Category: New Librarianship

Under the rubric “there is nothing new under the sun,” see the excellent article on Participatory Digital Libraries from 1999 by Diane H. Sonnenwald, Gary Marchionini, Barbara M. Wildemuth, Bert J. Dempsey, Charles L. Viles, Helen R. Tibbo, and John B. Smith of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

http://sils.unc.edu/research/publications/reports/TR-2001-03.pdf

OK, I never got all the work up with the Annoyed Librarian at Library Journal’s site. Of course, that was before I was written up. It appears the Annoyed Librarian isn’t a big proponent of Reference Extract. That’s fine. Saying that I don’t get it – no problem, not the first time. If it were just as simple as criticizing the idea, or even me, I would leave it alone. What really got me was the unrelenting negativism and belief that librarians are incapable of anything other than shelving books. And the comments simply make me sad. I can’t let it pass.

So breaking all the advice about good blogging, I can’t help but do a quote and react post. Once again, I’m not reacting to the Reference Extract comments. The project can stand on its own, and reasonable people can disagree. I’m going to focus on the kinds of attitudes that I think seriously jeopardize the profession.

By the way, before I jump into this, go read the article AND COMMENT. Don’t let the anti-library rhetoric stand unanswered.

OK, on to the quotes:

“The first thing that caught my attention was the call to move beyond bullet points and slogans. Fat chance. Lankes and I see the same futile inaction from librarians. The difference is it’s exactly what I expect and I don’t mind a bit.”

Let me be clear, I don’t see all librarians as inactive. Quite the opposite. This is why I rail and prod and work. I see our promise in the best of the profession. I simply want the whole field to hold itself to the higher standard of making a positive and proactive change in our communities. Not minding that there are librarians who cannot move past slogans into action is beyond cynical, it is flat out lazy.

Annoyed Librarian then goes on to argue about why librarians can’t beat Google. Please note: I’m on record as saying that if we can’t beat them we should work hard to make them better – after all reinventing search doesn’t mean changing all the players. But, I digress, Let’s see what the good and pacified librarians should content themselves with. Why Google is more worthy than librarians by Annoyed Librarian:

“Consider the competition, which for the most part is Google. Google makes a boatload of money. They can afford to pay the best software engineers and programmers in the country and give them a lot of support in their work. Their revenue is based on competitively creating products that people want to use because they work so darn well. They’ve been enormously successful, and within a few years have outstripped all their rivals. Some of their rivals also make a lot of money, and they also hire good engineers and programmers.”

Google is now 10 years old…it didn’t start as one of the largest corporations on the planet…it made itself that. The BIGGEST mistake that librarians or anyone else in the world can make is to see what is, and assume it will always be or that it is somehow a product of powers beyond our collective control.

Just think back three years ago and ask yourself if the way the world as it was foretold a black man as president, the U.S. Government in the banking business, and major corporations, hat in hand, asking for bailouts. I remember at the beginning of virtual reference movement those saying that it was impossible to answer questions over the Internet.

Anyway, so how do engineers stack up against librarians?

“And libraries? They hire library school graduates. In case the penny hasn’t dropped, let’s do the comparison in our heads. On the one hand, we have the best engineers and programmers in the country, and on the other hand we have…library school graduates. Unless the ALA can lobby successfully for some anti-competitive labor standards favoring librarians, I don’t see how libraries are going to compete.”

Go ahead and picture steam coming out of my ears. Apparently the best engineers in the country are simply born. Funny, I thought they graduated from colleges and universities just like librarians. Also the idea that somehow a computer scientist is blessed with some unique perspective on information is at best challenging. This is not to say that I don’t think librarians need more technical skills. If there has been one consistent note I have hit my entire career it is that librarians need more technical skill. My problem is that somehow computer programming is the benchmark we must all look to and librarians have nothing to offer. Now back to the quotes:

“They’re not businesses. They don’t have cadres of programmers working in the bowels of the library developing neat stuff. If they’ve got someone who can build a decent website and make a wiki they feel like they’ve achieved some sort of technological wonder. If some librarians feel like they’re hot stuff at creating search engines, let them apply to work at Google and see how far they get.”

This is an obvious place for all those technical librarians to stand up and ask the Annoyed Librarian where he or she has been working. Certainly not at the University of Pennsylvania, or the Ann Arbor District Library, or Evergreen, or OCLC, or North Carolina State University or… oh you get the point. Can we assume that Annoyed (I feel like we can be on a first name basis) has never been to LITA, or Computers in Libraries or…once again you get the point. For me this comment talks much more about Annoyed’s place of work than the profession. As for librarians working at Google, Annoyed should have a conversation with the Information Schools about their grads’ jobs.

OK, Annoyed then goes back at Reference Extract. Makes some REAL broad generalizations that no one cares about credibility (other than the MacArthur Foundation, the press, all of education, and a few folks in the health care field I suppose.

“Let’s return to the original question, are libraries losing the search war. The answer is no, because libraries were never fighting the search war. The history of search hasn’t been a history of libraries competing with commercial enterprises to improve search. The major search engines and indexes that most librarians use weren’t created by librarians. Other people create them and libraries use them. Just like other people create books and magazines andvideogames and the Internet and whatever else libraries provide access to. Libraries have rarely actively created information; instead they acquire, organize, and disseminate what others have done. Even if we consider all the social software the twopointopians get so worked up over. Libraries didn’t invent any of these tools. Creative non-librarians did, and librarians just use them.”

This is a VERY 20th century American viewpoint. Libraries throughout history have been places of scholarship and creation. But I’m going to agree that a culture of consumerism and adoption has become the norm in libraries…that was the point of my post that Annoyed was responding to. I think it is time for this to stop. Enough. Before I go on to my rant, here’s more:

“Why is this so shocking? Why should anyone get worked up about losing a war we were never fighting in the first place? Librarians have been early adopters and expert users of all sorts of information technology for decades, and somehow this has evolved into a feeling of ownership, as if librarians had a creative stake in these tools when they’ve merely been better at using them than the general populace.”

I agree here. The real place we diverge is Annoyed’s conclusions:

“Librarians should just relax, because they’re not going to reinvent anything. They never have. They never will. That’s not what libraries are for, but a lot of librarians like to get all hot and bothered that they can’t compete in a field they never entered in the first place.”

In other words, don’t bother your pretty little heads. It’s OK not to be creative. It is OK not to innovate, it is OK not to compete or strive. Be happy with reading and the stacks. Be content that you are the products of second-class academic programs that will never muster resources.

Well, I’m NOT OK with that. I have spent a great deal of time over the past months with the business world. I have been on boards with bankers, and CIO’s. I have talked with entrepreneurs and sales executives. What’s amazing is in almost every meeting, they all conclude that the world needs more librarians, but they always talk of librarians in the future tense. In other words, the world is going to need more experts in organizing information, providing credible information (that’s not librarians saying it by the way), and that library science is the place to build upon. But not the librarians of today. Almost to a person they see librarians as a stereotype of bookish introverts. What really gets my blood boiling when I read Annoyed Librarian is that all too often librarians also see and perpetuate this stereotype.

We as a profession are not living up to our potential. The potential that we see and others see. Why did Google partner with librarians? They saw the potential. Why did HP partner with the MIT libraries on DSpace? They saw the potential. Why did Microsoft partner with the British Library? They saw potential. Why were libraries where the Gates Foundation started? THEY SAW POTENTIAL.

The Annoyed Librarian’s post is not about Reference Extract, or me. This post is first a concession to the ways things are, and a call for mediocrity. Annoyed dismisses librarians as professionals with second rate credentials who can’t create, and have no place in technology.

That potential rests in all of our hands. To see it, and simply conceded that we will never meet it, I’ll say it again, is beyond cynical it is lazy. To simply declare librarians can never have resources to compete with Google means you will not work to do so. To say that library schools are inadequate and then simply throw up your hands is lazy. To believe that something cannot be done because something has not happened is not being realistic, it is creating a safe cocoon of defeat.

Our world, our society, our communities are in too great of need for libraries to sit back and wait for their fate. Our patrons/members/users deserve our full potential. Annoyed Librarian may simply dismiss this post and this rant as words, or me as out of touch, or deluded. But I have seen our potential. I have seen our words and our deeds lift people out of poverty, get people jobs, start the career of brilliant writers, and launch the business of entrepreneurs. That potential is not in our books, or buildings or web sites – it is in the librarians who hold the ideal of knowledge in their hearts. It is in the passion of librarians wanting to make a change.