The Letter Z

It isn’t really news that librarians don’t get paid very much, and that their salaries are decreasing. So it was disappointing, but hardly surprising, when the Marathon County Public Library recently cut three librarian positions and replaced them with new “customer service librarian” positions, which pay $10,000 less per year.

What was surprising was the formal response from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Information Studies. Elizabeth Buchanan, director of the SOIS Center for Information Policy Research, posted the following statement on a Wisconsin Public Library email list:

The School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee wishes to respond formally to the recent job postings that called into question the professional status of the Master of Library and Information Science degree. We firmly believe that the role of a professional librarian should be valued, and, should be compensated appropriately as other professional degrees are. The value of professional librarians, and the complex work they do, should be taken very seriously. Libraries are indeed a public good, bridging information rich and poor and providing unfettered access to information. Professionally trained librarians, in collaboration with other library workers, benefit all members in a community. We encourage library administrators, library boards, and local officials to remember that the library has been shown to definitively improve the economic, educational, and social value of a community. Keeping this in mind, we urge those making personnel and budgetary decisions to maintain the professional status that communities expect and deserve in their libraries by providing a living wage that recognizes the value of trained librarians.

I think this lacks some force as an argument: The fact that libraries are valuable to communities doesn’t really support the contention that librarians should be paid well, and it doesn’t address the very real budget problems faced by Marathon County library administration. Also, the school has more than just an interest in the community value of libraries: they want their alumni to make decent wages. Still, it’s nice to see an information school taking a political stand in favor of libraries. In my experience, information schools generally try to raise the salaries of their graduates simply by encouraging them not to work in libraries.

Of course, the UWM School of Information Studies isn’t a member of the iCaucus—the self-styled elite group of iSchools that have banded together in their study of information, also known as the iField. (I’m not kidding.) So maybe this makes them more willing to recognize their responsibility and ties to to the field of librarianship.

Via LISNews

In a speech at UCLA early this month, Michelle Obama suggested that “Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

This has gotten Hugh Hewitt and Jim Geraghty riled up. Writing at the National Review, Geraghty invokes the Constitution, and asks, “what if we kind of like our lives as usual? What about Americans’ freedom to be uninvolved and uninformed?”

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A recent post on the LISNews blog brought my attention to a rally staged last weekend at the Boston Public Library to protest the library’s use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology on its electronic materials. DRM restricts the use of electronic files–for example, making it impossible to transfer a file from one computer to another, or limiting the amount of time during which you can open and use a file. DRM is ubiquitous in the media industry, and it is concerning for many reasons. (If you want to find out more, I suggest taking a look at the DefectiveByDesign or Electronic Frontier Foundation websites.) I want to talk about one particularly pernicious aspect of DRM, and other digital technologies: the way in which they limit the devices which you can use to play the protected files.

I work for the Mobile Services branch of an urban public library. Unlike rural bookmobiles, which focus mainly on bringing library services to areas that are geographically isolated, urban bookmobiles bring services to people with other barriers to library use: low-income young children, seniors, and people with disabilities. My work with this program has, among other things, made me more sensitive to the ways in which citizens are commonly excluded from public services. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick note about Library Legislative Day, an annual lobbying event at the Washington State capitol organized by the Washington Library Association, which I attended yesterday with a group of information school students. I’m working on a longer piece for my school newsletter, which I will link to when published. Meanwhile, here’s what I found particularly interesting about the event.

I have never been that involved in or knowledgeable about the political process. I have a very abstract concept of representative democracy, and while I have a vague sense of participation, I have never thought that carefully about what that means. It seemed strange that I could simply walk into a representative’s office to speak with her aide, or that I could call a senator off the floor to come have a conversation with me. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a subject within the field of information science known as “information architecture.” According to the Information Architecture Institute, information architecture is “the art and science of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability.” To me this sounds like it has more to do with filing than architecture, but “information file clerk” just doesn’t have the same ring.

But long before people made up pompous-sounding terms like information architecture, there was a more rudimentary kind of architecture (known simply as “architecture”), and this was the kind that people interested in libraries cared about. And folks who build libraries—even today—don’t talk about information so much as they talk about a related—but very different—term: knowledge. Read the rest of this entry »

“What I was going to say,” said the Dodo in an offended tone, “was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.”

“What is a Caucus-race?” said Alice; not that she much wanted to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that somebody ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.

“Why,” said the Dodo, “the best way to explain it is to do it.” (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)

First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle (”the exact shape doesn’t matter,” it said), and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there.

There was no “One, two, three, and away!” but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out “The race is over!” and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, “But who has won?”

This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it stood for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence.

At last the Dodo said, “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”

More at Authorama.com

I noted yesterday that a recent Library Journal article by Raya Kuzyk reported that public libraries aren’t doing very much to educate voters in the buildup to Super Tuesday. I suggested that public libraries should indeed have a prominent role in helping citizens make informed decisions. But how exactly should they go about doing this?
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Library Journal reports that most public libraries aren’t doing very much to help folks prepare for the Super Tuesday primaries. According to their poll on election education, this is actually “a cooling-off period.” A sample of responses to their interviews with librarians: “We haven’t even talked about it, to be honest” and “The staff plans to vote—does that count?”

Do public libraries have a role in helping citizens wade through the barrage of advertising on candidates and help them make informed electoral decisions? The trustees of the Boston Public Library thought so, when they established that library in 1852. They wrote that:

under political, social and religious institutions like ours, – it is of paramount importance that the means of general information should be so diffused that the largest possible number of persons should be induced to read and understand questions going down to the very foundations of social order, which are constantly presenting themselves, and which we, as a people, are constantly required to decide, and do decide, either ignorantly or wisely

The institution they proposed to diffuse this information was the public library. If not the library, who?

I complain a lot about library education. Since I started my MLIS program in 2007, my disappointment in library school (or in my case, “information school”) has grown continuously, and my vocalization of that disappointment has grown along with it. So it was nice when, on Thursday night, I got the chance to hear some other people complain about it.

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I was recently accused of being cynical. Remembering something a former professor once said about not minding a comparison to these ancient philosophers, I decided to do a little research about what exactly I was being accused of.

The word “cynic” comes from the Greek kynikos, meaning “dog.” The Cynics were a group of philosophers who thought highly of dogs, fashioning themselves as “dogs barking at the truth.”

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