It turned out to be not so much about how information behaves, but rather how people interact with information. The idea of using such a general term, I think, was supposed to suggest all the multifarious ways in which people and information interact: people produce, seek, encounter, disseminate, use, and avoid it, to name a few examples. The course mainly focused, though, on one component of information behavior: information seeking.

In a way this makes sense. Librarians tend to consider helping people find what they’re looking for a pretty important part of their job, and we tend to think of our clients as people who need information that we can help them get access to. But I’ve often wondered if there are other ways in which librarians can help people interact with information.

I got to thinking about this again the other day, when I got a chance to listen to my astute classmate Jen Waller present about research she’s doing on the information needs of small farmers. Here’s the interesting thing: on the whole, the farmers she’s interviewed feel pretty good about finding the information they need on their own. The information need they want help with is distributing information about their farms to consumers. Jen talked about some ideas she had for addressing this problem by improving a website that connects farmers and consumers.

In some ways this isn’t very radical—you can’t help people seek information if you don’t have a system of distribution. But the information distribution librarians do is generally organized from the perspective of helping the seeker: how would it change our methods if we thought more about helping the distributer as well?

As I spend more time reading this unfamiliar stuff, I find myself rethinking why it is that I like to read, what value it gives me. And since I want to be a librarian, what good am I doing the world by recommending books to people?

It’s a complicated and interesting problem, and I believe there’s a lot more to it than “reading is good for you” or even “reading good books is good for you.” I’m working on a longer post considering this question, but this afternoon I stumbled across a paragraph that makes a few steps toward answering it.

This is from Jane Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, which I discovered the other day on my library’s new books shelf (oddly, since it was written in 2005). She is considering the “compulsive habit of reading” that she and most other novelists were guilty of as children:

Undoubtedly, we were reading for all the wrong reasons—escape, pleasure, avoidance of responsibilities and human contact. We were reading because it was easy and fun and because we were unsupervised. We were reading to find companions more congenial than those around us. We wanted to fill our heads with nonsense and tune out practical considerations. We were not, most likely, athletic or useful sorts of children. We were reluctant to help around the house or to go outside and play. We did not have very good manners, because in numerous ways to be cited later, reading books is deleterious to good manners. We did not have good sleep habits, because if we had, we would not have read under the bedcovers with a flashlight, or held the book up to the moon that shone through the window, and ruined our eyes. We were reading because we had two lives, an inner life and an outer life, and they were equally important to us and equally vivid.

This seems like a pretty good starting point for some of the reasons why we (not just novelists) read. I’m still working on articulating why it matters. More to come, I hope, on this question. I know I’ll be thinking about it.

“This is a commercial service that is using public resources and land,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

The introduction of wireless service is an added insult, he said. “The park service is saying unplug and connect with nature — but when you come, you can check your e-mail and trade stocks.”

Yellowstone does not permit televisions in its hotel rooms, but officials contend that wireless Internet is different. “It’s a way to get information,” Ollitt said. For example, visitors could research bison after seeing them in the park.

Snapping photos of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone on a recent afternoon, Bic Ngo brightened when he heard the park might introduce wireless.

“I’d love to get my pictures on Facebook tonight,” said Ngo, 33, of Toronto.

I’ve often thought that parks and libraries shared a similar set of tensions: between preservation and access; sanctity and convenience. At least no one is trying to build cell towers in the library.

An essay I wrote entitled “Not Just the Facts: Toward a Library and Information Humanities” has been published in American Libraries, the magazine of the American Library Association. It’s about why “library and information science” is a deficient way of understanding librarianship.

You can read the article online here. (You will need to download ebrary Reader.)

But here I am, and it’s actually not so bad. For the first time in a long time, I’m really happy with all of my classes. And, more importantly, it’s the beginning of my final year of school. Which means that I can no longer avoid thinking about the big C, my career.

I recently got a chance to meet Camila Alire, the president-elect of ALA, who visited my school and gave a presentation to students about the job search. Her big pieces of advice were to get job experience and get involved in professional associations. She also offered up that evergreen: you can either be geographically picky or picky about the kind of job you want to have.

I think this is true. As I have watched my classmates graduate and go job-hunting, the ones who are most successful are the ones who are willing to do just about anything or the ones who are willing to move just about anywhere. But those who are more picky—though they may be extremely smart and well-qualified—have a more difficult time finding stable employment. I have a friend who graduated a year and a half ago and is now in her second temporary job. A new co-worker just got her first permanent professional position after being in temporary jobs for three years. A former co-worker commutes 100 miles round-trip for a 20-hour a week job after a year of unsuccessful job-hunting. Another friend is working in a part-time, non-professional job while he looks for a job that actually makes use of the degree he just spent two years (and thousands of dollars) earning; another is working as a nanny to supplement her part-time children’s librarian position.

I could go on. All of these people are excellent librarians (or would be, if they could find work). But they are all unwilling to move halfway across the country and unwilling to work outside public libraries. And while unfortunate, it’s really just simple math: there are far more qualified applicants than there are jobs, especially when you live in close proximity to the only library/information school in the region.

I would add one more category to the flexibility matrix: salary. It’s a lot easier to find a job if you don’t care how much money you make. And just as geographic flexibility usually means “willingness to live in a crappy place,” and job flexibility often means “willingness to work at a crappy job,” salary flexibility translates as “willingness to work for crappy pay.” Salary flexibility is closely related to the other two types of flexibility: here in Seattle, starting salaries for public librarians are pretty good. But go just one county north or south and you’re looking at about a $10,000 a year pay cut.

Of course, the economy the way it is these days, flexibility starts to look more and more necessary. Obviously it’s not just librarians who are faced with dwindling employment choices.

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

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?”

I suppose the best response to this foolishness would be that of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in his Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge:

the most effectual means of preventing [tyranny] would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth, that, possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes

Legal philosopher Cass Sunstein has written extensively on the mistaken belief that freedom of speech implies the right to ignorance and insulation from information. Sunstein argues, in Republic.com 2.0, that in a well-functioning system of free expression,

people should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance. Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself. …in a democracy deserving the name, lives should be structured so that people often come across views and topics that they have not specifically selected.

Sunstein points out that the Constitution does not allow for the freedom to be uninformed, but quite the opposite, by guaranteeing a public forum, the central purpose of which is to expose citizens, whether they like it or not, to “diverse speakers with diverse views and complaints.”

Geraghty performs an Orwellian spin job when he construes ignorance as “freedom” and characterizes Obama’s call for a better-informed and more engaged public an “authoritarian” stance. Jefferson understood that it was quite the opposite: civic disengagement and ignorance, not participation and information, are what lead to tyranny.

We would do well to remember Big Brother’s Party slogan:

• WAR IS PEACE
• FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
• IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Sound familiar?

(via The Opinionator)

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.

A co-worker asked me the other day whether I had noticed an increase in the number of new library materials that were available only in downloadable electronic formats. He pointed out that many of our hard-of-hearing or deaf patrons had only bought CD players because of the library’s recent decision to stop buying any new audio cassettes. “Now they have to buy computers and MP3 players?” he asked.

My co-worker’s comment highlights the fact that the limitations imposed by DRM are not new. As one commenter on the LISNews blog wrote:

Maybe it’s a good idea–maybe public libraries should not have any resources that contain DRM–but that does rule out almost all DVD (and, by the way, almost all videocassettes, except that the restrictions weren’t digital), pretty much all subscription audiobook/music/etc. digital resources, Playaway, many (if not most) licensed databases…

Any electronic format, and just about every format besides the printed book, limits use to the owners of the proper devices. But DRM gives producers far more control over the use of materials than other forms of restriction. Companies who produce media players have always tried to make those players obsolete as quickly as possible in order to sell newer models. But DRM gives companies much more control over the obsolescence of the media itself. Witness the Sony ATRAC player, whose recent discontinuation leaves customers without the equipment to play the files they have already purchased. It makes sense for profit-making agencies to engage in this kind of manipulation. But why public libraries?

A public agency which places manipulative restrictions on its use is what Ivan Illich referred to as a “false public utility.” Illich, in Deschooling Society, described the highway as the paradigmatic example:

The highway system does not…become available to someone who merely learns to drive…[T]elephone and postal networks exist to serve those who wish to use them, while the highway system mainly serves as an accessory to the private automobile. The former are true public utilities, whereas the latter is a public service to the owners of cars, trucks, and buses. Public utilities exist for the sake of communication among men; highways…exist for the sake of a product. Auto manufacturers…produce simultaneously both cars and the demand for cars. They also produce the demand for multilane highways, bridges, and oilfields.

The more materials libraries collect in electronic formats, with or without the added restrictions of DRM, the more dubious their status as true public utilities, and the more they resemble a public service to the owners of CD and MP3 players.

(An aside: During a discussion on the collection of various formats in one of my information school classes, I pointed out that library materials in electronic formats are significantly different from books because they require additional equipment to use them, to which the professor replied, “But you need light to read a book.”)

So what should public libraries do? The organizers of the Boston protest have a simple solution: remove all materials with DRM technology from the collection. I agree with this in spirit, but I wonder what the ultimate results would be. If all libraries eliminated DRM-protected materials, would this actually combat the problem, or would it simply mean that even fewer people would have access to the material that is only available in that format?

Perhaps libraries should actively fight aggressive copyright protection of all kinds, including DRM. As DefectiveByDesign argues, the Boston Public Library is legally mandated to “develop, maintain, and preserve comprehensive collections.” DRM precludes maintenance and preservation by libraries because it eliminates ownership of the materials. And unlike books, which can be preserved, DRM-protected materials can only be preserved by preserving the devices used to play them. Libraries could join groups like DefectiveByDesign in arguing that DRM damages libraries’ ability to provide the essential service of archiving and preservation.

Or perhaps libraries should do more to preserve and provide access to the devices needed to play electronic materials. In this sense, my professor’s analogy about books and light is actually helpful. Traditionally, libraries have provided not only books but well-lit reading rooms. This is not only true of books (imagine a research library with microfiche but no microfiche reader). Libraries should remember that they are charged with providing not just access but the means of access. Historically, this has been more common for some formats than others.

The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped seems like a good model. The library provides each patron not only with talking books but with the player required to play them. Because the cassettes can only be played on the special players, the library can restrict access to people who don’t qualify for the service (a key requirement of copyright law and the reason for DRM), but because the library owns the players, it can include all who do qualify, regardless of their ability to buy the proper equipment. And because the library also owns the cassettes, it has the ability to maintain and preserve them. In fact, this is one important reason why in 2008 the library still uses analog cassettes: they are durable and reparable.

The collection of DRM-protected materials is generally justified in terms of popularity. (This is one of the main points offered by the Boston Public Library in its official response to the protest.) I think the concerns of the protesters, like those of my co-worker, serve as a reminder that there are other ways to measure the value of a library collection.

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.

I was also impressed by how willing legislators actually were to have conversations with us. (Granted, my student group was shadowing Bill Ptacek, director of the King County Library System, who seemed to know all the legislators personally, but even so, this seemed like a process I could do again on my own.) One representative came up to the gallery, where we were watching them vote on bills, and had a long conversation with us about how the decision-making process doesn’t work in the way everyone thinks it does. “We never send a bill to the floor unless we know it’s going to pass,” she said. “Or if we want to force people to take a public stand by voting no. All the real debate happens in committees and caucuses.”

Another legislator, a senator, explained why he didn’t support the bill we were lobbying for, which mandates a certain amount of funding for school librarians. “I agree with you that there aren’t enough school librarians,” he said, “but there aren’t enough counselors, either. The problem is that there’s not enough school funding in general. The answer is not to take power away from local school boards and put decisions about staffing levels in the hands of the state legislature. What we really need to do is figure out a way to get more money to schools in the first place. So while I support your goal, I don’t think this bill makes sense from a policy perspective.”

I was just an observer of this interchange, but I found myself nodding in agreement. And despite the fact that I was supposed to be there lobbying for the bill, I began to wonder if it was such a good idea. I do think local control of schools is generally better than state control, and I understand budgeting well enough to know that money allocated for a specific position is money that can’t be spent somewhere else.

Especially after my recent caucusing experience, and my increasing interest in political participation, it was nice to feel like I could talk to my legislator about what is important to me as a constituent, and that I can expect thoughtful explanations of their positions. I think that too often I tend towards cynicism about government without taking the time to learn about what’s really going on.

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.

I was first struck by the relationship between library architecture and knowledge when I visited the Library of Congress last summer. When I first stepped inside the breathtaking Thomas Jefferson building, I remember the feeling that I was standing in a monument not only to truth and knowledge, but to the ideals of a government which no longer seems to exist. What are we to make, for example, of the following quote from Francis Bacon, which sits above the statue of “Philosophy” in the main reading room?

THE INQUIRY, KNOWLEDGE, AND BELIEF OF TRUTH IS THE SOVEREIGN GOOD OF HUMAN NATURE.

Standing in the Library of Congress is what I imagine it must be like to stand at the Pyramids or the Parthenon, and bear witness to the glory of a former civilization.

This is sad. But it is assuredly glorious, and it is very exciting to see the new Carol Highsmith archive of digital photos of the library, which record in exquisite detail the splendor of this building.

The grandiose design of the library building (a “tribute for the great thoughts of generations past, present, and to be,” as one turn-of-the-century guidebook put it) seems to be representative of Jefferson’s idea of the library, when he offered his personal collection as a replacement for the materials lost when the original library was burned down by the British. In response to criticisms that the subject matter of his books was overly broad for a legislative library, Jefferson wrote, “I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.”

Back home, and recovering from my lament for the demise of civilization, I am fortunate to live in a city with several impressive, and quite different, library buildings, including the bizarre and renowned Seattle Public Library, the cathedral-like Suzzallo Library, and the brutalist Odegaard Library. Each of them stands as a tribute to a different way of envisioning and representing knowledge:

The Seattle Public Library’s Central Library, described by William Dietrich as “Knowledge Breaking Out of a Confining Egg.”

The Suzzallo Library of the University of Washington, dubbed a “Cathedral of Books.”

And the Odegaard Undergraduate Library, a hulking mass of brick and concrete just across Red Square from Suzzallo.

Odegaard is built in an architectural style known as Brutalism (really!). Legend has it that this style was popular for college buildings built in the late 1960s not only because they are cheap to build and easy to maintain, but because they are fairly impervious to student rioters. (Just look at those walls of brick in front of all the windows!)

I don’t know what sort of statement this was supposed to make about knowledge.

Image credits:

1. Lobby to Main Reading Room. Good Legislation mural by Elihu Vedder. Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C. Carol Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress.

2. Seattle Public Library -Seattle, WA-. wheelo50411, Flickr.

3. Suzallo Library HDR Stitch. Walakazoo, Flickr.

4. The Odegaard Library. lauren_pressley, Flickr.

(thanks to LISNews for the tip about the Highsmith archive)