by: Adam Feldman
I’m young for a librarian — 34 in a field where the median age is over 50. It
should go without saying then that I’m not the least bit afraid of technology.
Digital tools make me far more productive at what I do. However, as a member of
the only profession dedicated to mastering, or at very least thinking about, the
epistemology of all human discourses, I can tell you that books on a shelf
arranged by the Dewey Decimal System (or Library of Congress Classification or
UDC or Bliss or any other well-developed scheme) are an
essential and invaluable architecture of human discovery and understanding.
Today, however, those books on shelves occupy a shrinking portion of library
budgets in cities around the country. As Amanda Erickson reports in Next City’s
Forefront feature this week, “The
Next Chapter for Urban Libraries Is Here,” librarians are showing off new
digital collections and finding creative ways of interacting with the public
that integrate these resources into the community. In 2013, the first book-free
public library opened in the suburbs of San Antonio, Texas. The mainstream and
professional press has been breathless in reporting the popularity of BiblioTech
Digital Library among the Texan population it serves. However, I can’t help but
be underwhelmed by this description from the San Antonio Express-News:
“When the school day ends, the crush begins at Bexar County BiblioTech.” In
dense Philadelphia, where I work, our book-filled libraries are busy from open
to close. When school lets out, they often operate at standing-room only.
Digital evangelism has lulled many of us into what I think ought to be an
embarrassingly anti-intellectual comfort zone. Some comfortable folks among us
are coming to believe that everything we need to know about the world can be
skimmed in a compulsively reloaded feed, algorithmed and tailored to all our
narrow biases. It is a mistake to assume that because of all of the reading on
screens that we do these days that libraries are undergoing some sort of seismic
shift. Or that they must.
Honestly, sometimes very little of gravity is happening on those computer
terminals in urban libraries anyway. It’s often a lot of socializing on
Facebook. It’s also cell phone videos of fights on Youtube. And yes, while
thousands of people are indeed applying for jobs using our computers, fewer are
getting them. Tech and traditional literacy skills are serious obstacles for our
patrons. For those folks who have achieved those modern basic skills and have
managed to get low-wage jobs, we often find ourselves helping them to use public
terminals to fill out digital time sheets in between shifts. You know, so that
the boss doesn’t have to hire secretaries for the HR department.
The potentially uplifting electronic resources that we do have — the
expensive subscription databases — remain unknown to most computer users. With
the rising costs of these digital tools, there’s a potentially proportionate
threat to personnel budgets for hiring the librarians necessary to guide curious
learners in their use. Run by a fraction of the staff necessary for a
brick-and-mortar library, our e-book collections of pulp genre fiction and
best-sellers steadily rank among our busiest branches when you count
“circulation” statistics. The popularity of pulp is nothing new — leisure
reading has long been an important part of library land — yet the complex webs
of intellectual property law and vendor contracts guarantee that this “e-branch”
is a pale shadow of the spectrum of human publishing represented by a real-life
library curated by librarians who know their communities.
The digital revolution is changing us but not in the way people who don’t use
libraries think it is. The meaningful life-changing core of the neighborhood
branch is and remains the radical, flexible, dynamic education model that
librarians build using every electronic, physical, and human resource at hand.
We are a cradle-to-grave people’s pre-school through Ph.D. When a young mother
is pregnant, neighborhood librarians are teaching her to read to her pre-natal
child. Some of this involves tablets, but most of it will involve saliva-soaked
board books. Before school starts, we are introducing children to the
complexities of language, song, movement and manipulation. Sure, there are
virtual versions, but the analog experience fills our programming rooms in a
spectacle that has to be seen to be believed.
Once children are in school, we’re finding a million creative ways to give
students a respite from classroom drills by introducing them to the wonder of
stories or the excitement of indulging curiosity in the world via non-fiction.
Browsing shelves with us as guides accomplishes this in a far more satisfying
way than browsing hyperlinks alone. Yet when a hyperlink is called for, we’re
the ones teaching how to evaluate the site’s trustworthiness, if we’re not
recommending it ourselves first.
By high school, students are interacting with librarians who will frankly
discuss sex, drugs, abuse, work and college. We will unearth — without judgement
— the illicit counter-narratives young minds demand. At this point in their
development, there is no question that we must harness every resource possible
to respond to their needs. By university, we’re translating the peculiarities of
the academic cult to students who didn’t even know there was Kool-Aid to be
sipped.
No scholar can achieve anything of importance without navigating the full
spectrum of knowledge about this world regardless of its published format. The
e-book market is too narrow, too ephemeral, too monopolistic to meet all of
these needs alone. And barring a complete collapse of our global copyright
regime, it always will be.
This is the key point about which digital evangelists fail to think. The
digital-only library is far from a utopian information commons, where the voices
weighing in on every conceivable topic may be heard. Rather, that utopian
commons is the traditional, albeit well-resourced, urban library with several
generations worth of collection expertise and strong bargaining power against
the electronic vendors. We librarians are the tenacious masters of this planet’s
most effective freedom school, but we can never really seem to explain it to
anyone outside our ranks. Librarians, whether public employees or private
academics, are as a profession collectively fighting to make sure that when
someone wants to know, there are no barriers to satisfying that emergent
curiosity.
from: NextCity
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