R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Over on Techie Librarian we’ve (I suppose inevitably) been discussing the shift of library schools to schools of Information Science. The former, it seems, don’t teach information architecture or markup or any of that good stuff; the latter, it seems, don’t teach cataloguing and classification, much less public service.
Let’s leave aside for a moment that I’m attending a traditionalist library school (by the above metric, anyway) and still taking information architecture. I want to look at this so-called divide between librarianship and technology.
Because I think it’s bogus. I think wild-eyed fanatics on both sides are blowing things entirely out of proportion. I also think the research-research-research academia game isn’t helping.
On the one hand, you have the likes of Michael Gorman, whose resolute refusal to engage with new technology makes it really hard for me to cast my ALA ballot in his favor (though I intend to hold my nose and do it, because the rest of his agenda tallies well with mine). Caution when approaching new technology is a good thing. Careful consideration of costs and benefits is terrific; I’m all for it. Gorman goes far, far beyond that, all the way into “technology is the Dark Side; give in to it at your peril.”
And a lot of librarians, feeling threatened and insecure, have lined up behind him, hiding behind a bulwark of hard-copy LCSH schedules. Don’t tell me about WiFi and XML and information architecture. This is a library. Those things don’t matter, because they’re not the way libraries do things.
How are people with even my moderate level of technophilia supposed to react to this, I ask you? Is it really any surprise that faced with blank incomprehension and outright contempt from Gorman’s crew, the technologists have turned their backs?
Enter the Academia Waltz, which currently rewards the technologists’ research agendas, and professors of librarianship start to have real reason to worry.
Add to that, just for kicks, the overblown “librarian shortage” and its unhappy results for job-seeking librarians. (It is overblown. It’s garbage, even. It’s reminiscent of the 1989 Bowen predictions for academia, and we all know the results of that. If you’re thinking of going to library school because it’s an automatic job ticket, forget it.)
My SLISmates who graduate this May are asking hard questions about the market value of what they’ve learned, and I’m not in a position to argue with them—when I graduate, I’ll likely be in a better position to land a job than many of them, for reasons having nothing to do with the SLIS program or my performance therein. One more strike against “traditional” librarianship.
Wow, that’s a bit bleaker than I meant it to be. Sorry.
And on the other hand, we have the snake-oil vendors and the dogmatists. Lots of ’em. We all pretty much know what I think of snake-oil vendors, right? And the dogmatists have lost all touch with reality. Scary, scary people.
The answer—well, my answer, anyway—is to take a longer view. As I’ve said repeatedly here in the last week or so, not a few problems the technologists are worrying their fuzzy little heads over are problems traditional librarianship licked long ago. A lot of the jazzy new stuff works out to retrenchments or reimagination of the old stuff. So let’s poke some heads up out of the dusty card catalogs and help, hm?
Too often, though, a traditionalist’s idea of helping is a Gormanesque scoff: “I can’t believe you’re still hung up on that. Technology is useless, if this is any indication. Go read AACR2; it’s the last word.” C’mon, people, when you do this you make yourself irrelevant—why should any reasonable being heed this approach? So don’t come crying to me about your irrelevance, because I have no sympathy whatever.
Traditionalists are also vulnerable to the mote-in-the-eye problem. Sure, ebooks suck—but so do OPACs, and OPACs are an awful lot older. Surely all y’all could have gotten the bugs out of OPACs by now, if you’re so great? So amp down and let the techies help with this kind of thing. It’s what we’re good at, after all. And do us all a favor and acknowledge the faults of what has gone before, as well as its successes, especially in a teaching setting.
And we geeks? We really need to get over our bad selves sometimes. Part of the reason the traditionalists don’t get us is that we have done a truly craptastic job of explaining what we do and how we do it—the traditionalists are so far ahead of us in this respect that we ought to be ashamed.
We also need to give up the arrogant notion that what is old is outdated. Sometimes what is old got to be old in the first place because it works. Learn it, respect it, then critique it. Too many geeks forget all but the last part of that equation.
You know what, though? I’m crying in the wilderness. Geeks are geeks, and traditionalists are traditionalists. The distrust is all but institutionalized by now; they can’t help but talk past each other.
We need ombudsmen, that’s what. People who come at both sides of things with fresh eyes. People with enough cred on both sides to be listened to by both sides. Genial people who see value in received wisdom and in change, and who’ll call out both sides when they need calling. People who can help each side make sense of the other, who can defuse the anxiety.
And we especially need these people teaching in library schools, or information-science schools, or whatever you want to call them. How else are new students to gain any sense of perspective?
Not to toot my own horn here (well, okay, maybe a little), but people like me. I can’t be the only one out there. Even in academia, where hands-on practicality is the seventh deadly sin, there have to be a few.
No, no, I’m not reconsidering my refusal to pursue a Ph.D. I said no, I said no for bloody good reasons, and I meant no. I do think I’m going to pursue my compromise position, however. Folks like me darn well should be teaching.