Some discourse on librarians
May 7, 2007
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.
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.
