightly edited:
BLOGS NOT BOOKS!
A “ long term effect” to me means something that will
still be around a couple generations from now.
For example— your grandchildren’s generation will still
be able to read the book you wrote, but SO WHAT?
More important than the long- term effect IMHO ( es-pecially
considering how quickly book ideas become
dated) is the widespread immediate effect.
You asked “ which sort of writing has the potential of
making the greatest contribution to one’s profes-sion—
books, articles or blog posts?” and then you
said, “ I’m leaning toward the first.”
WHY do you think a book makes the greatest contribu-tion
to your profession? Here’s why I don’t think it does.
A) Lots of people can’t afford to buy a book and read
it, but most people can afford to read a blog so with a
book you have a limited audience.
B) Some people don’t want to read a book, but will
read a blog ( shorter time commitment)
C) You probably have NO idea how many lurkers
you’ve influenced with your blog posts, and you never
will know! Those readers link or point others to your
words, and they tell two friends and so on and so on.
Lots of people don’t pass on books in the same fashion..
A carefully crafted, established blog contributes immea-surably
to our profession. It is a noble gesture to share a
piece of yourself so publicly with people who often will
give you nothing in return— no money, no fame, and
sadly, often not even any thanks or praise. So... since
you asked— I think your blog is an extremely valuable
and generous use of time; precious as it is…
Yes, this post and comment could go in a metablog-ging
essay, but I think the questions and comments
apply broadly. After looking at it again, I think every-body’s
right. Long- term impact is significant ( and the
ideas in good professional books don’t age all that ra-pidly)—
but broad short- term impact is also signifi-cant.
There, blogs still have advantages over any more
formal medium, at least in some areas.
Looking beyond the technolust
I’ll use the title of Meredith Farkas’ April 6, 2009 post
at Information wants to be free as home base for conveni-ence—
but this discussion also includes “ The impor-tance
of the non- techie or how I learned to stop pulling
out my hair and love my Luddite” by Mick Jacobsen,
posted at Tame the web on March 11, 2009 ( a post I
didn’t flag partly because that particular L- word is so
patently offensive and dismissive) and Angel Rivera’s
“ You should listen to the non- techies too,” a same- day
The gypsy librarian commentary on Jacobsen’s post.
Here’s the money quote, from Farkas:
I feel strongly that we should not engage in dialogue
with people who aren’t into the technologies we’re in-to
just to convince them that we’re right, because,
frankly, we might not be.
It’s always interesting to see high- profile library people
change their stance on something— and how rarely
they’ll admit either that there’s been a change or that,
just possibly, they could have been wrong. Farkas is
not in that always- right group, just one of her many
strengths. We’ll get back to her later.
Jacobsen begins— after offending me ( not perso-nally)
in the post title— by citing his wife as one who
makes light of social media, summarizing “ I think it is
safe to say she pretty much dislikes any 2.0 technolo-gy
on contact.” ( Side- note to Jacobsen: lots of us refer
to “ aggravators” when dealing with RSS... for good
reason, even as I follow 500 feeds.)
But now: His wife’s using LibraryThing, his Face-book
account ( why not her own?), Delicious and
Google Reader— and created a blog. So?
What does this have to do with librarianship? Well,
doesn’t that first paragraph ( besides the wife part) de-scribe
a significant portion of your coworkers?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could move them to the
second? [ Emphasis added.]
Would it? Not necessarily… but this is a post about
effective evangelism, so here’s Jacobsen’s three- part
solution— in full so there can be no question of quot-ing
out of context:
1. Listen. Never dismiss what your Luddite says. You
may not see how it applies, but it surely does in their
eyes. When, and it is most certainly when, not if,
they have misgivings about a technology it may be
necessary to move on. You might be introducing the
wrong technology at that particular time or you may
need to reexamine the technology. The Luddite may
very well have thought of something you haven’t and
it may not be as useful as you hope ( I can’t tell you
how many times this has happened to me).
2. Don’t push too hard ( if you can avoid it). Some-times
all it takes is talking to them at the right time.
Understand their schedule. Some people are ready to
play at the start of the day, some after lunch, some
while eating lunch, etc. The first time I introduced
my wife to LibraryThing she wasn’t interested. A few
months later she noticed me using it ( looking at all
my pretty book covers) and asked “ What is this and
Cites & Insights December 2009 9
why did you never tell me about it before?” A minute
or two of introduction and away she went. This also
has proven to be true with a few of my coworkers in
regards to the newly created blogs at MPOW .
3. Respect. Their concerns are not generated from
hate of tech. ( well in most cases) or lack of intelligence;
it is because they don’t see the point. Show how you
are personally using this new technology, how others
are using it, and how they specifically could. Hypo-thetical
situations just don’t seem to work.
There’s that magic word again— twice in one para-graph,
which for me undercuts the admission that the
shiny thing may not be the right shiny thing for this
occasion. Much of the rest of this may be perfectly
reasonable, but this is a case of “ what I tell you three
times is true”: I’m so convinced at this point that Ja-cobsen
doesn’t really believe others have legitimate
objections, but is only finding ways around their
Luddism, that I’m nearly incapable of reading the rest
charitably. It’s sort of like finding someone who ques-tions
something you’re doing and says “ Hey jackass,
let’s discuss this”: The flag’s already gone up.
Sure, Jacobsen finishes with “ As a side note it is
probably better not call anybody a Luddite.” But that
begs the question. Clearly, he thinks of people as Lud-dites,
else he wouldn’t use the word repeatedly. Am I
unreasonable to read “ Listen” as “ Pretend to listen”
and “ Respect” as “ Pretend to respect”? ( He already
undercuts the second point.)
One comment says: “ Maybe the question is why
do we so badly want to convert people?” The last two
comments are interesting in a different way: You’d
think that the highest of the high- tech liblogs, in a
post about converting doubters, would catch obvious
spam— but there are four spamments in a row, one of
which has been there two months at this writing. I
may be a Luddite, but I know enough to keep spam
out of my blog.
Rivera likes the post:
It resonated with me because one of the problems I
have with the whole L2 phenomenon is that they of-ten
do not listen and that they tend to push way too
hard to get people to use whatever the toy du jour
happens to be.
He mentions some of his own experiences and how
resistant he is to L2 evangelism, and why.
And notice that as I talk about what I do, I do em-phasize
the concept of “ what I do” or for what I need
it. What I am saying is that some things work for me
and others do not. If they work for you, more power
to you, but please don���t get all pushy about it and try
to convert me. That just puts you in the same bracket
as religious fundamentalists who want to convert eve-ryone
and hold the view of “ I am right; I have the
truth, and you do not,” and I hate those people with
a passion. If you are a promoter of 2.0 technologies,
do you really want to be in the same category as fun-damentalist
bullies? My guess is probably not.
So please, I would appreciate it if certain people chill
a bit. I am not a luddite by any means; I am blogging,
aren’t I? And if you look on the right side column of
my blogs, you find the links to my other online tools.
But I can certainly see the point of some non- techie
people that they may just not be ready or that they do
not find a particular tool useful. Maybe like me, they
just prefer a different tool, or they prefer not to use
something at all. That is not a bad thing.
And yes, I also agree you probably should not label
those people as “ luddites.”
Rivera notes that Twitter doesn’t work for him— and
the very first commenter feels the need to write “ in
defense of twitter” and why it’s better than other tools.
( This person loves “ the minute details from our daily
lives,” so this isn’t “ Twitter is a great business tool.”)
The commenter either didn’t read the post or didn’t
understand it at all— or got to the point where Rivera
didn’t use Twitter and immediately responded, as a
good evangelist should. ( Rivera responded politely.)
So far, we have a post that makes some good
points but is flawed by red- flag language and a tone
suggesting that these points have little to do with the
possibility that a tool isn’t right for the person and a
lot to do with wearing them down while not wholly
offending them. Let’s get back to Farkas. Here’s her
first paragraph:
Let me preface this post with the statement that I hate
the term Luddite. I think it’s often used to dismiss
people and ideas that differ from our own. It’s much
easier to dismiss someone as being anti- tech than to
try and understand what may be their very rational
argument against something you love or want to do.
She read Rivera’s post first and was predisposed to
pass over Jacobsen’s language, although she does say:
“ The use of the term Luddite throughout the former
post really made it difficult for me to read, which is a
shame, because the arguments are quite good.” And
she sees things clearly, I believe:
Both Angel and Mick talk about opening a dialogue
with non- techies instead of writing them off as being
anti- tech. But Mick is coming at this from the stand-point
of someone who loves tech and wants to share
that love with others ( the evangelist) and Angel is
coming from the standpoint of someone who likes
tech that is useful to him and is sick to death of
people trying to push him to use technologies that
just aren’t for him.
Cites & Insights December 2009 10
Farkas offers a personal example— an internal wiki
she began several years ago to share knowledge
among staff workers. The need may have been there,
but the tool wasn’t used much. “ The wiki didn’t fail
because it was a wiki ( or because my colleagues were
anti- tech). It failed because fixing that problem was
not a top priority. It still isn’t.” ( On the other hand, a
wiki for subject guides has worked because reference
and instruction are priorities.)
I feel as though there should be blinking text
here: Meredith Farkas, who I’ve called “ Queen of the
wikis” because she’s provided so much useful infor-mation
and good examples of them, states publicly
that a wiki she created did not work. Which does
not, as she notes, mean “ wikis are worthless”— not
even close. It does suggest, once again, that “ Just do
it!” isn’t the most useful approach for shiny new tools.
Let’s move on from Farkas demonstrating once again
why she’s one of the best bloggers in the field ( and,
I’m inclined to say, one of the best thinkers as well) to
quote another great paragraph:
I really like what Angel said about the pushiness of
some people who just can’t understand why someone
wouldn’t think their technology of choice isn’t the best
thing since sliced bread ( and are sometimes rude and
dismissive towards those who disagree). There’s being
a pragmatist about tech— and you can even really love
the tech you use and still be pragmatic about it— and
then there’s being religious about tech. We don’t need
proselytizing. We don’t all have to use the same tools
and just because we don’t like something you love
doesn’t mean we need to be educated ( ugh! I hate
when someone makes the assumption that a person
must not agree with them because they haven’t been
educated about it properly— it really does stink of fun-damentalism
at that point, doesn’t it?). While there are
certain technologies I can hardly live without, there are
plenty that just don’t fit into my life. They may be
“ cool” and they may be really useful to you, but they’re
just not for me. Twitter is one thing that I use extreme-ly
sporadically and I’ve found just doesn’t fit my day-to-
day lifestyle. It’s great for conferences ( and I’m sure
I’ll use it at ALA Annual), but I don’t have the time to
stick with it and I have a hard time multitasking be-tween
work and Twitter. It doesn’t mean I “ don’t get it.”
I just don’t need it.
I want to boldface pieces of that paragraph, but that
might weaken other pieces. Just in case you don’t
want to read the whole paragraph again, here’s what I
would have boldfaced:
We don’t need proselytizing. We don’t all have to
use the same tools and just because we don’t like
something you love doesn’t mean we need to be
educated… It doesn’t mean I “ don’t get it.” I just
don’t need it.
I’ll admit that I may be less charitable than I should
be. To me, Jacobsen’s post is still all about proselytiz-ing,
but doing so in a more sophisticated way. It’s
about “ getting through to the Luddites,” not “ recog-nizing
that we all have different needs.”
That’s just part of Farkas’ post. She notes a two-sided
issue for library use of new technologies. Side
one: “ Just because we use it, our friends use it, and we
think it’s the best thing since sliced bread doesn’t
mean that our patrons use it.” ( By and large, libraries
don’t know what their patrons are using, and some-times
it doesn’t matter quite as much.) Side two, with
a nod to Brian Mathews: “ We need to keep assess-ing…
because… these things change all the time.
While Twitter may not be hot right now with your
population, it may be hot in a few months, so we real-ly
need to keep our finger on the pulse of our patrons.
And there may be times when it makes sense to step
out in front of your patrons with new tech.”
Farkas’ final paragraph:
I think sometimes we all need to try and step outside
of our personal feelings about these technologies,
which isn’t easy when we think they’re the best thing
since sliced bread. When we are talking to others
about technology, we need to realize that what we
find useful may not be useful to them ( and that’s
OK). When we are thinking about implementing new
tech with our patrons, we need to understand how
our patrons use tech and whether this is really a good
fit for that population. Charging in with an “ I know
better” attitude rarely leads to positive outcomes. Ef-fective
two- way communication and understanding
other perspectives is critical.
The first commenter puts down “ someone who refus-es
to purchase a computer for home use because they
see no value to computers.” Later, Farkas notes: “ Not
everyone necessarily needs a computer in their life
and not seeing the need for one doesn’t necessarily
equate to being against technological progress.” I’m
guessing that to many people ( including Pew Inter-net),
the very idea that some people really don’t need
home computers is so heretical as to be unthinkable.
Jacobsen adds a comment, semi- apologizing for
using “ Luddite” so often. I’ve gone back and read his
three points yet again, trying to read them as some-thing
other than tools for persuasion. Maybe I’m just
tired today, but I’m not getting there— I still see little
but lip service for the concept that some people ( and
some libraries) may simply not have the need for the
tools being pushed.
Cites & Insights December 2009 11
Twitter is evil. Elsevier is evil. Wikipedia is evil.
After that lengthy ( and more heated than I’d in-tended)
discussion, it’s time for a short one— noting
Kathryn Greenhill’s May 10, 2009 post at Librarians
matter. She notes that librarians need to know about
authoritative sources and teach other people how to
evaluate reliability, then provides three examples. The
first is Twitter’s sheer power to misinform ( in this case
about swine flu). The second is Elsevier’s series of
“ Australasian journals of…” fake journals. The third is
a deliberate hoax within Wikipedia that resulted in a
phony quotation being used in obituaries around the
world. The concluding paragraphs ( slightly edited):
What conclusions can we draw from these ar-ticles?
1. Twitter, Elsevier and Wikipedia should be legally
stopped before they can do any more damage?
2. There is no context in which Twitter, Elsevier and
Wikipedia will be a reliable or useful information
source?
3. Librarians don’t need to understand the many dif-ferent
ways Twitter can be used, the funding patterns
of academic journals nor how references are quality
controlled in Wikipedia?
Nope. Librarians need to understand how informa-tion
on Twitter, in academic journals and Wikipedia
is created, distributed, re- used, re- purposed and the
criteria for sensible evaluation.
To which I would say: True enough— but how, exactly,
do librarians go about unearthing the Wikipedia hoax
or discouraging uncritical use of Wikipedia or the
other resources? That’s a legitimate question, one that
should get raised any time a reference librarian uses
Wikipedia as a resource and doesn’t crosscheck things
against another source. ( That never happens? Really?
Do you always crosscheck Wikipedia? I don’t, but then
I’m not a reference librarian.)
Is Good Enough good enough?
Let’s end this segment with an interesting question, one
where the best answer may be “ Yes, no, sometimes and
maybe.” I think that’s where Bobbi L. Newman lands in
her September 2009 Librarian by day post.
She quotes Jason Griffey:
Think about the services in your library, and the
amount of effort and resources poured into making
your services as good as they can possibly be. What if
good enough is really enough, and instead we should
be expanding our range of services instead of seeking
perfection in any single one? How does that change
the way libraries operate?
Griffey was citing a Wired article, and you probably
know how I feel about Wired as a source of truth and
understanding. The “ good enough” concept is the old
20: 80 Pareto principle with a shiny new name. Since
I’ve said ( in American Libraries) that libraries should
be aiming at the 20% of needs that isn’t readily met by
20% of effort— the “ counter- Pareto” principle— calling
it by another name is unlikely to change my distrust.
Aaron Schmidt commented on the post:
This is great, mostly because just yesterday I was think-ing
about just the opposite! My thoughts aren’t fully
formed but my basic line of thinking is that good
enough services are probably wholly unremarkable and
don’t leave any sort of impression on our users. Doing
Things Right ( even if we have to do fewer things) with
pride and quality, on the other hand, could make libra-ries
stand out and make our users admire us.
Newman did more reading, tried to decide who she
agreed with and finds “ I’m still not certain.”
Sometimes good enough is good enough. Insisting on
great product can mean you miss the boat, time wise.
It can mean you’re so invested in the finished product
that you’re resistant to changing it. It could mean you
produce a Porsche when a Saturn could produce the
same result, getting you from point A to point B.
Let’s say you can spend a lot of time and money devel-oping
a new system or product. Since we’re talking
about libraries and it’s timely let’s say it’s a new service
that helps patrons find a new job. You could insist that
you’ve covered all your bases, considered every possi-ble
problem, question and need before you make it
available. But while you’re doing that there are people
who need your help who aren’t getting it. Or you
could make it available when it’s good enough. People
will have access to a service they need and you’ll learn
as you go what needs improvement. Remember hold-ing
on to it until it’s perfect doesn’t guarantee you
won’t run into problems later. In this case, as long as
you’re willing to make modifications as you go along,
and you should be, it is good enough.
I can also see problems with doing things that are
good enough. Patrons who encounter problems and
obstacles to their goals may become frustrated and
never come back. They won’t be around to know
when you’ve improved the system or service.
The second comment, by “ sylvie,” starts out where I’m
inclined to be: “ I think both are right, it just depends
on the service.” And, to be sure, my “ counter- Pareto”
assertion has to do with serving the community—
reaching out to the 20% of special needs, not being
satisfied with serving the 80% that’s easy to do. For a
given service, good enough as a starting point may be
exactly the right place— but I don’t think that’s what
Griffey’s going for. I’m not sure. Which, I suppose, is
the likely outcome of much philosophical debate.
Cites & Insights December 2009 12
Reading this in late 2009 is interesting given the
example. “ Good enough” Saturn is no longer with us.
Porsche? Doing just fine. ( To me, Saturns always were
“ good enough,” a phrase I’d never use for my beloved
Honda Civics.) Analogies are tricky things.
Purpose
What is a library? That’s the title of the first piece in this
section, more than two years old and decidedly worth
rereading. The post was written by Betsy McKenzie and
appeared October 3, 2007 on Out of the jungle, typically
a “ blawg” or law- oriented liblog. The whole essay is just
over 1,000 words. I’m offering limited excerpts, with
emphases added and minor editing.
Libraries these days have a lot of different dimen-sions–
they function in different ways for different pa-trons,
and at different times for the same users…
Libraries today function, as they always have, as re-positories
of books and other materials. Librarians se-lect
titles, whether for print books and journals or for
online databases. Once selected, the library must ac-quire
the resource, either buying it or licensing it.
And once acquired, the library is also responsible for
keeping the material and ( usually) making it available
on a fair basis to users... So, in one major dimension,
libraries select, acquire and preserve information.
As always, there are various specialized tools to locate
what you want in that mass of stuff… In this dimen-sion,
libraries help people find the information that
has been gathered and preserved. This ranges from
cataloging and labeling to reference work.
A third dimension for academic libraries is as teach-ing
resources. We select books, indexes, and data-bases
with a special eye toward their use in teaching
students… We also host tours and instruction ses-sions
in the library itself…
A fourth dimension in academic libraries is their use
as study spaces. In this function, libraries need to
ensure quiet ( well we try!) space without distractions.
We reserve study rooms for groups. We referee argu-ments
between students over the use of study rooms
and study space. We also stock study aids.
A fifth dimension of all libraries is as social centers.
Students meet in the library for shared tasks. They al-so
meet friends and potential mates in the library…
A sixth dimension is as retreats. Students who feel
pressured by faculty often feel they can relax with the
librarians. We make a point of being friendly and
welcoming. We don’t assign grades…
And the last dimension… is as showcases. Libraries
usually are made ( at least partially) on a grand scale,
with views, and/ or large, impressive reading rooms.
The library is used on tours for potential students
and for recruiting faculty and deans as well…
So much of what we do every day fits into one or
another of these dimensions… When we plan or
work out shared use of space, we need to think of the
library in all its varied dimensions– sure you can save
space by using all compact shelving, or by ditching
all the print, but what does shrinking the library to a
database do to the other services the library provides?
So librarians try to communicate to decision- makers
the different levels or dimensions of library service.
It’s not just about buying a book and putting it on the
shelf. I don’t think it ever was.
That’s a bit less than half the essay; read the whole
thing. For public libraries, I’d probably change “ infor-mation”
to “ resources,” since entertainment and enligh-tenment
are valid and valuable outcomes of library use
that may not relate directly to facts— but overall, I
think this serves as a good reminder that, while books
continue to be core to most libraries ( and, at least for
public libraries, it would be suicidal to abandon them
in the foreseeable future), it’s never been just about buy-ing
books and putting them on the shelf.
Happy New Year to libraries
This one’s from Stan Katz and appeared at “ Brains-torm”
in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Decem-ber
27, 2007 ( chronicle. com/ blogPost/ Happy- New- Year-to-
Libraries/ 5577/).
At the year’s end, I am thinking fondly of the humanities
scholar’s best friend: the library. Scientists and social
scientists and professional school scholars also use the
library, but the humanist lives in and of the library…
For the moment, I want to notice only the concept of
“ authority,” for which libraries are crucial… [ Referring
to an ARL keynote by Hunter Rawlings: He says] that
“ In the realm of scholarship we speak of an ‘ authority’
on Plato or Shakespeare, or on government, by which
we mean an expert whose knowledge is to be trusted
as the best available on a given topic.” Until recently,
such authority was collected in books and serials,
which in turn were preserved and made accessible by
libraries. The library, in short, in collaboration with
scholars, was the accumulated depository of authority.
It is, after all, the business of humanities scholars con-tinually
to question and add to our founts of authority.
We are joined at the hip to libraries and archives.
For today I want to ignore the challenge to authority
( and the library) posed by the World Wide Web and
digital information, the world in which authority is
hardest to establish and maintain –- except to say that it
is the great libraries that are probably our best hope of
maintaining the concept of authority in an age in which
truth seems only a keystroke away. I think, by the way,
that it is easy to make the case that we need librarians to
Cites & Insights December 2009 13
mediate digital information for us. I want also, at least
for today, to ignore the extent to which humanists have
complexified the concept of authority in a generation-long
outburst of postmodernist casting of doubt upon
truth. My tribute for the new year is to the ancient insti-tution
that has so nobly served those of us who care
about knowledge, and to the trained scholar- technicians
who have so patiently created and sustained it.
Long live libraries, long live librarians, long live arc-hivists!
These days none of them can and should be
taken for granted.
You’ll find Rawlings’ keynote at www. arl. org/ bm~ doc/
mm- f07- rawlings. pdf. I’m not sure I have anything to
add to Katz’ message.
The library: It’s boxy but it’s good
AL— not that AL but the Academic Librarian, Wayne
Bivens- Tatum, has a quartet of 2008 posts relating to
library purpose that strike me as worth noting. The
first dates from April 1, 2008. Extensive excerpts with
comments as appropriate:
I’ve been reading a Time Magazine article on Star-buck’s
attempt to freshen their brand I was struck by
a line from the past and current CEO of Starbucks…
“ The three of us stand and look at the area by the
cash register— a clutter of CDs, breath mints, choco-late-
covered graham crackers, chewing gum and trail
mixes. ‘ There’s no story,’ Roberts says. Schultz adds,
‘ We’re selling a lot, but the point is to take a step
back and ask, Is it appropriate? We’ve been selling
teddy bears, and we’ve been selling hundreds of
thousands of them, but to what end?’”
The first thing I thought of was my own local Star-bucks
and the way I’ve seen it transform in the past
few years from a coffeeshop into something resem-bling
an upscale convenience store… I’ve certainly
bought my share of grande coffees over the years.
What I haven’t liked is everything else…
Truncated significantly ( I’m not fond of Starbucks cof-fee,
so I can’t speak from personal experience), but
this is far from the only case of diluting a store’s core
identity through too much extension. Which brings
us to…
I thought about the many librarians trying to brand
or perhaps rebrand the library... Libraries can open
up pubs and hold square dances, but that will never
make them any more popular qua libraries. The old
library brand is, I suppose, Books. My library has mil-lions
of books and buys tens of thousands more every
year, but Books doesn’t work well as a brand because
it captures only a portion of what we do. Information
is too broad. Perhaps Scholarly Research would be the
best brand, because the library and its resources are
central to and indispensable for scholarly research in
the humanities and social sciences.
If Scholarly Research is the brand of the academic li-brary
( and I’m arguing it should be), then do we di-lute
our brand if we focus on other things? I think we
do. Usually when I see discussions of the problem of
branding, they’re talking about public libraries and
trying to make the case that libraries have more than
books. However, academic libraries have some of the
same issue problems. Should we create blogs? Should
we be on Facebook? How can we appeal to and more
importantly communicate with students? Having a
mission— Scholarly Research— helps answer some of
these other questions. Should we have a space on Fa-cebook?
Sure, if it helps the mission, but not if it’s
just to have a page up to show that we’re hep to the
latest fashion. Should we blog? Definitely, if it serves
the mission of scholarly research somehow. Our mis-sion
is scholarly research, and that should be central
to how we brand ourselves.
Note what’s being said here: Social networking and
other extensions make perfectly good sense if they
serve the central purpose— the mission— of a library,
but not if they distract from that purpose.
Scholarly Research may sound like a humdrum or hu-morless
mission, but it has to be the identity of the aca-demic
library. It might not appeal to 18- year- olds as
much as something trendier, but the library is what it is,
and the struggle of marketing is to make things popular,
not to change the things into something else. We can
experiment with and investigate trends and fads to see
what might help us in our mission, as long as we re-member
the mission and don’t get caught up in frivoli-ties
that we think might make us more popular. It might
be best for our image to sell scholarly research as the
worthwhile endeavor we all think it is than hanker for
something sexier. There’s an old Dudley Moore movie
about an advertising executive who ends up in an asy-lum,
Crazy People. One of the crazy ads he comes up
with is, “ Volvo: We’re Boxy But We’re Good.” We will
probably be better off selling the library as what it is
than trying to pretend it’s something else.
The Library: It’s Boxy but It’s Good.
John Dupuis commented on the slightly different mis-sion
of scitech libraries, since most scientists don’t do
their research in libraries. Agreeing, Bivens- Tatum
said he wasn’t even sure about social sciences— but
for humanities, it’s clear.
Maybe a more important point here, when people
talk about the mission of “ The Library”: There is no
such thing as “ The Library”— and the mission of
Princeton University Library ( where Bivens- Tatum
works) is not the same as the mission of Livermore
Public Library ( where I borrow books). ( About that
bald- faced, bold- faced assertion: I’m not much for
manifestos and I’m not going to get to discussions of
Cites & Insights December 2009 14
some recent sets of statements— but part of me wants
to start building an “ unmanifesto” of messy but useful
truths about libraries, at least as I see them. If I do
that, the very first one would be “ There is no such
thing as ‘ The Library.’” That’s not Bivens- Tatum
speaking; that’s Walt Crawford.)
Research libraries support research
Same author, same blog, August 20, 2008— and may-be
those four words don’t require the 1,699- word ex-pansion
of the post, but I think there’s considerable
value here as well. ( OK, so Bivens- Tatum starts out by
saying what I just bold- faced, albeit in a different
manner. What can I say?) Here’s most of the post:
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 out-look
even among academic librarians…
I’m thinking about this because of the juxtaposition of
topics I’ve encountered so far today. This morning I at-tended
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 num-ber
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 re-gion
digital copies will be made available to those libra-ries
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 col-lections
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 Of-ficer
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 know-ledge
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 condition-ing
the books. Enough already. None of us has the
Alexandria Library. Michigan, Stanford, Oxford,
Indiana. Those guys have digitized their collec-tions.
What have you got that they haven’t got?
Why are you buying a new book? Buy digi-tial….
How many people are using the indices
we’re all paying so much for….
Bell certainly realizes how ignorant ( or perhaps deli-berately
provocative) Sannier is about book digitiza-tion
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 admin-istrators
that our libraries deliver the best service for
the tuition dollar. It must be shown that academic li-braries
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 se-riously…
as an expert on university research or teach-ing
more broadly, that is, outside of the technological
and digital portions of it. Obviously Google has not di-gitized
all the books in the Google Book project libra-ries,
and just as obviously the copyrighted ones they
have digitized are not freely available online. Obvious-ly
also, as Bell notes, 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.
… Based on the excerpts as well as Bell’s reaction, nei-ther
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 tui-tion
dollars are used wisely and student learning out-comes
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 re-
Cites & Insights December 2009 15
wards for. The purpose of a research university is to
research, to create knowledge, to contribute to the
scholarly record, etc… In the sciences, engineering,
computer science, and other areas, this may not re-quire
anything that can’t be accessed by a computer.
In the humanities, area studies, and some of the so-cial
sciences, it does, and it most likely will for dec-ades
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 com-ing
out of the CRL are now available to research li-braries.
It’s possible, but it doesn’t seem very likely.
Another possibility is that enough material will be digi-tized
that future researchers will be content with what
is digitally available and not worry about the rest.
That’s pretty sloppy research, but as we know every-one,
scholars included, prefers 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 [ or ever has
had]. The CRL, for example, was founded in 1949 to
address this issue. That’s why we have cooperative
agreements with other libraries…
I don’t think every institution of higher education
should be a research university or every library a re-search
library. I also don’t think that large libraries are
necessary for most undergraduate education… De-spite
its dependence on monographs, a strong liberal
arts education could probably be supported by a li-brary
of 10,000 books or so… And perhaps all those
books would be digitally available to a new college
today, or at least relatively soon…
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 de-signed
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… 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 re-search,
and the purpose of a research library is to sup-port
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 re-search
libraries and the universities they support from
the excessive technophiles and bibliophobes that could
destroy them if given a chance.
I’d add to that mission: At least at the ARL level, insti-tutions
and their libraries should have some commit-ment
to preserving the culture— and large collections
of print materials are part of that commitment. Hear-ing
a high official at my alma mater essentially trash
the significance of large central libraries did not make
my day…
Steven Bell commented on the post. In part:
When I write my ACRLog posts I’m thinking about
the full spectrum of academic libraries— from com-munity
colleges to research libraries and everyone in
between. For the vast majority the emphasis on the
teaching and learning role far outweighs the building
of a collection or supporting faculty research. Heck,
at many of them the faculty aren’t doing much re-search.
But I appreciate your take on the “ burn the li-brary”
guy from the research library perspective—
that’s why I found his statements more shocking—
because he’s from ASU. But even when it comes to re-search
universities, I don’t think just resting on the
laurels of a research mission may be sustainable…
What we can bring to the classroom— for both facul-ty
and students— can’t be offshored or done better by
a computer. I can easily foresee a future when aca-demic
institutions— even the premier research uni-versities—
could have all of their collection work,
book buying, gatewaying— managed by the ACME
Research Library Company. I doubt that the faculty,
who depend on these libraries for their research,
would even notice the difference.
Bivens- Tatum agrees in part, noting that up to half of
his collection development is already done through
approval plans, and stresses the human contact in
instruction and elsewhere. “ I agree that in general as
long as the professors get what they want from the
library, they don���t care what goes on inside it. Nor
should they from a professional perspective.”
What more to say here? I shudder at the thought
of research universities without large central libraries
including large numbers of books, but that’s just me.
( Or maybe not.) Maybe it’s because I don’t see any
other institution serving that purpose; maybe it’s be-cause
I think it’s a valuable purpose.
Humanities and the research library
The next month— September 29, 2008— Bivens-
Tatum considered reports from Ithaka and CLIR about
transforming and reconceiving libraries.
Cites & Insights December 2009 16
As I’ve argued before, though perhaps not convin-cingly,
some things about the humanities don’t
change. We continue to ask the same basic questions
and continue to study texts in a way that fundamen-tally
has remained the same since the Renaissance…
[ Even with new techniques, a lot is the same.] Study-ing
texts, interpreting culture, making arguments
about human things… Central questions will remain:
What does this cultural text or artifact mean? What
does it tell us about ourselves and our world? What
happened at such and such a time and what does it
mean? And, it seems, for a long time to come tradi-tional
methods will also apply. Some people criticize
libraries as slow to change, but the traditions of hu-manities
scholarship might be even slower. There
have been humanist scholars around a long time.
Humanists think libraries, even traditional libraries,
will still be important for their future…
Humanists are much less likely than anyone, includ-ing
librarians, to want to do away with print journal
collections even if electronic versions were available.
Humanists are more likely to feel comfortable in the
library, and less likely to think they’ll be more reliant
upon electronic resources.
It’s possible that humanists are just going to have to
be disappointed in the short run, especially with
print journals, but the transition might take a very
long time, and is unlikely to be complete in the fore-seeable
future. By then they will have adapted, or
gone extinct, as will the libraries they love now.
Despite the heated change rhetoric from some quar-ters,
libraries seem to be adapting to the future al-ready…
What seems clear to me is not how much has
or will change, but how much will stay the same even
after huge changes.
Same Roles, Same Techniques: Collection, Organi-zation,
Preservation, Authority
Things we’ll continue to do and in more or less the
same ways:
Buying books, organizing them, making them ac-cessible
in many of the same ways we do now,
maybe using digital vendor slips instead of paper,
but still more or less the same.
For scholarly works, we’ll continue to combine
with scholarly presses to put our collective impri-matur
on such works.
Building special collections and archives. If noth-ing
else, they have to be built before they can be
digitized.
Same Roles, Different Techniques: Collection, Or-ganization,
Preservation, Accessibility, Discovery
We’ll continue to collect, but with new techniques we
can even make our traditional collections more dis-coverable
and accessible.
Collection will increasingly be digital. Hardly a
surprise. But even providing access to print collec-tions
should improve…
Organizing it, providing metadata, better web por-tals,
better OPACs
Preserving the digital collection
Ensuring quality…
Making it accessible
Making it discoverable! Not just a sealed off arc-hive,
but easily findable…
Different Roles, New Techniques: Creation, Colla-boration
These are a couple of roles some people are predict-ing
for research libraries in the future, obviously
based on activities at least of the fringe of a lot of li-brary
operations now.
Creation
Creators of Digital Content— digital libraries, insti-tutional
repositories, open access journals, aca-demic
publishers. Obviously we’re already doing
some of this, but doing more of this will make the
library more central to scholarship.
Creators of information tools: Zotero, Omeka,
LibX toolbar
Helping scholars create digital content, like at the
Center for History and New Media
Collaboration
Between libraries: Print repositories, keeping ready
access to our own copies, but sharing in an orga-nized
fashion.
Between libraries and other campus units: Work-ing
with information technologists, for example.
Between librarians and faculty: collaborating with
faculty or enabling faculty to collaborate
Some libraries are doing these things now, and more
will probably have to to adapt, but nevertheless many
of the traditional roles are likely to remain, especially
in the humanities…
This post generated some conversation on FriendFeed,
which Bivens- Tatum responded to in an October 2,
2008 post. Dorothea Salo said he was dodging the hard
question: “ What are we going to have to stop doing in
order to do the new stuff? Because we are going to have
to stop doing something. There aren’t enough resources
in the world.” She added to that later— but I’m leaving
out that comment and his response as falling outside
the scope of my discussion. Excerpts from his post:
It seems I’m being criticized for failing to do some-thing
I never set out to do in the first place, which is
hardly a meaningful criticism. After all, it was a blog
post, not a management treatise. Thus, I wasn’t
“ dodging” the “ hard questions.” The supposedly hard
Cites & Insights December 2009 17
questions were merely not part of the subject of the
blog post. The topic was what I saw as a possible fu-ture
of humanities scholarship and research libraries
in about a thousand words…
… The most serious criticism is that I’m arguing that
some changes won’t or perhaps shouldn’t be occurring.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. What I will say, and
what I have said before, is that some things just aren’t
changing, and the traditions and practices of humani-ties
scholarship are among those things. It’s not a ques-tion
of wanting or not wanting “ change.” It’s a question
of looking around at what scholars in the humanities
are actually doing, and for the most part they’re doing
the same things they’ve been doing for centuries, and
they’re not showing any signs of rapidly changing.
The world of information may be changing rapidly,
but humanists for the most part just don’t care…
Humanists engage texts and arguments; thus they
need texts and arguments to engage. Giving them a
nice data set won’t please them. Libraries are there to
serve scholars, not the other way around. It would be
hubris to say scholars in the humanities need to
change the way they work because we librarians just
aren’t happy with their slow pace. Humanities libra-rians
may be among the slowest to change, but it
seems to me they’re still changing faster than hu-manities
scholars might be comfortable with.
As for what we might give up, I don’t have many
concrete answers. Part of my goal is to try to articu-late
in a small way what an ideal research library
might be. Whether or not any library can live up to
the ideal doesn’t really matter. Just because we fail at
a worthwhile goal doesn’t mean the goal isn’t worth-while.
It just means we’re failures…
Some libraries subscribe to fewer journals. Some cut
their book budgets to the bone. Some give up buying
European monographs. I’m not interested in the ques-tion
of what libraries should give up, but of what they
should provide. If research libraries can’t at a mini-mum
provide the resources that their current cohort of
scholars needs, then those research libraries are failing
in their most important mission. If that means that
humanists still need those scholarly monographs, but
librarians aren’t buying them for whatever reason, the
library has failed. Period. To some extent, we’re all fail-ures,
but we should have the courage to admit it, not
challenge the facts of scholarship…
Collecting in the humanities is cheap relative to the
sciences. While some of those STM serials might be
$ 10,000 a year and rising, that’s not the case in the
humanities. Some of the best or most important
journals might be a couple hundred dollars. Mono-graphs
are often under a hundred dollars, at least
ones from this country. It’s not humanities collections
that are breaking library budgets.
As for giving things up, we would have to look at the
library more broadly than just humanities collection
development, which to some extent was the main top-ic
of my last post. Some of the changes seem quite
easy. A reference librarian retires. We don’t have as
much reference as we used to. But hey, we need a digi-tal
photographer if we’re going to digitize stuff. Let’s
take the reference librarian line and hire a digital pho-tographer
instead. It’s library science, not rocket
science. Regardless, I’m not the one making those large
decisions for any library, and I’m not in a position to
speculate on the future of every part of the research li-brary
or how every library should address their hard
questions. I just write about what I know. The problem
might be that I just don’t know that much.
One somewhat- justified criticism made of some Open
Access advocates is that they paint nonprofit scholarly
societies— those that price their journals fairly ( by no
means all of them)— with the same brush as the big
STM publishers. One recent criticism of librarians
who support OA is that the top library periodicals
mostly aren’t OA— but, with one or two exceptions,
they also don’t cost much. I don’t believe you’d spend
$ 1,000 a year for all of ALA’s refereed journals, just to
give one example.
Bivens- Tatum’s primary point in both posts is that
humanities research isn’t changing all that rapidly, and
that research libraries that change too rapidly may be
failing to serve their scholars, abandoning their mis-sions.
Is he wrong?
the public library is for: the public
This one’s from a possibly unusual source: Richard
Akerman, writing July 22, 2008 at Science library
pad— in this case not about science libraries. It has to
do with a proposed new central Ottawa Public Li-brary—
a CA$ 200 million proposal— and the “ busi-ness
case” for it. Akerman begins with five key points:
the city is for its citizens
the public library is for the public
public space is essential to a healthy urban environ-ment
the central public library provides one of the few
remaining opportunities to enhance and enlarge pub-lic
space
you can’t use business terms or voodoo business
math to analyze public good
A newspaper article on the proposed library asks:
“ What’s the business case for a $ 200- million central
library? What return will taxpayers get for that in-vestment?
How will it result in better service to users
of the library? What are the alternatives and why were
they ruled out?”
Cites & Insights December 2009 18
Looking further at that article, the newspaper
writer challenges “ place” as part of a public library’s
role, suggests that having more small branches with
book delivery ( hey, keep the books in a warehouse)
might be more beneficial and more. Here’s what
Akerman has to say ( excerpted):
Flawed assumptions lead to flawed conclusions. Our
society favours many flawed assumptions and meta-phors.
In particular, the idea of the world as an effi-cient
assembly line producing business value.
Government is not a business. Public good does not
have direct monetary ROI. Cities are not factories that
bring components in on assembly lines ( i. e. people in
on highways) in the morning, get them to do a bunch
of work, and then ship them out for storage ( i. e. to
the suburbs, on the highways again) in the evening.
At least, they shouldn’t be.
If you follow these assumptions, what you get is a
city with wide highways cutting through all parts of
it, as highways always have a “ business case,” and
private space ( like say, $ 300 million convention cen-tres)
easily approved, as private space provides an
easy “ business case,” while public concert halls and
public libraries languish…
So you end up with some Disneyland city full of pri-vate
space where the idea of return on investment is
to provide lots of parking near the wide streets so
tourists can zoom around and “ contribute to the local
economy” by buying a burger at McDonald’s.
So let’s ditch that nonsense and get back to reality.
The “ reality case” for a new central Ottawa Public Li-brary
is this:
A vibrant city has people living downtown. It serves
primarily its actual residents. It provides them with
many amenities, not least of which is beautiful places
and spaces. Ottawa, land of the cheap glass tower of-fice
building ( interspersed, for variety, with the cheap
concrete stalinist tower), is starving for public space…
The case for a central Ottawa Public Library is that
people need a place to meet and think and be outside
in the city…
Wallpaper had a feature “ Loan Rangers” in the June
2008 issue, about interesting new public libraries,
[ including this quote]:
There are those who think [ libraries] are an anach-ronism
in the digital age, a sort of urbanised vil-lage
hall, frequented only by disoriented
immigrants doing DIY language courses. Then
there are those who insist they are still vital ameni-ties,
‘ universities of the street corner,’ crucial mu-nicipal
centres at the heart of the community.
Do strong cities need strong central libraries as places,
not just sets of services? Let’s just say that Ottawa
seems to be forging ahead… and that all the best plac-es
I know have strong central libraries that blend
space, collection, programs and service.
Means, not ends
For a very different take on the purpose of libraries, in
this case from a medical librarian ( but seemingly refer-ring
to all libraries), we go back a year— to T. Scott
Plutchak’s October 5, 2007 post at T. Scott. His principal
assertion: “ As long as the library is serving a need, it
will be valued, but it has no value as an end in itself.”
He notes some doom and gloom he sees— from a
young academic librarian who worries that “ our pro-fession
may retire before I do” and from another aca-demic
librarian who asserts that “ We need libraries
that are highly integrated into and tightly connected
to what happens in the classroom, both physical and
virtual.” To which T. Scott responds:
The skeptical contrarian in me reads this last quote
and wonders, “ Why?”…
Suppose that a decade from now, librarianship no
longer exists as a profession. No more library schools,
no more librarians ( except a few civil servants or te-nured
faculty who can’t be fired). No more new jobs,
libraries shuttered and turned into dormitories, study
halls and rest homes.
So what?
Does it happen because people truly no longer need us
and what we can provide? That, by using the internet
wisely, by relying on the big technology companies
( Amazooglesoft), and the smart publishers who’ve fig-ured
out how to organize and provide information di-rectly
to people while bypassing libraries, the people in
our communities ( be they universities, schools, com-panies,
or society in general) are able to connect with
the recorded knowledge that they need even more ef-fectively
than they could in the age of libraries?
If that’s the case, wouldn’t it be a good thing?
Sure, it’d be a bummer for those of us who like our
library jobs, but it’s not like we— the actual individu-al
persons— are going to wink out of existence. We’ll
figure out something to do. And we may be nostalgic
for what we’ve lost, but if society has figured out bet-ter
ways to achieve what we used to help them
achieve, aren’t we all better off as a whole? So I don’t
get to be a librarian anymore. I don’t have the option
of being a blacksmith, or a riverboat captain, or the
guy who delivers milk in glass bottles from a horse
drawn wagon, either.
The point is, I don’t think we’re telling the right story,
and I don’t think we’re worrying about the right stuff.
I don’t want to hear anymore about what we need to
do to make ourselves relevant so that our libraries
can survive. I want to hear people telling the stories
about why we’re essential, about how society can’t
Cites & Insights December 2009 19
thrive without us, about how students and teachers
won’t have the kinds of experiences that they deserve
if we, well- trained, passionate, technologically- savvy
librarians aren’t working with them in the classrooms
and the labs. I don’t want to hear about how “ we
need libraries that are well integrated...” if the “ we”
refers to librarians. I don’t care what we think we
need. I want to hear us explaining why the students
and the faculty need us to be tightly integrated into
what happens in the classroom. I want to be told why
a town without good public librarians is impove-rished
and why we’re here to save the day. I don’t
want to hear about what we need to do to be rele-vant—
I want to hear the story about why our com-munities
so desperately need us.
If we can’t tell that story, then we should wink out of
existence, and a decade is longer than we deserve.
In one sense T. Scott’s right: The purpose of libraries is
not to employ librarians, and if everything librarians
do can be done better without them, then they be-come
obsolete. ( There are riverboat captains these
days, although not many. There are, blacksmiths—
there are, after all, a lot of horses. But never mind.)
He’s also right that some libraries don’t tell their sto-ries
as effectively as they should.
I take issue with T. Scott’s apparent implicit asser-tion
that the purpose of libraries— and in this case I’ll
stress public libraries— is to connect people with rec-orded
knowledge. I think the case has been made that
public libraries are about a lot more than that. If that’s
the only purpose of medical libraries, fine: Stick with
that narrower assertion. Tossing in “ so desperately need
us” is a rhetorical swipe: Should society fund only
those things that are “ desperately needed”? Do we des-perately
need public parks? Do we desperately need po-lice
dealing with nonviolent crimes or safety issues?
Even in responding to comments, T. Scott overplays
the criticality card— we do, and should, have lots of
things that make life better, that make us better people,
but that can’t be called indispensible. Is that wrong?
To preserve and protect
Steven Harris asks some interesting and possibly dis-turbing
questions about how academic librarians view
the purpose( s) of academic libraries, in this June 19,
2009 post at Collections 2.0. Excerpts, leaving out half
of the events:
A few events have me thinking about the long-standing
academic library philosophy of building
comprehensive collections for the purpose of preserv-ing,
protecting, and archiving our cultural heritage. I
am wondering to what extent there might be a philo-sophical
shift going on to move towards serving cur-rent
needs and not worrying so much about being
the cultural time capsule…
1. A blog called Awful Library Books is geared mostly
toward public libraries. It identifies ( humorously)
books that really don’t need to be in a public library
collection anymore. Got me thinking. We often think
that this “ awful” stuff needs to be in an academic li-brary
for historical purposes. But how many of these
do we really need to save? Can we really know if
there is any “ just- in- case” need? Maybe the fact that
we don’t know says we should keep it in the collec-tion,
but can we afford to?...
4. I was giving a presentation recently about the need to
augment our ebook collections in my library. The argu-ment
was mainly that there are many remote demands
that can be more readily served by electronic collections.
The collection that we opted to license is a “ rented” col-lection.
Our library patrons now have a huge number of
ebooks at their disposal, but there is no “ perpetual
access,” as we say in the library world. We have it as
long as we pay the rent. All goes away, if we don’t…
6. In a blog post entitled “ Better Than Owning” Kevin
Kelly points out the benefit of “ renting” services in the
cloud or on the Internet. He compares this remote ser-vice
to a traditional print library. We don’t own the
books in the library, but we can make use of them. I
wonder about pushing that concept even further. The
library itself doesn’t own the resources, but it can make
use of them and provide access to its own customers…
Is there really a professional groundswell moving
academic libraries toward a “ current use” versus a
“ future use” philosophy? Do we want there to be such
a groundswell? I support the idea that my library
should save many things, regardless of the current
demand. But I also want us to serve as many current
demands as possible…
To my surprise, there have been no comments to date.
Harris is at the University of New Mexico. Would it
make a difference if he was at Yale? At a small com-munity
college? At a liberal arts college?
Restore the noble purpose of libraries
This one’s by William H. Wisner, from the July 17,
2009 Christian Science Monitor— and the tagline is “ Fo-cusing
so much on their technology actually dumbs
them down.” You can find it at www. csmonitor.
com/ 2009/ 0717/ p09s01- coop. html, it’s 800 words long,
Wisner’s been a librarian for 22 years… and I’m not
quoting very much of it. A few bits:
Libraries were once a sacred secular space of silence
and reverence – a place where one automatically lo-wered
one’s voice. As a direct heir to the Enlighten-ment,
the establishment of libraries was a testament to
the self- evident integrity of mankind, the belief that we
all desire to find the truth through knowledge.
Cites & Insights December 2009 20
Librarians once framed our mission in those terms–
before libraries became the noisy computer labs they
now are, with their jingle of ringtones, clattering key-boards,
and unquenchable printers…
In some libraries today it is actually impossible to
find any place quiet enough to simply read and study
undisturbed. What I call the postmodern library– the
library plus technology– deconstructs itself…
My once gentle profession has prostituted itself, aided
by library schools, which, embarrassed even to call
their graduates “ librarians,” now opt for the sexier
term “ information scientists.”..
Once the captains of the information superhighway,
librarians are now thumbing a ride into history…
In focusing on access in all its forms and hoping for
the best librarians have slowly stepped away from be-ing
readers or scholars, like their forebears in the
Middle Ages who could recite whole books from
memory. You cannot defend what you do not know.
And you cannot know what you do not love…
There is a way for libraries to uphold their noble
purpose. They must carefully balance wants and
needs of the community – they must stop being one-stop
shopping centers.
There’s more— for example, he says his own public
library has “ gotten everything exactly wrong” because
he saw a TV monitor playing videos in the children’s
section and didn’t see kids in the stacks, and really
seems to hate refilling printer paper as a reference li-brarian.
I wonder at the tone and the sheer negativity
of this. I wonder about those early librarians who
quoted whole books from memory. I wonder.
“ Andy” at Agnostic, maybe wondered as well, and
posted “ Enjoy the silence” on July 22, 2009. He offers
two modestly extreme paraphrases of the entire piece,
including all the stuff I did not quote:
If I read it correctly, the library needs to ( 1) restore the
silence of the library by removing any technology that
makes any noise, including ones carried by patrons;
( 2) remove any form of visual, audio, or interactive
technology from the children’s section; ( 3) librarians
need to learn books to the point of oral recitation, re-gardless
of specialty; ( 4) comes to grips with the fact
that libraries are popular because they are free despite
our professional ethics which tout that we provide
access to all regardless of their ability to provide sup-porting
payment; and ( 5) that we stop being “ informa-tion
scientists” and start being scholars again through
rote memorization of printed materials so we can once
again love and defend our societal purpose.
Or, the funnier way of summarizing his article:
I need to stop prostituting myself, learn Middle Eng-lish,
write humorous non- existent interviews with ce-lebrities
who used to date while handing out
beverages to make the library “ personalized” again
and restore the public trust.
Note that I said “ extreme,” not “ absolutely unfair.”
Andy concludes: “ Either way you look at it, it’s a
strange theory.” More:
While I whore myself to the paper beast, I will relish
in the idea that the reason the printer is empty is that
people decided to print out timely and relevant in-formation
and take it with them. Quite frankly, that’s
all the more reason to construct library based mobile
applications so that people can reach the same infor-mation
on their noisy cell phone or noisy laptop. Or
more reason for me to teach classes so that people
learn how to use all of the library sources from home
so they can print on their own paper. Or just em-brace
a combined format approach that yields the
best resource or information regardless of the me-dium.
Or, heck, for that matter, I’ll give them what-ever
literature work they want in whatever format
they want: print, large print, even audio!
By my own admission, I’m not much of a reader. So I
will confess that all of these new audio, video, and in-teractive
technologies for children make me pretty
jealous. I really had to struggle with reading, not be-cause
I was bad at it or suffered a disability, but be-cause
it wasn���t as interesting compared to watching or
hearing the work. Oh sure, we can dismiss decades
worth of studies on the different learning habits of
children and just stick with reading. My brain and cha-racter
certainly aren’t much worse for it after all these
years. But I’m not going to work at a library with that
kind of children’s section. I’ll be over at the fun library
with the games, the videos, and the noisy interaction
and enjoy the more progressive learning models…
… As for me, you can find me in the future where in-formation
architecture and communication networks
interact so as to provide seamless content delivery
and global sharing of user derived content while pro-viding
the highest level of patron interaction and sa-tisfaction.
Oh, there will be books there too. Print is
not dead, just its business model.
I disagree with that final sentence ( or I would, if I had
any idea what the “ business model” of “ print” as a
whole is���) But the rest of what Andy’s saying?
Sounds about right ( and I’m one of those for whom
reading has always come really easy, while most other
learning modes don’t work as well).
The first commenter isn’t so quick to dismiss
Whisman:
What I took away from it is that in our rush to adopt
emerging technologies many libraries are too quick to
abandon their roots and the balance tips from library to
a sort of hollowed out public computer lab. It’s not bad
to have interactive media for children but letting kids
Cites & Insights December 2009 21
plop down in front of a video screen is not the same as
engaging those kids and using technology to get them
involved with learning from all sorts of sources includ-ing
books. I see him really cautioning librarians to not
forget that they’re not just there to feed more paper into
the printer, you’re there to interact with your patrons
and introduce this whole world of knowledge and in-formation
that you act as guardians of.
Which would be fine— but the essay itself was nowhere
near that balanced. And Andy provides a good re-sponse—
that Whisman seems to ignore the value in
newer formats and tools. The first commenter, Jess,
replies with a longer defense of the essay, one that reads
the essay far more charitably than I’m able to. As it
happens, there’s a book involved as well: Whither the
postmodern library?— published in 2000 by McFarland.
After reading the limited preview of that book at
Google— a surprisingly long limited preview— I’m even
less able to read the essay as balanced or plausible.
Why libraries rock
The theme was a blogathon for Louisville Free Public
Library. I admit to some shameless “ sometimes libra-rians
need to feel good about themselves” here—
because you do. If this whole section is too positive,
well, it’s the last issue of the year, and fact is I’m pretty
positive about libraries now and for the future.
“ Andy” posted “ Why libraries kick ass” on August
31, 2009 at Agnostic, maybe. He includes a story about
how he wound up in librarianship ( after getting a de-gree
in biology), which leads up to this ( excerpted):
If the library was an organism, it would have had a
long period of time in which there wasn’t much
change. Going back through time to the early age of
recorded history, it was a niche resource of learning
and information storage available to those who were
educated and could afford it…
Only within the last hundred years, with the spread
of literacy and the notion of public education, the li-brary
has started to evolve. Communities built libra-ries
to house shared literature and educational
resources for the common good. What was once only
available to the select few was now available to the
general public. This stayed about the same for the
better part of a century before technological innova-tions
changed everything.
It is here, within the last twenty- five years, that the
evolution of the modern library fascinates me. The ex-plosion
of communication innovations and modern
computation powers has quickly created a new global
network of information exchange. The library has been
forced to rapidly evolve to incorporate these new tools
and technology into our collection. In doing so, libra-rians
have become inventors and innovators looking to
dissolve barriers to access, to create simpler presenta-tion
models, and to generate awareness to the global
information network that exists. These rapid short-term
changes of the library evolution represent a new
age of humanity as the global village finally forms on
the basis of true knowledge and understanding: an un-fettered
idea and information exchange.
This is why libraries kick ass. We are evolving along
with the speed of innovation cycles, bringing new
approaches and tools as to how we collect, store, and
retrieve information in all its forms. There are few
things in this world that remain remote, that cannot
be reached in one medium or another, and for the
first time in history, we have the clearest picture as to
what our global neighbors look, sound, and think
like. Libraries continue to grow, evolve, and move
forward in this bold new information age. There is
nothing more exciting to be standing at the precipice
of the expansion of human knowledge and to know
that this is only the beginning. This is why libraries
matter, this is why libraries are integral, and this is
why libraries kick ass.
Gasp. Not “ if libraries don’t start changing, we’re
doomed.” Not “ physical libraries are obsolete.” But
“ libraries are changing”— in most cases, without ab-andoning
what’s made them special all along.
Buffy Hamilton, The unquiet librarian, posted
“ Why libraries rock” on that same day. She’s a high
school librarian and prepared her post after some of
her students participated in the blogathon. Part of
what she has to say about libraries:
I believe that with all my heart, libraries matter more
than ever— whether we are helping cultivate one of
many literacies, including information literacy which
is now an essential literacy, helping a student find the
perfect book, teaching cloud computing, providing a
safe haven in the day to a stressed out teen, giving
students a sense of belonging, or just providing a
friendly smile, we are the bridge from past to present
to future for our students.
I feel incredibly blessed and fortunate to do some-thing
I love so very much each and every day. How
many people can say they get to live one of their ma-jor
passions for a living? How many people get to
learn something cool and new on a regular basis?
Even on days in which I feel discouraged, I always
find something positive that keeps me focused on my
mission of creating a library that will hopefully help
cultivate a love for lifelong learning and libraries.
Long may libraries be the places where dreams begin
and are nurtured. I urge you to discover how libraries
can support your passions and even uncover new
ones. Let us never relent in our efforts to create libra-ries
and patrons that dream big!
Cites & Insights December 2009 22
Amy Kearns posted “ Libraries are rocks” on August
31, 2009 at Library garden. She cites one specific defi-nition
of “ rock”: “ a person or thing on which one can
always depend.” Excerpts:
Libraries are things on which one can always depend
( or they should be anyway). Libraries are there for
you whether you are rich or poor, privileged or un-derprivileged,
old or young, law- abiding or not law-abiding,
educated or uneducated, beautiful or ugly.
My personal library work background is in public li-braries
and I can tell you from first- hand experience,
that many people consider the library a first ( or last)
resort in many cases.
When I worked in the Clifton Public Library, I met a
man who moved his family from Poland and literally
his first stop was the library. He came for job infor-mation,
school information for his daughters, and
found out about the Conversation Club. He began at-tending
the club and made friends and connections
at the library. I came to know many other people who
came to the Conversation Club and who frequented
the library regularly for information, entertainment,
conversation, connection. They would have come to
Conversation Club every day if we had been able to
hold it that often.
They came to use the free Internet stations to com-municate
with friends and family back home, and to
look for work and apartments. They came to our
computer classes and created resumes and learned
how to search in our databases and in our catalog for
books, dvds, cds. Their children used the library after
school to play games on the computers and to do
homework and socialize with other students.
At the Paterson Free Public Library, I knew many
regulars for whom the library was a safe and depend-able
place to come. These library users read entire
newspapers cover- to- cover, looked at magazines and
yes, used the free Internet stations. They attended the
free cultural and entertainment programs and took
part in events at the library. They relied on us to open
every day, and be there every day…
As a child, it was a weekly event for my mom to take
my brother and sister and me to the library where we
would literally stock up on piles and piles of books to
bring home. I remember participating in the “ reading
olympics” and the summer reading programs every
summer. And when I was looking around for a career,
where did I head? To the library. Not originally to find
a career in librarianship, but to find out information
about careers, and to check out a sign for office help…
Whether people realize it or not, whether they active-ly
use their library on a regular basis or not, I think
people think of the library as a rock. As something
that will always be there and should always be there.
Does this mean they take it for granted? Does this
mean it will always be there?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. But those who love libraries,
those who know libraries are rocks, are such passio-nate
people about their libraries... Rocks seem per-manent,
but we know that events that are
catastrophic enough can damage or demolish them.
And, events that are minor, but happen over and over
again for a long time ( such as erosion) can also wear
away a rock. Sometimes those who most depend on
the library cannot be the ones to stand up and fight
for, or protect the libraries. We who can do that need
to remain vocal about libraries, our rocks, so that
they never disappear.
Here’s Steve Lawson at See also… ( also August 31,
2009) on “ Why libraries kick ass”:
Whenever I hear someone– an elected offical, often– say
that “ libraries are for research and information and lite-rature,
and not for X” where X = video games or DVDs
or comix or books that aren’t in English or Goose-bumps
or Madonna’s Sex or boardgames or sewing cir-cles
or popular novels; whenever I hear that, I think
“ this is a person who doesn’t really like libraries, who
is scared of libraries and what they represent, and
wants others others to be similarly scared.”
I think that research and information and literature are
all wonderful things, and that almost every library
must put some or all of those things at the core of their
mission. But that’s not why I think libraries kick ass.
I think that libraries kick ass because libraries
help people expand their imagination.
And there is more to the imagination than the se-rious,
gray, DOA literature that people envision when
they say that libraries should be for “ serious” stuff.
Libraries need to collect broadly to reflect the cul-tures
in which they are embedded.
Libraries do many other things, too, many more ob-viously
utilitarian things that even elected officials
can get behind, like helping people learn to read or
find a job. But in order for people to want to learn to
read or get a better job or discover a cure for cancer
or write a haiku, they need to have their imagination
awakened. Before we can make ourselves better or
make our world better, we need the imagination to
envision something better in the first place.
To be able to be in the midst of thousands or even
millions of volumes containing the expression of hu-man
thought and feeling in all its multitude of forms
is an awesome thing. Even more so when you think
that there are many more libraries like the one you
are in, none of them complete. I have memories of
being a child and realizing that whatever I happened
to be interested in, I could go to the library and come
home with an armful of inspiration. I get this feeling
Cites & Insights December 2009 23
from every library I visit, and I hope that I can pass
some of that feeling on to students where I work…
Libraries kick ass when they allow our hearts and
minds to expand and roam freer than before.
Very slightly excerpted… and with emphasis added.
Today’s librarian: Hip, delusional, and doomed
I’d love to finish this section and this article on a high
note, but it’s rarely that easy. This 1,700- word piece
by Michael Antman appeared on September 6, 2009
at When falls the coliseum, which appears to be an
ezine of sorts, “ a conversation about America.”
Antman begins by citing a fairly dumb CNN ar-ticle
about “ the future of libraries and a newspaper
op- ed signed by Jim Rettig and Chicago library com-missioner
Mary Dempsey, one that discussed some
non- book services, specifically access to the internet
and digital resources, as a value of the public library.
There are two flaws in this approach that should be
obvious to anyone who isn’t a librarian. The first is
that, as digital devices converge, it becomes easier
and easier to get every kind of information you need–
- from job listings to the Dialogues of Epictetus to
those all- important “ pre- movie dinner options”— on a
single handheld device. And the volume of that in-formation,
of course, grows exponentially every day.
So why bother walking over to the library to get that
same information, even if the place smells all fresh
and electronic- y these days?
The second flaw is that, as these handheld devices get
more and more affordable ( as, of course, happens with
virtually all useful electronic devices) they’ll be in the
hands of more and more people, just as has happened
with cell phones. That means that, despite the current
recession- driven uptick in library attendance, people
will eventually figure out that they can get everything a
library currently offers, including not just information,
but movie downloads, music, and of course every form
of social media, in their own homes.
I’m inclined to stop right there, note that public li-brary
usage was growing in the boom years as well,
and note that “ oh, everybody will have devices and
funds to use everything they want” continues to be an
elitist ( and incorrect) argument, no matter who’s mak-ing
it. He quotes one virtual- services librarian saying
“ Librarians must venture into the digital space, where
their potential patrons exist, to show them why the
physical library is still necessary” and responds:
Let’s see if we can follow this logic: The way to show
that the physical library is still necessary is to no
longer be bound to it. And the way to get patrons in-to
your “ physical library” is to venture into their “ dig-ital
space,” thereby making it that much less
necessary for the physical library to continue to exist.
So Safeway’s website showing weekly specials is in-tended
to keep you out of their stores? Local busi-nesses
are deluding themselves by offering advice on
websites? Whether the librarian overstated the case or
not, there is nothing inherently illogical about ventur-ing
into the digital realm in order to encourage use of
a physical space.
All this, it seems to me, is not only a twisted rationa-lization
and evasion of a library’s central purpose, but
a kind of death wish…
So if providing exactly the same services as everyone
already gets ( or soon will get, when the prices
drop, the unemployed find new jobs, and the econ-omy
picks up) on their home computers or handheld
devices isn’t the best way to ensure future employ-ment
for librarians, what is? It seems to me that per-haps,
just perhaps, librarians should be exerting at
least some energy, as their counterparts in publishing
are, in helping to ensure the continued viability of the
physical book, which has been and should continue
to be the cornerstone of most public libraries. [ Em-phasis
added.]
Where did Antman read that librarians intended to do
nothing but offer social media and similar services?
How has he determined that the unemployment rate
will drop to zero in the near future and all employment
will be lucrative enough to make broadband and PCs
universal? Damned if I know— but I do know that
every public library I know of is doing its part to “ en-sure
the continued viability of the physical book” by
buying them, circulating them, publicizing them… and
using them as the cornerstone of a range of services.
Let me be clear about what I’m saying. My local public
library, one of the best in the United States, has Inter-net
access, DVD rentals, CD rentals, readings for child-ren,
and a host of other services in addition to books.
That’s all wonderful stuff, but these services are in ad-dition
to, not instead of, books. My library’s DVDs and
CDs will all disappear in a few years anyway, as every-one
downloads movies and music, and the Internet
services will eventually fade away, too ( just as pay tele-phones
have) as fewer and fewer people find them-selves
without access to a computer of their own.
Antman’s impressive and apparently omniscient. Or,
maybe, given the 10 hours
