Over at the eponymous Blyberg.net, John reports that librarians in Sacramento have bees in their bustles over the promulgation of popular literature.
I’m surprised they didn’t throw in not wearing hats and gloves, and failure to curtsy to library staff. John summarizes this well: “So we’re in the business of placing value on content, now. Great, I love the idea of telling our patrons what they want. That way, we don’t have to change at all.”
Posted on this day, other years:
- So a Straw Man Walks Into a Bar... - 2005
- Deep into Reading - 2004
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I’m going to enjoy reading your blog.
[…] or ridicule the librarians sending the petition. K.G. Schneider titled her response “I am *so* not in the same profession as these librarians,” and John Blyberg writes, in a post tagged with idiocy, “So we’re in the business of […]
Letter Z, you write that my post represents “the ‘speech chill [of] the library blogosphere'” and that “the criticism of the Sacramento librarians reflects a thoughtlessness and disrespect that, far from promoting serious discourse, makes it all but impossible.” Yet I approved a live trackback to your post, where you discourse at some length on the topic. You don’t seem chilled at all.
So, after not paying too much attention, I actually went back and looked a bit deeper. This story is being characterized, by the Union Librarian, as being about, ultimately, six copies of Paris Hilton’s bio and ten copies of Jackass 2. Given that the Sacramento public library has twenty-seven branches, I think that probably sounds like the right number of copies of Hilton’s book, but maybe too many copies of the movie. The idea that such purchases are indicative of a “departure from amassing a rich research collection [cite]“, is a bit over the top, but then union supporters tend to be a bit over the top at times. (And when did having “a rich research collection” become the mission of a mid-size urban library system?)
I think that once “Letter Z” gets past the initial rhetoric, he makes some useful points. But this is also just the latest incarnation of the “fiction question”, which, as Z points out, has been going on since the middle of the 19th century.
If I knew what was going to be “important literary or cultural material” one hundred years from now, it would be a lot easier for my to manage my collection, I’m sure.
As a librarian, I think it is a fallacy to take one newspaper article at face value. The first two paragraphs in the Bee provided enough splash, color, and controversy to draw people in, but it does not begin to describe the real issues between staff and management. Jumping on a soapbox with the kind of “fake outrage” that Bill Maher talks about is really quite useless, and boring.
Well, touche, KGS. Point taken. I guess what I meant to say is that the library blogs I had read so far dealt with this issue in a pretty homogeneous–and, to my mind, unreflective–way. Steven Bell, in a terrific piece in Inside Higher Ed, suggests that a lack of reflection and an intolerance of opposing views is characteristic of library blogs in general. He refers to this as a “speech chill” that “has descended on the library blogoshpere.” So I didn’t mean to imply that your post in particular was an inhibitor to discourse, but it did seem to be a pretty good example of what Bell was talking about.
Bell goes on to say that “on the few occasions when a dissenting comment is attached to a post in the spirit of discourse, the commenter is likely to find him or herself the target of an unpleasant post in which the blogger uses his or her bully pulpit to lash out against someone who’s dared to take an opposing view.” I wrote my blog post in an attempt to provide an opposing view in a way that might encourage a level of discourse I hadn’t seen yet. I think that so far it has.
So thanks for the response, and no, I don’t feel chilled.
Allie B., are there places online where the staff have explained their point of view? It’s true, we’ve gone by what we read in the newspaper and library news channels. If this is just bad press, where can we read “the rest of the story”? The only other perspective I have is from Sarah Jan-Houghton.
Bo, I reviewed Steven Bell’s article earlier: https://freerangelibrarian.com/2007/04/30/rigor-mortis/ . I think he makes some good points… he and I are on the same page on some issues… but it’s not a well-crafted argument. The whole “chilling effect” argument leaves me somewhat cold. I know of people who have complained of chilling effects, but beyond that argument itself — There are chilling effects! No, there are not! — I can’t think of a real-world example. (It could even be argued that the whole “chilling effects” argument is about not being able to accept different points of view.)
It’s true, this was a short, terse blog entry; they can’t all be winners. However, this blog tends to have long — heck, windily prolix — posts featuring reflection. In this case, I went with the information provided, on the assumption that if there were another angle to all this, it would be available online. No?
[…] of all, some great comments were posted in response to what I wrote, both on this blog and on others. Some helped provide support for my arguments, some respectfully disagreed, and some pointed […]
[…] like the simple, closed-ended questions these types of questionnaires tend to feature. In fact, as K.G. Schneider so pointedly put it recently, I tend to like to discourse at length, which those quizzes never let […]