Librarians have a pronounced tendency toward navel-gazing. We love writing articles about ourselves, discussing how we are perceived by the public, and musing about our place in the world. This last activity frequently degenerates into megalomania as we assert our role as defenders of freedom, champions of the downtrodden, and arbiters of enlightenment. Though it sometimes gets a little silly, I don’t think our idealism is a bad thing: certainly a consciousness of a higher purpose can be useful as an inspiration. It can help us to think big as we craft creative solutions to problems and can provide perspective as we deal with the jammed photocopiers, problem patrons, and budget cuts that characterize day-to-day life as a librarian.
The latest high-flown statement of purpose is something called The Darien Statements. The document begins with the assertion that our purpose is nothing short of “preserv[ing] the integrity of civilization.” (See this post by Wayne Bivens-Tatum for a thoughtful parsing of this statement.) This is followed by three lists of statements regarding the the nature of the library, the role of librarians, and the duties of librarians. Needless to say, the Statements are being discussed extensively in the professional blogosphere. And discussion, I think, was the point. I doubt that the authors had any notion of penning the perfect summary of our increasingly complex profession—rather they wanted to generate dialog about the big issues.
Many of the statements are difficult to argue with, either because they are self-apparent (“Libraries preserve and provide materials”) or because they are vague (“Libraries facilitate human connections”). (I couldn’t help observing that these particular assertions put us in the company of butchers and pimps, respectively.) Personally, I can’t find much in the document to object to. While sometimes hazy and grandiose, it is less so than one might expect of an attempt to outline the purpose of a varied and changing profession. It is a thoughtful document and I commend its authors.
While I do not object to the content of the document, I feel I must object to an outstanding omission. Nowhere does the document make reference to reading. Perhaps we are to infer it in the statement that “the Library encourages the love of learning.” But in an age when being a “visual learner” is an acceptable excuse for functional illiteracy at the college level, I think that some explicit reference to the written word would have been appropriate.
In light of this omission, which seems to deny libraries our traditional association with literacy, I found it bitterly ironic that the writers of the Darien Statements expressed themselves in the sub-literate, PowerPoint-esque form of the bulleted list. Don’t get me wrong—I love lists. I make grocery lists, to-do lists, even reading lists. But for communicating thoughts of any complexity, I’m a fan of real sentences and paragraphs.
The connection (or lack thereof) between librarianship and literacy is something that had been on my mind even before the Darien Statements prompted me to pen this post. Librarians are tremendously fond of “information literacy,” meaning the skills needed to locate and evaluate information. One would think that reading skills would be required for the evaluation of information, but such skills are not generally addressed in the context of IL. We advise students to take note of the Internet domain of an information source (curiously, Internet resources seem to be the only items requiring evaluation), but remain silent on how to evaluate a resource based on its actual content.
The Darien authors appropriate identify one of the roles of librarians as “connect[ing] people with accurate information.” Let’s ignore the formidable job of determining accuracy and focus on the curious verb “connecting” and the curiouser object “information.” Is the patron “connected” to “information” when she has a book in her hand or a full-text article on her screen? Or do we have some further responsibility? After all, the patron is to be connected to “information,” not merely the vessel containing it. Should we, therefor, teach note-taking and study skills? The possession of such skills by a student would certainly make a meaningful “connection” more likely. And, while we’re at it, what about writing skills? The process of learning (is this equivalent to “connecting” to “information”?) is rarely completely internal. By writing about what we read, we engage in (or at least with) the Great Conversation, strengthening our understanding. Knowledge that cannot be communicated is always suspect. Anyway, a Darien Library is supposed to “expand the capacity for creative expression.”
What I am suggesting may seem like mission creep for libraries, but we have always embraced mission creep. If involvement in literacy might bring us uncomfortably close to the realm of the English and Writing faculties, we must remember that the last decade has already made us strange bedfellows with IT departments. I would argue that addressing study skills or hosting book groups is no farther from our central mission than teaching Internet skills.
I once dipped my toe into this stream when the institution at which I then worked engaged Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson as a speaker. With the help of a few other science librarians, I formed a reading group which met once a week for several weeks prior to Wilson’s visit. I’d put the readings on electronic reserve so that they were generally available. The other science librarians and I would meet with the readers for discussion (and cookies, of course), often with an invited guest from an appropriate department. The results were less than spectacular in terms of attendance. We were lucky to get five or six patrons on a given evening. Response from the library administration was also lukewarm. I think they regarded the project as charmingly optimistic at best and a complete waste of time (and cookies) at worst. The benefits of the exercise were indeed difficult to measure. I would like to think that the few participants gained an appreciation for the library as a center of learning and perhaps even for librarians as the possessors of more than clerical skills.
So, the question: is reading our business, or are all those ALA “READ” posters just for kids? Tell me what you think.