Libraries, Neoliberalism, and Oppression




From Libraries and the Enlightenment:





The Memex and the Academic Mind












Notes on Truth and Librarianship















Libraries and Enlightened Views

I’ve been reading Gabriel Naude’s Advice on Establishing a Library (1st ed. 1627, 2nd ed. 1644; trans. into English, 1661). Naude’s treatise is one of the earliest works on librarianship in any modern sense, and lays out a plan for systematically collecting a research library. Among other things, Naude was the librarian who developed Cardinal Mazarin’s personal library, the Bibliotheque Mazarine, and requested it be open to the  public, thus creating the first public library in France (at least as far as I can tell). Until relatively recently in human history, libraries were private, the property of royals or the rich, and served to collect but not disseminate knowledge, and Naude was among the first to develop the idea of a comprehensive, "universal library" open to the public and collecting works on almost every subject, libraries the historian Jonathan Israel has called "workshops of the early Enlightenment."

What’s especially interesting considering the time and place is Naude’s enlightened views on collection development. Consider some of his defenses for acquiring unpopular, heretical, or just plain wacky books:

On books with new ideas:

Neither may all those who have introduced or modified anything in the sciences be omitted, for it is merely flattering the bondage of man’s feeble wit if the scanty knowledge that we possess of these authors is buried under the disdain to which they are inescapably subject for having set themselves up against the ancients and having learnedly examined what others were used to accept as by tradition. . . .  I affirm that all these authors are requisite to a library . . . since it is certain that the knowledge of these books is so useful and valuable to him who can consider and draw profit from all that he sees that it provides him a thousand openings and new conceptions, which, being received by a mind that is open, inquiring, and free from prejudice, “bound to no master fealty to swear,” make him speak to the purpose on all subjects, deliver him from the admiration which is the true mark of our weakness, and enable him to discourse upon whatsoever presents itself with a great deal more judgment, foresight, and resolution than many persons of letters and merit are used to do. (23-24 in the U. of CA Press ed.)

On unusual books (Cabbala, divinations, etc.):

For, though most of them teach only hollow and unprofitable things, and though I hold them but as stumbling blocks to all who amuse themselves with them, nevertheless, to have something with which to please the weaker wits as well as the strong and at the least to satisfy those who desire to see them in order to refute them, one should collect the books on these subjects, although they out to be considered among the rest of the volumes in the library like serpents and vipers among other living creatures, like tares in good wheat, like thorns among the roses—and all this in imitation of the natural world, in which these unprofitable and dangerous things help to round out the masterwork and the scheme by which it was accomplished. (26)

On heretical works:

Since it is necessary, therefore, that our scholars should find these authors somewhere available in order to refute them; since M. de T. posed no objections to collecting them; since the early Fathers and Doctors had them at hand; since many of the clergy keep them in their libraries; since there are no scruples about having a Talmud or a Koran, which belch forth against Jesus Christ and our religion a thousand blasphemies infinitely more dangerous than those of the heretics; since God permits us to profit from our enemies. . .; since they an be prejudicial only to those who, lacking the basis of right conduct, suffer themselves to be carried away by the first puff of wind that blows, and seek out the shade of a beanstalk, and—to conclude in a word—since the intention which determines all our actions for good or ill is not vicious or hardened, I think it nether an absurdity nor a danger to have in a library . . . all the works of the most learned and famous heretics. . . .” (27-28)

How hard it must have been at that time to defend such a library, I thought upon first reading it. A Catholic librarian defending a comprehensive research library owned by a Cardinal during the Reformation. The defense isn’t that the books are right, or even good, but that they exist and are part of the world, and educated, enlightened, unprejudiced minds should read to learn and test their beliefs rather than just to confirm their prejudices. What a daring idea for its time.

Naude was enlightened for his age, and he’s still enlightened for ours. Consider stories like this, about a "conservative" blogger and dim thinker who toured the White House and discovered (gasp!) books on socialism in the library, and thus concluded Obama might be a socialist. Ooooh, those scary socialists! Imagine the poor education and lack of reasoning ability it would take to consider such a thing at all problematic. I’ll ignore the fact that anyone who thinks Obama is a socialist doesn’t know much about socialism. (No President who hands 30,000,000 new customers to big insurance companies is a socialist.) Instead, consider the mindset of someone who obviously believes that people read books to confirm their prejudices and not to learn. Owning or even reading a book on socialism is prima facie evidence that one is possibly or probably a socialist. I suppose reading Inside the Third Reich makes one a Nazi. For such people, education is nearly impossible, because of the unwillingness or inability to encounter ideas contrary to their own.

This sort of crude, ill informed belief isn’t confined to the right, by any means. One of my writing students–a good liberal whose very poor understanding of conservatism was based entirely  upon reading David Brooks’ columns in the New York Times–was in my office and once asked me about my political beliefs. Specifically, he wondered if I was a conservative because I have several books on conservatism on my shelves. Politics drives this sort of blindness more than other subjects, perhaps, because it would never have occurred to him to see all the books on Plato and ask if I were an ancient Greek philosopher. His reasoning became quite clear in the ensuing conversation. Only political conservatives would read books on conservatism, just as liberals read only liberals and his libertarian friend read only Milton Friedman. Thoughtless liberals may not be enemies of Enlightenment, but they’re not necessarily friends or examples. He probably has the Alvy Singer Defense ("I’m a bigot, but for the left, fortunately"). Or there was my socialist friend in library school who refused to read The Wealth of Nations because it’s "capitalist, isn’t it?"

The pattern is the same, and is much like the cloistered, stultifying mindset that Naude was battling in the early 17th century and that Enlightened libraries actively resist. Open inquiry and intellectual freedom are cornerstones of Enlightenment thought and foundational values for most libraries academic and public. The reason we collect books on all subjects isn’t because we are neutral and just want to represent all points of view. The false neutrality might make it easier to win local political battles, but it’s a value that’s incompatible with another value championed by librarians: intellectual freedom.

Intellectual freedom isn’t a neutral value, but instead one of the constellation of Enlightenment values that support research universities as well as academic and public libraries. In academic libraries, we don’t build extensive collections of the sort Naude envisioned because we’re neutral, or because we think every
idea should have equal representation and be considered equally useful or valid. We build those collections to support the habit of open inquiry and the increase of knowledge. If I buy books promoting totalitarianism, it’s not because I think totalitarianism is right or true, and in fact think it’s utterly imcompatable with the foundational values of libraries in a liberal democracy as well as being an assault on the nature of human beings. To the extent that public libraries serve as the "people’s university," their collections serve the same purpose, to allow at least the possibility of open inquiry even if few take advantage of it. It should clear from examining our country and culture that there are always plenty of people hostile to open inquiry, intellectual freedom, and reading to learn rather than reinforce their prejudices. When those people write books, we collect them so that open minds can be informed about them, not by them, and can test their beliefs against the arguments of those who wish to shut down argument.

Libraries Never Change

While doing some research for a project on libraries and Enlightenment, I ran across an article by Grace O. Kelley on the "The Democratic Function of Public Libraries" that presents some familiar criticism:

The library, even more than other institutions, seems not to have been altogether a true part of the social process. In some way, it has been switched out of the current of social change, occupying a niche or eddy of its own. For a long time it seems to have been but slightly affected by the forces which have been changing the rest of the world. One looks in vain in histories of culture and education for studies of the modern library as an active force which is making its impress upon the social fabric. Due to the nature of its organization and of its service it has been possible for it to continue to function largely on its original indefinite ideals and, in a sense, to let the modern world go by….

Not only our knowledge of the world, but the world itself, keeps changing from day to day. "The inescapable drive of change under the accumulation of ideas and traditions, under the relentless impacts of science and invention," make a fixed regime impossible. "An industrial civilization founded on technology, science, invention, and expanding markets must of necessity change and change rapidly." Any institution which does not change too, adapt itself to the times, and become part of the onward "drive of change," will be pushed aside to be left perhaps for a time to make a harmless life of its own. 

The most interesting thing for me about the article was when it was written. It’s from The Library Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Jan., 1934), and yet it seems as timely as today’s headlines, blog posts, or conference presentations. I left out a middle paragraph that helps fix the date of the article more.

On the whole, the public library still has its eye on a state of society which it considers to be more or less permanent in nature. It is academic in its ideals, and to it the world’s "best books" of literature and fiction are still of superimportance; it seems sometimes "unaware of the words, thoughts and things that science and invention have brought" but which in the long run must be heeded. The effect on general reading of the auto, the radio, the talkie, the news-reel, the tempo of modern life and of the machine age in general, is only confusedly sensed.  
I almost wrote that this paragraph dates the article, but I don’t think that’s true. The effect on general reading of the talkie and the news-reel is still probably "only confusedly sensed."
What has changed isn’t the criticism of libraries for not adapting rapidly enough to social and technological change, but the assumption of what changes they should be making and why. The problem, according to this article, was that public libraries had no clear concept of their clientèle, and thus offered reading that may or may not have been appropriate. However, the purpose of the library was to offer reading, especially reading designed to further the education of the masses in a democracy.
Kelley makes a lot of the distinction between public and special libraries. "The primary aims of both relate to knowledge: in the case of one, to the spread of the fruits of knowledge among the people; of the other, to the extension, through aid given to research and study, of the boundaries of knowledge." Public libraries weren’t adapting fast enough to the specialization of knowledge, and were with public funding attempting to supply reading of interest only to specialists. Instead, she argued, libraries should be supplying general reading that makes the rapidly increasing specialist knowledge accessible to the public. In fact, "librarians may well encourage writers to couch their findings in understandable and illuminating form, and, at the same time, improve their own equipment and facilities for distributing this product freely to eager readers." At first I thought this placed an unrealizable goal before librarians until I considered the enormous expansion of reference publishing in the decades after this article was written. 
This isn’t a serious issue now, if it ever was one, so that’s at least one problem we’ve solved. The practical concerns of the time are as dated as the principles and hopes. Kelley, also writing in a time of economic uncertainty, was still hopeful in a way I’m not sure we would be capable of today, even if we were prone to think in her terms. Here’s her concluding paragraph:
For we can have faith to believe that the intelligent reading of worth-while books on important matters that are of mutual interest both to the reader and to the author will result gradually in a clearer understanding of the changing concepts of society and all of its problems. This in turn will lead to a more effective and enlightened control over social conditions, increase the probability of happier and more successful living, and in this way justify the vision of democracy.
It’s an attractive vision in some ways, but one I doubt many librarians would believe these days. There are certainly plenty of worth-while books on important matters being written, and to some extent even read, but few still have any faith that more people reading good books (or even being more educated, for which "reading good books" is just a metonym) will lead to a clearer understanding of social problems or a "more effective and enlightened control over social conditions," and even less faith that public libraries are an essential part of that process. 
This snapshot of library criticism from 75 years ago shows us both that libraries have in practice and principle changed dramatically in that time and in unpredictable ways. The only thing that hasn’t seemed to change is the relentless criticism we apply to ourselves and our profession, the insistence that we are out of touch somehow with the larger world, that we’ve been "switched out of the current of social change, occupying a niche or eddy" of our own. Unless we assume that libraries suddenly began changing and adapting in response to this article in the Library Quarterly, we have to assume that such wasn’t true then, and we have no real evidence that it’s true now. What we have instead are insubstantial panics and false prophets of doom, and in this area it’s true that libraries haven’t changed at all.

Humanism and Libraries

Those who weary of the unreflective pragmatism pervasive in librarianship should appreciate Andre Cossette’s Humanism and Libraries: an Essay on the Philosophy of Librarianship, newly translated from the French by Rory Litwin for his own Library Juice Press.  The slender volume is a clear, refreshing discussion of the philosophy of librarianship, and Litwin should be congratulated for making it accessible to English-speaking readers.

Humanism and Libraries makes a distinction between library science and library philosophy and tries to establish the definition and aim that unifies all libraries and provides their philosophical foundation. Library science “is the theoretical construction of objective relationships among the activities of librarianship,” and should be contrasted with philosophy, which “is the theoretical integration of library practice as a unity, the encompassing understanding of the meaning of the profession.” Library science studies the activities of libraries, while library philosophy explores their underlying unity and justifies their function in society. Because of their practical training and pragmatic tendencies, librarians tend to function without a coherent philosophy, which isn’t fatal for daily operations. “For librarians, the fact of not having a coherent professional philosophy does not prevent them from being motivated by ideas and principles, but these bear more resemblance to religion than to a genuine philosophy.”

He asserts that a philosophy of librarianship would need a definition of librarianship and a set of goals for all libraries. For the definition, he claims inspiration from Jesse Shera and proposes the following: “Librarianship is the art and science of the acquisition, preservation, organization, and retrieval of written and audio-visual records with the aim of assuring a maximum of information access for the human community.”

This seems simple enough. It’s the discussion of aims that becomes complicated. The aim is crucial, because Cossette takes a teleological approach to library philosophy. “The vast human project of the Library can only be evaluated according to the aims toward which it is directed.” Though I disagree in part with his assessment, I’m in agreement with the approach, as it is exactly what I proposed in my essay on “Technological Change, Universal Access, and the End of the Library,” where I argued that “part at least of any philosophy of the library must include thinking about the telos or end of the library. We must ask and try to answer the question: what is the end of the library?”

Cossette examines three possible ends: preservation, education, and information access. Some have considered the aim of libraries to be preservation. Cossette makes the excellent point that “if the role of the librarian only consists in preserving texts he is merely a technician and can not be considered a professional, nor scientific.” 

Cossette also denies that education is a sufficient end, but his reasoning is much shakier here. He first denies that education can serve as the end of the library because it’s “classist.” “In maintaining the illusion that the ultimate goal of the library is education, thinkers in library science perpetuate an ideology that is inseparable from the division of society into classes, which exists in the interest of the dominant class. This bourgeois librarianship, which aims to disseminate high culture, to grant access to the treasures of civilization, is alienating for the vast majority of working people…. This librarianship is classist also for the reason that it universalizes a system of values that belongs to the dominant class.” This objection seems weak for a number of reasons. Something being “bourgeois” isn’t a philosophical objection to an idea as the ultimate goal of an institution. Libraries are perhaps bourgeois institutions, and there’s an end on it. If access to the treasures of civilization alienates the majority of workers, then so much the worse for the workers. However, the biggest weakness is that Cossette’s definition confuses education with indoctrination or perhaps acculturation. Libraries as educational institutions don’t “disseminate high culture,” or at least that’s not all they do. 

In addition to denying education as a possible end of libraries, he has a serious problem with the notion of librarians as educators, which a lot of academic librarians consider themselves to be. He’s opposed to the idea, quoting Kenneth Kister that the “educator is mainly interested in critical analysis of the material involved, whereas the librarian is largely concerned with such services as acquisition, organization, retrieval, and distribution of that material.” He argues that just because librarians teach people how to use libraries doesn’t make them educators. Librarians who believe they are “have a poor sense of the fundamental nature of librarianship. They have neglected to take account of what all types of libraries have as a common goal: the maximal dissemination of information.”  (This is his end for libraries.) 

He claims that “Librarians are not engaged in a pedagogical situation, which means they are able to play a role that is completely different from that of a teacher, whose function is normative, hierarchical, and distanced. His fundamental role consists of providing the information requested by the reader, as rapidly and effectively as possible. In academic and school libraries, it is plain that users require, in the majority of cases, information for their educational needs. But it would be an abuse of language to claim this as a reason to call a library an educational institution or a librarian a teacher. The aim here is merely to teach students how to access information.” (My emphasis.)

But is this true? I don’t believe it is. Academic librarians teach people both to access and evaluate information, and collection development librarians also build library collections not just by including some works but by excluding others, which often involves some sort of intellectual evaluation. Cossette is so dedicated to defending his primary claim about the end of libraries that he ignores what academic librarians actually do.  Librarians as educators upsets Cossette’s scheme because then academic librarians and special or public librarians couldn’t claim to be experts in the same field of expertise. Such a rigid definition itself fails to take account the possibility that all libraries might not have a common goal. 

He concludes with the fairly banal point that the telos or goal of libraries is the maximal distribution of information.  

The contemporary library becomes a service for information retrieval with the aim of providing all people with pertinent information toward educational, cultural, utilitarian, recreational, or other aims…. It is not a question of imposing on readers this or that type of information as a pretext for fulfilling a supposed educational or cultural mission. Rather, the librarian leaves it to the user to determine the purpose of his information request and accords him the full freedom to choose for himself the information that he will use.

Elsewhere, I’ve called a version of this the Universal Access Principle (or UAP), “ the proposition that libraries should provide free access to all information to all persons all of the time.” At the time I argued that this principle is confused. “The belief underlying the UAP allows for no evaluative choices, and yet it is used to justify an evaluative choice–i.e., that citizens should be taxed to support thi
s principle. It is founded upon a radical ethical relativism, asserting that we have no way to decide what is good or bad, and thus we must let individuals decide for themselves, but then it decides for them. Specifically, it decides for the citizens that it is good for them to underwrite ethical relativism.” I’m not sure I still agree with my previous assessment, especially the claim about ethical relativism, but I agree with the basic point that the UAP claims a neutrality that cannot possibly justify it as an end of the library. It claims to be value neutral, but is cryptonormative instead. And the hidden norm isn’t the ethical relativism I once thought, but instead Enlightenment liberalism. 

Even after deciding upon the UAP as the telos of the library, Cossette sneaks education and acculturation in through the back door when he addresses the role libraries play in informing citizens and helping free the oppressed.  “In providing needed information to all citizens, especially the most disadvantaged, the library lends its support to the realization of democratic ideals: it contributes to the formation of an informed electorate that is capable of rational decisions.” This is definitely not the goal of neutral information provider, and if this is the essence of libraries then there can be no libraries in totalitarian states. He says that ”librarians working in democratic libraries are professionally neutral in facing political, moral, and religious problems that divide readers. If there is controversy, they defend intellectual freedom.” However, the defense of intellectual freedom is not a neutral political position. 

This section concludes by bringing in more voices affirming the non-neutral neutrality of librarians. “They provide free access to all to a collection that contains controversial texts and ideas. The impartiality is made possible by their professional ‘indifference’ to all competing opinions. ‘If he [the librarian] has no politics, no religion, and no morals, he can have all politics, all religions, and all morals.’ The contemporary library is a center of liberalism, ‘but its function is not to preach it but to be liberalism in operation.’” The ideas quoted so approvingly don’t make much sense, though. Librarians can’t defend intellectual freedom and have no politics, and though it makes political sense to claim so librarians aren’t really professionally impartial about ideas or books. A library that is the “center of liberalism” cannot possibly be neutral. Cossette affirms as much when he finally discusses libraries and humanism in his conclusion. Libraries are humanistic because they aim toward creating a certain sort of human being. “How can we call a service that aims for the creation of autonomous individuals who are sufficiently well informed to bring about all of their various projects anything but humanistic? … The work of librarianship is truly a human endeavor, that is to say an activity of humankind for humankind, that has as its end the well being of humankind.” 

Earlier, Cossette had claimed that the end or goal of libraries was the maximal dissemination of information in a neutral manner, but even he can’t maintain that as the end. In the conclusion, we are told the end is the “well being of humankind,” and its well being in a very particular way—the creation of autonomous individuals informed enough to complete their various human projects. That’s an awfully ambitious goal for librarians who are supposedly neutral. Obviously, the UAP claims neutrality, when in fact it isn’t neutral, but aims to create a liberal culture of free autonomous human beings. This is where I think Cossette and the “neutral” liberals he quotes are confused. If the UAP is the founding philosophical principle of librarianship, then libraries are not in fact neutral and can’t possibly be. They are necessarily institutions of education and acculturation—to create educated, informed liberal democratic citizens. Librarians may build collections housing diverse views, but they don’t believe those diverse views, and they are not neutral about them. Some of the ideas are better than others, and librarians help decide that. Cossette wants to have the library be neutral towards information while claiming that neutrality serves emancipatory goals, but that’s disingenuous. Libraries as he conceives of them are institutions actively participating in the Enlightenment project of human liberation through education and tolerance. It’s educational, critical, and bourgeois. It assumes that critical thought is as necessary as information, and helps provide both. Though beginning as an Aristotelian, Cossette turns Kantian in the end.

Cossette’s definition and ultimate end of librarianship assumes that all libraries have something in common, the library-ness of the library, as a Platonist might say. He has to spend so much time deriding the educational claims of academic librarians because if they are educators in any meaningful sense then they have something peculiar they might not share with public or special librarians.  However, by the time he concludes with the humanistic, liberal end of libraries, this attempt at unity is no longer necessary. By undercutting the supposed neutrality of librarians, he has reintroduced an educational role for both academic and public librarians. Though public librarians sometimes deny their educational role and affirm their neutrality, some occasionally embrace an educational and cultural mission. That’s the point I got from the Darien Statements (which I evaluated here).

I disagree with his attempt at unification, because academic and public libraries have different, though sometimes overlapping missions. There may well be no library-ness of the library to examine. This doesn’t mean there can be no philosophy of librarianship, only that such a philosophy will have to be more complicated than providing access to information. Ultimately, I agree with Cossette’s conclusions that we can only understand and philosophize about libraries by understanding their place in a society and culture. The end of the library cannot be an end in itself, but must reflect the ends of society. By acknowledging the role of libraries in liberal democracies, Cossette says as much himself. 

Though I’ve found much to criticize (and left many interesting arguments untouched), I highly recommend Humanism and Libraries. If it weren’t so thought-provoking, I would never have addressed it in the first place. Regardless of whether one agrees with all of Cossette’s methods or conclusions, taking the journey with him through this discussion should give any librarian much food for thought. 

On the Vision Thing

Somehow today I stumbled upon this commentary by Carl Grant, the president of Ex Libris North America. In it, Grant expresses his disappointment over a lack of leadership or vision for librarianship. "As a librarian in the United States, I’m growing more and more upset and outraged about the lack of a national vision for librarianship. Where is our professional leadership in this time of economic crisis? Who is describing a vision that inspires us and that we can support?" Given the recent "Darien Statements" and my own occasional ruminations on the subject, there is evidence that some librarians desire a large and meaningful discussion about vision and purpose, and I can certainly understand the frustration Grant feels.

What I’m not so sure about, which I also discussed concerning the "Darien Statements," is whether there can be such a "national vision for librarianship," because it’s not clear that librarianship is itself a unified field. Grant discusses a Chronicle article calling for a national educational agenda that considers higher education a public good again rather than as a place for states to save money by cutting it to the bone. Grant comments: "There are some wonderful messages and ideas in that article that can be applied directly to libraries (frequently, with little more than a word swap)." I tend to agree, but it’s not clear that "librarianship" as a field is even as coherent as "higher education," and "higher education" itself verges on incoherence these days if we included Harvard, the University of Phoenix, community college systems, and your local Bible college.

For there to be such a vision, there would have to be some agreement on what it is libraries in theory should do, but what libraries do in practice varies considerably. It’s relatively easier to discuss academic libraries, but even within academia libraries play greater or lesser roles, and the importance of the library is very different for an historian and an astrophysicist, or to an on-campus liberal arts student and a part-time distance ed student.

One thing that seems clear when such discussions about meaning or purpose come up is that they can’t be divorced from the educational and political mission of libraries. Grant at one point says "our fellow educators" and considers the profession of librarianship part of the "core infrastructure of America, of its society"; the "Darien Statements" state that the Library "Encourages the love of learning" and "Empowers people to fulfill their civic duty; even the Annoyed Librarian likes to quote the motto of the Boston Public Library on educating citizens, or at least she used to. To the extent this is true, then perhaps academic libraries are not so divorced from public librarians after all.

The goal of the Library or the vision of Librarianship cannot be separated from larger goals of society, and the larger goals that seem to stir people the most are related to education, politics, and economics. Educational institutions are here to teach people and allow them to fulfill their potential as well as shape them into good citizens and productive workers. If there is to be a grand vision, it seems it would have to have this as the goal.

But would a vision like that guide every library and every librarian? Where I work, such a vision seems natural enough. The students we serve are bright and movitivated and are likely to fulfil their potential while being good citizens and productive workers. That, after all, is the natural goal of a liberal education, and some purpose like that is part of why I do what I do where I do it.

Are public libraries necessarily different? Public libraries have different relationships to their communities, and serve many functions that academic libraries often don’t. I’m thinking about hosting book clubs or acting as community centers, things that might be rough parallels to seminars or student center events on a college campus. Still, it’s obvious that with the traditional and current emphasis on providing information and guiding people to it that an educational function is built into public libraries. School libraries as well. Special libraries have some claim to making people into more productive workers, though I’m not sure how well they fare on making people better citizens or fuller human being, but everybody can’t do everything.

Is something like this the de facto vision of librarianship that we’re just not talking about much? Near the end of his essay, Grant opines that "an effort to find [a strategic plan] for libraries in general, National Libraries and/or Public Libraries can leave one exhausted and unsatisfied." I agree completely. I’m just not sure the problem is a lack of vision. I think if there can be a vision it will be something like I’ve described, and that any of us who think on the matter and want to find a larger purpose to our profession eventually work our way to something like this: libraries and librarians create more complete human beings, better citizens, and more productive workers. If that’s the case – and keep in mind I’m merely speculating – then we have the vision in the sense of purpose and goal. Do we have the will to implement that vision, or can we come up with a specific plan? On that I have as many doubts as Grant.

Preserving the Integrity of Civilization

I emerged from a long period of intense work to find the Darien Statements popping up all over my Google Reader. They seem like worthwhile enough statements, if  grandly stated. Readers of this blog know that I’m not averse to grandiloquent overstatement in the search for purpose. They didn’t evoke in me the visceral reaction they seem to in others, and I think I occupy the middle ground somewhere between the acid cynicism of the some bloggers and the sunny optimism of others. Mostly, I wonder about the meaning of the first statement that is supposed to support the others. "The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization." When I first read it, that sentence really grabbed me. Yes, I thought, that sounds good. However, as I thought about it more and unpacked the sentence, the meaning seemed to dissolve before me, and I’ve been trying to make sense of it.

The first problem for me was the Library. Maybe it’s something about the singular and the capitalization that bothers me, the assumption that there’s some essence common to all libraries, the librariness of the library existing in the mind of God or something. One of the reasons I focus on academic libraries is that I don’t think there is a Library; there are libraries of all sorts and all types, and there doesn’t seem to be much that they have in common. We might say they all provide access to information of some kind to some set of users as a common denominator. That seems to be about it, and that doesn’t seem enough to warrant the singular, capitalized noun. In my mind I always contrast the tiny public library that serves my grandmother and the largish academic library I work in. They are vastly different libraries with very different goals. If we add in school and special libraries, the variety becomes even greater. Though public and academic libraries have a lot in common, it seems to me that these days public libraries consider their missions to be broader than the educational mission usually assumed of most academic libraries.

If there is no one Library, then there can be no one purpose. But even if there were one Library and one purpose, would it be to preserve the integrity of civilization? In addition to implying that there’s a Library, this statement also implies there’s a civilization, and that this civilization has integrity. In one common sense of the term, there are many civilizations, and ours (if we share one) is but one of them. If we are talking about our civilization, which one is that? Let’s assume for the sake of argument we’re talking about Western civilization. This makes sense. The statements are written in English and are undoubtedly written from the perspective of librarians who are the products of Western civilization. This is a troublesome phrase to some. What might I mean by Western civilization? I’m not quite sure, other than the current state of the Judeo-Christian-Greco-Roman-Germanic mishmash that has defined so much about Europeans and the places they have colonized.

Which leads to my next question. How much integrity does this civilization have? What do we mean by integrity? Etymologically it means something whole, undivided, complete, possibly pure. I’ll ignore the moral protests against Western civilization, because they tend to ignore comparisons with other civilizations. Just trying to look objectively, dispassionately at Western civilization, in modern times it seems to be the most porous, divided, unintegrated civilization in existence. This civilization, born amongst the commingling cultures in the ancient Mediterranean, has always been impure and open and unintegrated and grows more so every year. Rarely in the West has there been an active decision – as there once was in Japan, for example – to retreat from contact with other civilizations. There was some isolation during the early Middle Ages as the structure of the Roman empire collapsed, but otherwise the West has been porous.

Even what is sometimes popularly considered the most integral period of Western history, the apex of Christendom during the high middle ages, was much more internally divided than most people realize and was also deliberately and aggressively open to Islamic civilization through the Crusades. Since the Reformation, Western civilization has begun an endless process of splintering and dividing while growing ever more open to outside influences while also overwhelming other civilizations with Westernization.

But maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way. Could it be civilization in some moral sense that is meant, as we might use it when we say people are civilized, which in some senses we would say only of a subset of a civilization in the first sense. ? Or in a related sense, using civilization as Matthew Arnold used "culture"? Culture for Arnold was the best that has been thought and said, and the human mission to perfect ourselves through an immersion in this culture. In this way of thinking, the mission of The Library would be a cultural mission, a civilizing mission. The Library preserves the integrity of civilization by civilizing us, by preserving culture in the high Arnoldian sense and allowing us access to it in a way we wouldn’t have if The Library didn’t exist.

This understanding makes sense of many of the statements,for example the phrases about "personal enlightenment" and "love of learning" and "creative expression," as well as the liberal content of some of the exhortations to promote openness, kindness, or trust. This Arnoldian interpretation is high-minded, and to some can be inspiring. It is what I myself think of my own library and its educational and research mission in my prouder moments. However, if something like this is meant, especially for all libraries, it seems to go against the grain of some popular thinking on libraries and librarians, especially the idea that librarians can or should be "neutral," or the relativistic "every book his reader" of Ranganathan. If The Library has a civilizing mission, then librarians must act accordingly, and become the guardians and promoters of this civilization. Civilization loses any neutral sense it might have. Such a civilization has a content, a philosophy, an ethic, a framework to choose what is worthwhile to be preserved or promoted and what isn’t.

This doesn’t bother me at all. Something like this was implied in my arguments for the librarian as filter. In those posts, I argued that it was the librarian’s job to select and thus to choose what to preserve, and that librarians can not and should not be neutral, but I was talking about academic libraries. I wonder if librarians in the mass are ready for such a charge when they’ve been taught for a long time to be neutral providers devoted to "access" in the abstract, but not access to particular items of value. If my Arnoldian interpretation is right, then this statement means that all librarians and all libraries have a positive, substantial educational and civilizing mission. This means that public libraries and librarians would need to move away from the usual policy of giving the public what it wants to giving the public what the librarians think they need. This already happens in academic libraries, but it seems foreign to what I know of public libraries.

I can’t say for sure if this is what the authors of the Darien Statements meant by "preserving the integrity of civilization." This is the interpretation that seems to me to make the most sense of the document. If it is what they meant, it’s a powerful statement that cuts d
eeper through the thinking of a lot of librarians than perhaps they meant to. If this interpretation veers too far from the authorial intentions, perhaps more clarification would help me understand the statements better.

Research Libraries Support Research

I’ve long thought that the concept of “library” isn’t a very coherent one. The small town (pop. 300 or so) public library that serves my grandmother and the very large research library I work in are both called libraries, and yet their staff, collections, and mission couldn’t be more different. There are also often large differences in outlook even among academic librarians. Sometimes this is a teaching versus research difference, and sometimes a service versus collections difference. Few librarians seem to move completely to one side or another, and I certainly don’t, but the tensions are undoubtedly there in the profession, and often in the same library.

I’m thinking about this because of the juxtaposition of topics I’ve encountered so far today. This morning I attended a presentation by Bernard Reilly, President of the Center for Research Libraries. He discussed a lot of the initiatives currently underway at CRL, including a number of their digitization projects. One of them involves Latin American newspapers, and as part of an effort to make the materials more useful to the libraries in the region digital copies will be made available to those libraries as well as to CRL libraries, though not freely on the Internet. My favorite quote was that this project is “built on the assumption that an Internet cafe is not a library.” Though the CRL hopes to digitize a lot of material in the coming years, I seriously doubt that everything they have will ever be digitized. I wasn’t aware until today of how much of it isn’t even cataloged yet.

To the undigitized, and possibly never digitized collections of CRL, add the archives scattered across the globe. Then the book collections that aren’t now, and may never be digitized. That’s a lot of material that will never be freely available from an Internet cafe or your laptop, or even your university should they have the money to pay for such things.

Now let us turn to a blog post at ACRLog I read just after the presentation–Library as Place–For Air Conditioning Books. In it Steven Bell comments on a presentation by Adrian Sannier, Chief Technology Officer at Arizona State University. Bell excerpts a couple of tasty quotes. Here’s part of one:


About that, I’m not sure what to say, except it wouldn’t be much of an educational institution, but more on that later.

Here’s part of another juicy one:

Burn down the library. C’mon, all the books in the world are already digitized….Stop air conditioning the books. Enough already. None of us has the Alexandria Library. Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, Indiana. Those guys have digitized their collections. What have you got that they haven’t got? Why are you buying a new book? Buy digitial….How many people are using the indicies we’re all paying so much for….

Bell certainly realizes how ignorant (or perhaps deliberately provocative) Sannier is about book digitization and higher education, though he opines that maybe some IT people have it in for us librarians. Bell’s response is that If “academic libraries are being dismissed as one big book air conditioner then we better start doing some of our own transforming to make sure our operations are lean yet productive, and that we have the data to prove to the top administrators that our libraries deliver the best service for the tuition dollar. It must be shown that academic libraries directly contribute to students achieving learning outcomes and persistence to graduation.” That’s certainly a sensible approach, but there are other considerations to make about Sannier’s poorly informed presentation.

First of all, I find it difficult to take even remotely seriously. Dr. Sannier is no doubt a bright and competent man. He has a PhD in computer science, and before going to ASU worked with computer systems both in academia and private industry, according to his bio. My assertion isn’t that I don’t take him seriously as a professional, only that I can’t take him seriously as an expert on university research or teaching more broadly, that is, outside of the technological and digital portions of it. Obviously Google has not digitized all the books in the Google Book project libraries, and just as obviously the copyrighted ones they have digitized are not freely available online. Obviously also, as Bell note, curricula differ widely among educational institutions, and it’s not at all clear that even the complete collections available freely online at some of these libraries would satisfy all comers, which of course we know isn’t going to happen anyway.

I’d like to watch the entire presentation, but unfortunately right now I have a spreadsheet of 38,000 nondigitized book titles I have to go through line by line to make location decisions, plus I’m going on vacation next week, so I can barely break away to blog. Perhaps next time I have a free moment, which at this point will probably be New Year’s Day. Still, based on the excerpts as well as Bell’s reaction, neither of them are necessarily taking into account the larger mission of the research library. Bell’s response is to recommend that libraries make the case that tuition dollars are used wisely and student learning outcomes are met and they graduate. That’s all good stuff, and I think natural from a public services AUL at an urban state university.

But teaching students is but one mission of a research university, and not necessarily the most important one, if we judge by what professors get the most rewards for. The purpose of a research university is to research, to create knowledge, to contribute to the scholarly record, etc. This differs by field, naturally. In the sciences, engineering, computer science, and other areas, this may not require anything that can’t be accessed by a computer. In the humanities, area studies, and some of the social sciences, it does, and it most likely will for decades to come, if not forever. Yes, it’s possible that eventually every archive and book collection in the world will be digitized and available to researchers, even if not for free, like some of the collections coming out of the CRL are now available to research libraries. It’s possible, but it doesn’t seem very likely.

Another possibility is that enough material will be digitized that future researchers will just be content with what is digitally available and not worry about the rest. That’s pretty sloppy research, but as we know everyone, scholars included, prefer the good but easily available to the best but difficult to obtain. This could happen, but it wouldn’t negate the ideal of the research university or research library; it would just cheapen it.

It’s this perspective that makes it difficult for research libraries. Sannier rightly notes that no library is a universal library. No one has everything. That’s been the case for decades, though. The CRL, for example, was founded in 1949 to address this issue. That’s why we have cooperative agreements with other libraries. This is not even remotely a new issue. It might seem like a new issue now only if you think everything is digitized. Since most books, archives, etc., aren’t digitized, there’s nothing new being said about the issue. Just claiming it’s true doesn’t make it so.

I don’t think every institution of higher education should be a research university or every library a research library. I also don’t think that large libraries are necessary for most undergraduate education. It’s clear some fields hardly need library resources. Despite its dependence on monographs, a strong liberal arts education could probably be supported by a library of 10,000 books or so, if they were, for example, the 10,000 or so that Peter Briscoe in Reading the Map of Knowledge considers the “core.” And perhaps all those books would be digitally available to a new college today, or at least relatively soon. So, if we’re talking about starting up a new community college, or business school, or liberal arts college, this get-rid-of-the-print-books approach has at least a chance of working, though what liberal arts college would feel satisfied with a library so small I don’t know. Thomas Aquinas College, perhaps. But still, if one wanted to trim the collection to the absolute minimum necessary for a decent liberal arts college, it just might be barely possible. (That’s a lot of qualification, I know).

However, once we turn away from undergraduate education, the whole notion breaks down completely, and for any research university worth the name such a scheme is unthinkable if the library is actually designed to support any research. And the argument that no library is universal only goes so far. No library is a universal library, but it seems clear to me that the top 25 libraries or so plus places like CRL together constitute about as universal library as we are about to get. We can measure “top” anyway we please, whether it’s the number of items, amount of digital content, or financial resources. Regardless, there have to be a number of libraries that do their best to build just-in-case research collections for some fields so that we can all satisfy our otherwise insatiable just-in-time research needs.

A “research library” without print materials and climate control to protect them is an oxymoron. That might not always be the case, and I wouldn’t feel at all bad if the situation went away, but it’s here to stay for a long time to come. Print materials are still needed for research, and the purpose of a research library is to support research. I suppose some would consider me an excessive technophobe or bibliophile for saying that, but such is far from the case. I just want to protect research libraries and the universities they support from the excessive technophiles and bibliophobes that could destroy them if given a chance.

The Library: It’s Boxy but It’s Good

I’ve been reading a Time Magazine article on Starbuck’s attempt to freshen their brand: Starbucks Looks for a Fresh Jolt. There are library blogs out there that talk about marketing and branding and such, and I usually like to steer clear of business talk, but I was struck by a line from the past and current CEO of Starbucks.

From the article: “The three of us stand and look at the area by the cash register–a clutter of CDs, breath mints, chocolate-covered graham crackers, chewing gum and trail mixes. ‘There’s no story,’ Roberts says. Schultz adds, ‘We’re selling a lot, but the point is to take a step back and ask, Is it appropriate? We’ve been selling teddy bears, and we’ve been selling hundreds of thousands of them, but to what end?'”

The first thing I thought of was my own local Starbucks and the way I’ve seen it transform in the past few years from a coffeeshop into something resembling an upscale convenience store. The breath mints, the teddy bears, the special CDs–all with the Starbucks brand on them. It seems to offend some people, but I actually like Starbucks coffee, and while being only a moderate coffee drinker I’ve certainly bought my share of grande coffees over the years. What I haven’t liked is everything else. Sometimes I even get in a very un-Starbucks mood and wish the people in front of me would just order a cup of coffee instead of whatever fancy drink they ordered, not because I begrudged them their half-decaf, fruit-filled, skim mochaccino, but because I’m in a hurry and just want my straight cup of coffee. Most of the time, though, what I don’t like is being bombarded with all of the cutesy or cuddly non-coffee crap they also sell. So, I don’t go to Starbucks as often as I might.

After the brief meditation on my own Starbucks experience, which lasted less time than it took to write the previous paragraph, I thought about the many librarians trying to brand or perhaps rebrand the library. I blogged last year in Conceptual Incommensurability and Video Games criticizing attempts to turn the academic library into a social space. Libraries can open up pubs and hold square dances, but that will never make them any more popular qua libraries. The old library brand is, I suppose, Books. My library has millions of books and buys tens of thousands more every year, but Books doesn’t work well as a brand because it captures only a portion of what we do. Information is too broad. Perhaps Scholarly Research would be the best brand, because the library and its resources are central to and indispensable for scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences.

If Scholarly Research is the brand of the academic library (and I’m arguing it should be), then do we dilute our brand if we focus on other things? I think we do. Usually when I see discussions of the problem of branding, they’re talking about public libraries and trying to make the case that libraries have more than books. However, academic libraries have some of the same issue problems. Should we create blogs? Should we be on Facebook? How can we appeal to and more importantly communicate with students? Having a mission–Scholarly Research–helps answer some of these other questions. Should we have a space on Facebook? Sure, if it helps the mission, but not if it’s just to have a page up to show that we’re hep to the latest fashion. Should we blog? Definitely, if it serves the mission of scholarly research somehow. Our mission is scholarly research, and that should be central to how we brand ourselves.

Scholarly Research may sound like a humdrum or humorless mission, but it has to be the identity of the academic library. It might not appeal to 18-year-olds as much as something trendier, but the library is what it is, and the struggle of marketing is to make things popular, not to change the things into something else. We can experiment with and investigate trends and fads to see what might help us in our mission, as long as we remember the mission and don’t get caught up in frivolities that we think might make us more popular. It might be best for our image to sell scholarly research as the worthwhile endeavor we all think it is than hanker for something sexier. There’s an old Dudley Moore movie about an advertising executive who ends up in an asylum, Crazy People. One of the crazy ads he comes up with is, “Volvo: We’re Boxy But We’re Good.” We will probably be better off selling the library as what it is than trying to pretend it’s something else.

The Library: It’s Boxy but It’s Good.