What are librarians afraid of?

Well, getting their libraries shut down, for one thing. The Boston Globe reports on a slew of public libraries closing their doors thanks to massive budget cuts. I wrote in a recent post that I was worried about libraries making decisions that were based in fear. This story is a good reminder for those of us who live in cities with well-funded libraries of a very real basis for some of that fear.

The Globe article states:

Towns are often forced to choose between providing free access to books or hiring a couple more firefighters or police officers. Saugus town manager Andrew Bisignani said public safety has to come first. In the cold, mathematical world of budgets, public libraries have a label they cannot shake. They are a “non essential service.”

Strategy without philosophy

In Sacramento, librarians and their union are petitioning the library board with a vote of no-confidence in management for turning the focus of the library’s collection away from “items of lasting value” and toward popular music, DVDs, and Paris Hilton’s autobiography.

A lot of library bloggers have commented about this, nearly all to criticize or ridicule the librarians sending the petition. K.G. Schneider titled her response “I am *so* not in the same profession as these librarians,” and John Blyberg writes, in a post tagged with idiocy, “So we’re in the business of placing value on content, now. Great, I love the idea of telling our patrons what they want. That way, we don’t have to change at all.”

Aside from being an excellent example of what Steven J. Bell calls the “speech chill [of] the library blogosphere” (i.e., all library bloggers seem to be of the same opinion), the criticism of the Sacramento librarians reflects a thoughtlessness and disrespect that, far from promoting serious discourse, makes it all but impossible.

Not surprisingly, the Sacramento library’s official response has had a similar tone to that of the bloggers who have written about this issue. Administrators are trying to paint this as an “old vs. young” debate: the library board chairman has said, “Almost inevitably, when there’s significant change that occurs in an organization, there’s discontent with people who have been generally satisfied with what happened in the past… For the most part, that’s what’s happened here.” But a resistance to change does not necessarily have to be thought of as an annoying obstacle in the forward march to progress.

The independent benevolence of government

So far, one of my better classes at the Information School has been one taught by Deborah Jacobs, City Librarian at the Seattle Public Library. The class is called “Public Libraries and Advocacy,” but as she said on the first day, it really should be called “Public Libraries and Politics.” The class has been a great introduction to the political and managerial side of public library work, and, unlike most of my classes so far (sadly), has been really focused on using theory as a basis for creating practical solutions to real-life problems.

A couple weeks ago, we had the opportunity to meet some really interesting international visitors from the library profession–Martín Gómez, director of the Urban Libraries Council, and Jens Ingemann, director of the Royal Library of Copenhagen. They were visiting Seattle for the IFLA Metropolitan Libraries Section Conference, which the Seattle Public Library was hosting, and stopped in to visit our class. Each gave a fascinating presentation of the work they’re doing, and gave us all some food for thought about the challenges and possibilities of librarianship.

What was most interesting to me about their visit, though, was not what either of them brought up in their presentations, but what came up during a discussion based on the reading we had done for that class. In anticipation of their visit, we had read the chapter in Kathleen de la Peña McCook’s Introduction to Public Librarianship on international libraries. This chapter brought to our attention the fact that government-funded public libraries are not something that all countries (or even all regions of the U.S.) can take for granted. What our discussion centered around is whether this is really as bad as it sounds. How thankful should we be for government support, and what would we do if we didn’t have it?

Some discourse on librarians

Tonight I had the pleasure of hearing Stephen Abram speak at the opening night festivities of the IFLA conference, which is being hosted by the Seattle Public Library. This was now the second time I’d gotten a chance to hear him speak, and both times were very exciting. He is an excellent speaker, and is good at both highlighting what is exciting about the library field and needling librarians who don’t do their part to help keep libraries vital. He is a blunt speaker: Tonight, he talked about the “morons” who work at a reference desk and refuse to wear nametags, but who still want to be treated as professionals. He said, “Would you go to a doctor who wouldn’t tell you his name?” After he made this comment, he admitted to being blunt, but didn’t apologize. On the contrary, he said that there’s not enough bluntness in our profession. I think he’s right. This is exactly what Steven J. Bell says in his recent piece on the lack of discourse in the library field in Inside Higher Ed.

Library science, not library ‘let’s all just be nice and agree to think the same way.’

Steven J. Bell has a great piece in Inside Higher Ed in which he criticizes the library profession for a lack of serious discourse. This is something I’ve been struggling with within my program since I started in the fall. I’ve been consistently disappointed with a lack of serious discussion or debate built into any of my classes. When discussion is included, it’s usually as an afterthought and tends to get cut off just when it starts to get interesting. I had begun to think that this was a problem with my school (which is, for the record, a well-respected and highly ranked MLIS program), but Bell’s piece makes me think that this might in fact be endemic to the profession.