A wobbly stool

The first year of library school has come and gone. So now I have three months to spend actually thinking and learning about libraries. Unfortunately, during my time spent in school so far, the topic of libraries hasn’t come up all that often.

I did learn a lot this year–it’s just that I didn’t learn much of it in my classes. The knowledge I’ve gained from professional experience, outside reading, and involvement in extracurricular activities has been far more interesting and relevant than most of what I’ve had to spend time on in class.

There have been a few highlights from the first year, my classes with Deborah Jacobs (director of the Seattle Public Library) and Nancy Pearl (is there anyone who doesn’t know who Nancy Pearl is?) being chief among them. One thing that’s stuck with me from Nancy’s class is her characterization of librarianship as a “three-legged stool”: the information/technology leg, the reader’s advisory leg, and the programming leg. If this is true, then 95% of my classes so far have been focused on one leg. That’s a pretty wobbly stool.

Here’s a few of the lowlights from the year:

• My meeting during the first week of classes with my faculty advisor, who told me that the library is a 19th century technology, and that I should consider other careers besides librarianship;
• The almost complete lack of discussion or critical thinking in most of my classes;
• The focus on all the wonderful possibilities for an MLIS degree (except for being a librarian);
• The fact that one of my better professors, one who actually did encourage discussion, and who tried to get us to look at what we were studying in terms of real library scenarios, was denied tenure because he didn’t publish enough research.

The impression I’ve gotten from other library school students, both in my program and in others, is that I’m not alone in my disappointment. When I started school I felt that library science was about the most interesting and exciting field I could imagine. I still feel that way, but it’s in spite of my year of library school, not because of it.

But enough complaining. What am I going to do about this? I’ve already started pariticipating in a round of meetings with deans at my school to try to improve one class that is particularly abysmal. Another student and I are working on a white paper this summer which will hopefully call attention to some of these problems. And I’m in the early planning stages for a thesis that will look critically at the history of library education. (What, for example, is implied by the transition from “librarianship” to “library science” to “library and information science”?)

What concerns me is not so much the focus on information and technology as the approach is taken toward it. Cathy Davidson has an interesting piece on the HASTAC blog in which she asserts that historically there are three stages in the adoption of new technologies. The first stage, introduction, is characterized by exaggerations of fears and possibilities. When these exaggerations fail to materialize, the second stage, debunking, follows. This stage is characterized by confusion, ambivalence, and uneven development. Finally, we come to the third stage, invisibility, which Davidson says we are living in now with regard to the Internet, Web 2.0, and global communication. In this stage technology is no longer technology; it’s simply life as we know it.

Davidson suggests that the third stage is when critical analysis matters most:

When technology is accepted, when it becomes invisible, we really need to be paying attention. This is one reason why the humanities are more important than ever. Analysis — qualitative, deep, interpretive analysis — of social relations, social conditions, in a historical and philosophical perspective is what we do so well. The more technology is part of our lives, the less we think about it, the more we need rigorous humanistic thinking that reminds us that our behaviors are not natural but social, cultural, economic, and with consequences for us all.

This rigorous thinking is a chief element of what’s been missing so far from my library education. I think that Davidson gives us an inkling of why this is such a grave omission. Library education is preparing us all to be “information scientists,” but what the profession really needs are information humanists.