Books are artifacts of our culture and will continue to exist for a long time, and maybe some will exist forever. At one point, books may have been the most significant contemporary cultural artifacts we had; they came to symbolize knowledge, culture, and literacy. Libraries symbolize the sum of all that knowledge, the enduring aspects of our culture, and the democracy enabled by all of it available to everyone.

But the cultural significance of books is changing. Books are now coming to symbolize finite knowledge, a slow exchange of information, and the old way of doing things. The threat is that libraries will (or have) come to symbolize these things as well. So the challenge for me - a working theme for my work - is to help libraries hold (or progress) our places in our cultures and communities while the place of books slips away.

I’m calling it ‘working’ because I finally cracked into one of the books about critical literacy studies that I borrowed from my brother. After only about 40 really dense pages, I have the sneaking suspicion that my assumptions about libraries and their value in our culture (world?) might be crap. Or at least, they might be crap under the under the lens of critical literacy studies.

Related/unrelated, books I have read since my last blog post are:

She - H. Rider Haggard
The Conquered - Naomi Mitchison
Maps and Legends - Michael Chabon
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
The Road - Cormac McCarthy

The reason I might care about how library values and ideals might look through the lens of critical literacy studies is that about a month ago I read several short articles and blog posts referencing a release from IBM predicting “Five Innovations That Will Change Our Lives in the Next Five Years“, including the prediction that You will talk to the Web . . . and the Web will talk back, which got my brain unhinged a bit.

Literacy/literacies come into it partly because IBM is saying you won’t need to read or write to use the Web, and partly because one of the things I know about information retrieval today is that it is almost entirely text-based. We can come up with exceptions, and we may say well, the exceptions will become the rule, but my quick conclusion is that keyboards and screens are the primary ways that humans interact with computers and will continue to be.

We make text on keyboards, text is a representation of language, and language is damn useful.

But that got me thinking - and here is where I get unhinged - what is text, in the ASCII or UTF-8 sense? What is text in the writing sense? What is a text? What is language? Wikipedia and the Dictionary of the History of Ideas both let me down, but I’m excited that I might take the time to explore these ideas at what they might mean for libraries.

Your thoughts and suggestions are most welcome!

Most of what catches my eye is somewhere between waist and eye level, and either near the end of the shelf or on the last shelf in a row. In the biographies a few weeks ago, I recently found cluster of books about C.S. Lewis, including Letters to an American Lady and Letters to Children.

Letters to an American Lady was a much more tantalizing and mysterious title. The preface refuses to reveal the identity of The Lady, but tells us that the two never met in person. I began flipping through it. God, god, god, letter-writing, god. One hundred letters in all, from Lewis to The Lady, and none in reply. It turned out that this was not, after all, the woman the New Yorker reported he met late in life, married, and had kinky sex with.

Letters to Children might then, I thought, have something more interesting to offer. It begins in 1944, but the letters are sparse until his Narnia books start to be published in 1950 and shortly thereafter become popular. At that time, children started sending Lewis letters containing both fan art and questions about the series.

Lewis replied to them all.

June 3rd. 1953

Dear [Hila]
Thank you so much for your lovely letter and pictures. I realised at once that the coloured one was not a particular scene but a sort of line-up like what you would have at the very end if it was a play instead of stories. The [Voyage of the] “Dawn Treader” is not to be the last: There are to be 4 more, 7 in all. Didn’t you notice Aslan said nothing about Eustace not going back? I thought the best of your pictures was the one of Mr. Tumnus at the bottom of the letter. As to Aslan’s other name, well I want you to guess.

I admit I’ve never read the series, or anything else by Lewis. I do have fond memories of my father reading The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to my brother and me by the woodstove before bed, and more recently I saw the movie; somewhere in-between those events I owned a horribly scratchy LP recording of the same story, until I snuck it into a crate of mostly hip-hop records and sold it at Crossroads in Portland.

I am considerably more likely to read the series after having read these letters because Letters to Children is a secret library book, as Anne-Marie put it. It is a book not explicitly about libraries, but one which, when read by a librarian, can be understood to be about the profession.

In one letter to a family, Lewis dispenses writing advice, but in the librarian’s hands, the letter is also instructive as to how to talk to children.

March 19th, 1954

[Dear Hugh, Anne, Noelie, Nicholas, Martin, Rosamund, Matthew, and Miriam]

You have sent me such a lot of treasures I don’t know where to begin. Your story, Martin, is good and keeps one right to the end guessing what is really happening. I am a little bit surprised that the Policeman did not feel at all afraid of such a strange hostess. Or did he, and you didn’t tell us? I think just a word about how he felt, and a name for him, are the only improvements I can suggest. The one place where you do tell us what it felt like for him (”He thought a moment”) does a bit of good to the story.

Lewis acknowledges the children, first each by name, and then again as he responds to the stories and drawings they have presumably enclosed in their last letter. He calls the children’s enclosures treasures and expresses his gratitude and appreciation. Finally, and it seems only if asked for, he offers a bit of help.

In other letters, Lewis’ address is much simpler. “Dear Fifth Graders, I am so glad you liked the Narnian books and it was very kind of you to write and tell me”, he begins, before arguing that the entire story isn’t allegorical and asking them to include him in their prayers.

One-off letters to classrooms full of fans are the exception in the book. Most of the letters are to the same children over and over. Perhaps these were the ones that were easiest to collect, but it is also clear that a characteristic of Lewis’s correspondence was that he didn’t just respond to fan mail from children, he carried on relationships with them.

He corresponds with one young woman for almost a decade, during which she enters high school, takes up opera singing and the cello, and eventually grows into “a pretty woman” (according to a photograph she sends). In another case, a mother writes to Lewis because her son worries he loves Narnia’s Aslan the lion more than he loves Jesus; Lewis replies, and years later, Lewis includes the news that he has married. I presume the boy’s idolatry was cured.

Letters to Children is even a bit of a biography. Lewis begins the book as an awkward middle-aged man, apologizing to his god-daughter for refusing to attend her confirmation. He becomes a wildly popular writer of books for children, and has mild success writing for adults. Loads of fan mail arrives, and he responds to it all, often dispensing Christianly advice. Through letters, he meets and falls in love with a dying woman, who is rejuvenated for a while when they are together. He is torn apart when she dies, and he himself eventually declines.

In the book’s introduction, his stepson Douglas H. Gresham writes that “Lewis’ understanding of children … came from within himself.” To the recipients of these letters, Lewis is a favorite author, a scholar, a friend and an adviser; the collection demonstrates how to be all of those things to a child and not be one yourself. Most of all, I love that Lewis is ever kind to children, and that to seems to have come from an entirely other world.

“So, yeah, when I hear all the stuff about trying to make our libraries more like businesses and trying to make our patrons more like customers it makes me despair.  Despair because, for one, if we seriously think we can compete with commercial booksellers at their game we’re seriously effing deluded but more importantly, I despair that we would even want to.”

I’ve had a crazy fortnight of grading (aside - love using the word “fortnight”) and have had these ideas buzzing in the back of my brain since Menucha, though they’ve been fed by some post-Menucha events, including Rachel’s Discouragement Series.  Still, 100 portfolios and 50 essays in two weeks and I haven’t had the chance to seriously sit down and think and make sense of any of these thoughts in the way that means they might make sense to others.

By now though, Rachel is no longer discouraged, and I am at risk of losing them altogether, so here we go.  Caveat emptor.  See what I did there?  Probably not.  But I did it because what started all of this thinking was Rachel taking on the idea that library service can equal, or should equal, customer service.

So at Menucha we were listening to people talk about the future of the catalog.  And in a situation that set this particular Menucha conference apart from many others, most of the speakers were from the cataloging or systems side of libraries.

And there were questions from the public services librarians to some of these catalogs and systems people about things like timing: how did your team time the roll out of a new system?  Did you wait until summer when it would be least disruptive?  There were little comments here and there about how the systems people just wanted to get better systems out there as soon as possible, regardless of what was going on at the reference desk and in the classroom — and the public services people might have been a little bit portrayed as barriers to that.  But not in any overt kind of way.

And then my colleague Terry Reese (the new Gray Family Chair for Innovative Library Services at OSU) talked about moving the ILS to the network level, and more than this, arguing that the discovery experience for users needs to move from the local catalog to the network level as well.  He argued that local holdings will become less important, that our users need to connect with the world of information that can spark their learning and their curiosity.  The reaction was spirited, digital holdings are clearly one thing, but Terry got a lot of pushback from (what I perceived to be) public services librarians who were convinced that local users still needed to be able to connect quickly and easily to local content, especially in the tangible world.

Things all really came to a head when the only joint public- and technical-services panel took place on Friday morning.  Librarians from the University of Washington came together to discuss that campus’ implementation of WorldCat Local.  Let’s just say that there were a lot of conversations that the different units at UW had not had before this panel, or at least before the drive down to give the panel, and there was much tension and strain in the resulting conversation.  But that’s really not what I want to talk about here.

Because I was really, really sympathetic to the public services librarians asked to make a big service change that didn’t really work that well to start - asked to walk into a classroom a students and demonstrate a tool that might or might not work as it was supposed to and that wasn’t even supposed to be able to do something of the things that your most demanding users would really need.  But even though my rooting interest was entirely on the side of the instruction librarians, I had a thought that wouldn’t go away - maybe we were thinking about this all wrong.

It was Rachel’s customer service post that made me figure out why.

It would be crazy insane for a business to show the world of possibilities to its customers if that business couldn’t quickly and easily deliver those possibilities to the customers, and take credit for it.   For a business to stay viable, they can only offer stuff when the path to that stuff is quick and reliable for the user.  And that’s how we public services librarians are thinking about things.

But is that enough?  For those of us in academic libraries, with our mission statements that are all about creating lifelong learners and productive citizens is it enough to produce users who can find enough stuff within our proprietary databases and our four walls to produce a reasonable paper or project that is due the next day?  If that’s what they can do — are they really information literate?  Really?  Truly?  Are they information literate in the way that they can do what they need to do when they leave the ivory tower?  Are they information literate in a way that means they will be informed citizens?

I keep thinking about this story from when I first started working in academic libraries.  I guess it was about eight years ago now.  I was working at a small school in a big consortium with a union catalog and automated borrowing.  The student government officers asked for a meeting with the head of access services to talk about library service.  They wanted the numbers on how many consortium requests were placed the previous year.  It was their belief that every one of those requests represented a library failure - we didn’t have it in our collection, so we’d failed and needed the consortium to bail us out.

The head of access services argued the opposite.  She said that a few years ago (so the mid-90’s)  academic libraries mostly showed their own holdings to their users.  Sure, you could do some fancy searching and find the other stuff, but the easy searching - the path of least resistance - was to find what your library had.

Now, she said, we show you the world.  And then we get it for you.  Each successful consortial request was a win for the library for being forward-thinking enough to realize that participation in this joint effort was a win for the users.   And our users do win when we collaborate this way.   Eight years later they still win when we collaborate this way.  They win when they can easily search elsewhere, and when they can get the stuff easily and quickly.

But I’m not sure, really, that those of us in public services really present it as a win.  Don’t we kind of teach the whole process, the workflow, as if it is a response to an initial failure on the part of the library?  First you check our stuff, and if we don’t have it you move on to Summit and if it’s not there there’s always ILL.   Don’t worry, we can get it for you even when our first two tries don’t work out.  How can our users not see it as “here’s what we do for you when the system breaks down”?

And here’s the thing — there’s always a thing — the thing is - we’re still presenting Orbis-Cascade as Plan B and at this point, in the real world of 2008, the real world of information literate lifelong learners, even Orbis-Cascade is research with training wheels.

That story happened long enough ago that we we were still talking about “the Internet” and “the library” as if they were two different things.   So “lots of libraries” was way more of “the world of information” than was our one library, but it was still kinda a different kind of information than “the Internet.”   Eight years later that distinction is just crazy talk.  The world of information is way bigger than our individual libraries and it is way bigger than Orbis-Cascade and what both of these systems have to offer is mainly the customer service thing - the quick and easy delivery of that inventory to the user.  But again, is that enough?

At that conference, as sympathetic as I was to the public services librarians and their concerns, I really started to see the vision of academic libraries that showed the REAL world of information to their users.  Some of it would be available right here right now because it’s our stuff and it’s in.  Some of it would be available right here right now because it’s digital and it’s accessible that way.  Some of it wouldn’t be available right here right now and that’s okay because you know what that’s how information works.

First in library school and then when I first started at OSU, not eight but five years ago now, we talked a lot about teaching concepts in information literacy classes instead of tools - about teaching about things like “the information cycle” or “the flow of information.”  The idea was that we would teach our students enough about how information works that they would know the kind of information they would need, what they could expect to find in a library, what they could expect to be free, what the government provides, what publishers publish and so on and so on and so on.  And we never figured out a way to present that stuff that didn’t feel abstract and artificial and boring, and the students didn’t respond.  And I think that might have been because while we knew that stuff was important, even for understanding what we had in our libraries, we didn’t teach them to research in that broader world.  We were trying to teach them about the big, bad real world while encouraging them to do their work in a sandbox.

I think we might be at a place now where the world of information, the real world of information, is where our students need to be.  We have an analogy to work with - that full-text only limiter in our databases.  We all tell our users not to use that.  “Don’t click the full-text ticky box,” we say, “you’ll be eliminating stuff from your search that might be really useful, and that we might have in print or in another database.”  Even though we know that getting to the text outside of the database might be clunky and messy and annoying, we still open our students up to that frustration because we think the payoff will be worth it.

To get to a place where our public services are in that world of information context beyond the full-text articles, where we teach that way, where we assume that our users’ discovery will happen on the network level, that’s going to require a change - away from thinking about what we do as customer service.  Because to take advantage of that level, our students can’t act like consumers.  They can’t demand it right here right now because information isn’t free and sometimes you just find the thing about the thing instead of the thing and that’s not just a library thing - it’s the way it is.  And they can still decide that right here right now is what they want but they would need to do that knowing full well there’s more and different stuff out there but the more and different might cost them some time.

I think that smaller libraries, especially smaller branch libraries within larger systems - like some of the WSU libraries  - are already teaching that way.  So much of “their” stuff is elsewhere that it only makes sense.  And I think the public libraries that are part of district or county systems have users who are used to the idea that what’s here and now today is not the world of what is possible.

Rachel says, “if we seriously think we can compete with commercial booksellers at their game we’re seriously effing deluded but more importantly, I despair that we would even want to” and I agree.  She’s talking about how we shouldn’t want to because our users are citizens not consumers, and I’m thinking about something related but not the same - our users in academic libraries also have a lot of pressure and encouragement to think about themselves as consumers.  But college is not the mall and an education isn’t something you can buy.

Yes, there will ALWAYS be the the students that wait until the night before and who just need enough stuff to get that paper done.  And if our systems don’t let us limit to what’s available in the here and now after the fact then we have a problem.  But can we stop demanding that we design all of our systems for that user?  I’ll admit it, I’m not looking forward to sitting at the reference desk in front of a frustrated and angry student who thinks that the library has on purpose decided not to buy all of the good stuff on his topic; that is not anyone’s idea of fun.  But can we at least acknowledge that requiring our systems to be useful to the lowest common denominator of student engagement and involvement in learning might in fact mean that those systems aren’t doing what is best for those who might really respond to authentic discovery experiences?

I recently finished them both, back-to-back as it turned out, and though I learned a few things from each, I was disappointed that I had been sucked into reading about ideas that were already familiar.

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point probably started it all. At the time, I thought his books were the Harry Potter of non-fiction: popular, large margins, oversized type, and snackworthy. What I didn’t realize was, just as J.K. Rowling is purported to be leading kids to a lifelong love of reading, Gladwell would be my gateway author to popular non-fiction books dealing with some combination of business, economics and technology.

This year alone I have read Lawrence Lessig’s Code, David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, and Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. I also checked out Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe, but after reading a few chapters, I returned it in disgust.

Counting Ariely and Shirky, I’ve read five of these in the past nine months, and given that it takes me two to three weeks to read a book, the genre has made up a significant portion of my recent literary consumption. To try to compensate, I am making the resolution not to read any more non-fiction until January (I am lapsed already; I’ll say more in a few days).

Besides elbowing out my time to read anything else, I started to notice all the ways that these books were similar, with the exceptions being that Ariely talks about behavioral economics and not much else, and Lessig talks about the law. Lessig’s book is the only one I would really recommend to anyone at this point.

What the books all have in common is that they are all discuss the Great Change in the World, and they all go about doing it in the same way. They usually begin with an anecdote about the internet which demonstrates how different things are today and will eventually be referred to throughout the book and put into the proper context by the book’s thesis. The opening chapters loosely tie together several world-changing phenomena - possibly the Magna Carta, the discovery of the new world, the Rosetta Stone or the fall of the Berlin wall - but they always they cite Gutenberg’s printing press and the internet in their stories. Next there is a whole chapter dedicated to Wikipedia, and the heart of the book is an explanation of how things will change/are changing/have changed. Like their authors, their audience is probably 30-50 year old men in suits; i.e., besides the suit, I am in the target demographic for these books.

So if I think I understand this genre so well, I thought, why not write my own book? I present to you National Non-Fiction Book Proposal Writing Month, or nanofiboprowrimo.

Working title The world as we knew it : how the quantum information age will change everything

Note to literary agents, editors and publishers: the title intentionally mixes verb tenses in order to demonstrate the thesis of the book, that we can either know the world or know its future, but not both.

This book will define the great technologies in the history of the world and thread them loosely together. The Wheel, the Bible, Fire, The Great Library of Alexandria, movable type, railroads and Web 2.0 are just the beginning. The world is on the verge of the next information revolution that will change the worlds of business, education and entertainment forever.

Preface: an Example of How the Internet is So Amazing

Lots of people who voted in the November 4, 2008 US presidential election used Twitter to say who they voted for, where they voted and how long the lines were. In this way, information about the election was distributed but never collected, except by Twitter, who doesn’t know what to do with it and probably doesn’t care.

People in Oregon were cut out of this process because they voted by mail. The world had changed, and Oregon had not changed with it. Only time will tell what the effect will be.

Chapter 1: the Great Library

The Great Library of Alexandria was a famous building full of stolen documents. Most contemporary historians focus on how we will never know what knowledge was lost when someone burned it down, but in fact it was Eastern scholars, the people that would one day be Muslims, who succeeded in preserving the wisdom of the ancients.

In those days, information was passed from person to person and by heralds making announcements in the piazza. Ships sailed randomly wherever the wind took them and commerce on the silk road turned at the pace of mighty cart wheels.

Flash forward to 2009: the internet is the way we transport information, from websites and cellphones to twitter and the DarkNet. And yet, our ability to preserve information is inversely proportionate to the speed at which it moves.

Chapter 2: Benjamin Franklin and the Public Library in America

In which it is proven that libraries are about books, but libraries’ real importance was in their collection of printed information. Printing information is what Benjamin Franklin did as a revolutionary spy, hence the title of this chapter. For 200 years, printed information was shared and collected easily in libraries. It was the golden age, but that day is no more.

Chapter 3: Traditional Media is dead: Dawn of the DarkNet

We all know that newspapers are going out of business and that cable networks are struggling to keep up with the internet. Comcast is blocking BitTorrent, broadcast television is trying to figure out the HD thing, and the top-down approach of in-person conferences is subverted by Twitter backchannels.

On the DarkNet, peer-to-peer file sharing is alive and well. Child pornography, illegal music and even DVD bonus features are regularly transmitted between trusting partners.

The irony is that in order to be Dark, the DarkNet has to be not used by that many people. As soon as it is popular, as with Napster of the 90s, DarkNets self-destruct. YouTube is also used for sharing porn and music, but this is tolerated because of the range of legitimate uses for the site and because it is controlled by the Google.

Chapter 4: Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a utopian experiment in education* which we all know is rife with error. The interesting thing about Wikipedia is that it preserves all the changes made to it. But this doesn’t really work for the internet-at-large because Wikipedia is not the Web. And even if it were that way for the whole Web, we would be leaving out the DarkNet

Other internet preservation techniques, such as Google’s cache, the internet archive and Project Gutenberg are all other shots in the dark at the problem. We can’t really trust a corporation, even Google, to preserve the world’s information, goofy non-profits are just as bad, and no one is even thinking about preserving the ephemeral Tweets and DarkNet transmissions.

Chapter 5: Beyond Wikipedia: Quantum Physics and the Information Age

Quantum physics tells us that we can either know a particle’s position or it’s velocity, but not both. The very act of observing the particle changes it.

Indeed, we are entering the Quantum Age, where we can either share information or preserve it, but not both. The very act of transmitting the information changes it, leaving the preserved copy inaccurate and useless.

Chapter 6: Research in the quantum age

There is so much research published these days that no one has time to read it all critically before conducting and publishing their own research. New library research methods are evolving to cope. Instead of reading papers, people judge papers on how many times they have been cited and which papers they cite.

Not reading all the prior research has two consequences: we stagnate by repeating work that has already been done, or we make leaps in bounds in the wrong directions. Ironically, this problem is worst in the field that is best positioned to solve it: Artificial Intelligence.

Chapter 7: Business in the quantum age

Without being able to preserve and consult our past, the economy of the future will be bigger and longer cycles of boom and bust, of poverty and prosperity. We will make the same mistakes over and over and have the same successes over and over.

Chapter 8: Entertainment in the quantum age

Entertainment will follow similar cycles to the economy; we are currently in a cycle of great individual creativity and will soon enter another cycle of mass consumption and production, with a few media giants holding onto the reins of the entire shebang.

Chapter 9: Sledge Hammer

It will come to a point where the only tool we have is a sledge hammer. It’s not all doom and gloom, really. It’s just a new way of thinking and a new way the world is, and smart people and smart companies are going to make a lot of money with it. Invite me to give your corporate board a seminar and I’ll explain more.

Postscript:

I’ll write something reassuring here … does it really matter? You’ve read this book before.

So here’s some of what I was going to say back when I did feel discouraged:

I know American antipathy toward the life of the mind is nothing new.  Way back in the early ’60s Richard Hofstadter, in his classic Anti-intellectualism in American Life, defined anti-intellectualism as:

a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.

So, yes, we have a tradition of suspicion of intellectuals and a related disdain for elitism.  I know this.  But it feels somehow worse this election cycle.  Regardless of where you live, where you get your news, who you talk to, you’ve probably heard someone expressing their desire for a candidate to be like a “regular person”.  Leaving aside the fact that a “regular person” is not going to be running for president in this country, why would you even WANT a regular person to be president?  What kind of allergy do we have to the idea that a leader should be better than a regular person?  Even if we’re living in a post-Nixon, disillusioned world where we know the Great Man is a myth, shouldn’t we still want some aspect of greatness in our leaders?  Hell, I don’t even want the leader of my workplace to be a regular person.  I want leaders to inspire me, to represent impossible ideals, to -and get this - be smarter than me.  So, I think of all the things this election cycle has given me to be discouraged about it’s that after eight years of total, total fail a lot of us still seem to think the most important criteria for leadership is “it would be fun to have a beer with that guy”.

Hofstadter goes on to say:

As an attitude, it is not usually found in a pure form but in ambivalence–a pure and unalloyed dislike of intellect or intellectuals is uncommon.

I wonder what he would say now.  I think a “pure and unalloyed dislike of intellect” is pretty damn common.  I heard someone on the radio say “I could never vote for Biden, he uses words I don’t understand”.  You know what?  Get a freakin’ dictionary and thank your lucky stars that someone smarter than you is responsible for running the country.

When I first started writing this it was just after the announcement of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate.  The whole “greatness” question was what actually started this whole Discouragement Series.  I started writing it trying to be all “less-political” and not naming Palin as the source of my angst.  It’s weird though.  I went through a period where I couldn’t really think about her without getting sick to my stomach, like, literally sick to my stomach.  She really represented to me everything that is the most discouraging in American culture and the fact that people seemed to love her just made me totally despair.  Her selection seemed calculated to appeal to the customer (as opposed to the citizen) and to appease those who hold greatness in contempt.  I guess I feel like I have come around to actually naming her by name because it seems to me there’s been a shift.  It seems to me there are folks out there looking at her and saying “You know what?  No.  We deserve better than this.”   Maybe I’m just choosing to believe this, maybe nothing is different.  But I feel hopeful.
But then, that’s me.

Well, what do you know, it’s not just me!  It’s most of us.  Beyond all questions of politics, one thing that I find deeply exciting about President-Elect Obama (i really like saying that) is that he is profoundly, unabashedly cerebral.  My friend Mark and I were just remarking that he is certainly the most overtly intelligent president we’ve elected our lifetime.  As Mark said “Bill Clinton is wicked smart, but he almost always hid it under that southern fried aw-shucks thing”.

I feel like we just took a leap of faith and chose greatness.  Whether or not Obama turns out to “a great man” is yet to be seen but we voted for an idea of greatness.  And I have to say I’m having a hard time staying discouraged in the face of that.

I used to work as a lead supervisor in the circulation department of a big public library.  Among other things, this meant that the buck usually stopped with me when it came to irate patrons complaining about fines.  Someone starts screaming?  Go get Rachel.  And, actually, i’m pretty well-suited to that work.  Aggro people really don’t bother me.  I have yelled at more clerks and customer service reps than I’d care to admit, so I usually feel like I can relate to the head-space that the Angry Patron is in.

One day, though, a woman came in to complain about the replacement fee she was being charged for the novel that her child tore to shreds.  Now she didn’t deny that the damage was done by her child but she also didn’t feel she should be responsible for paying it because, after all, children do bad things.  We went back and forth, back and forth, and she became increasingly angry and frustrated that I wouldn’t simply waive the charge.  Finally she said:

“I just don’t understand this!  This is terrible customer service.  If this were Land’s End and my kid destroyed a shirt you’d just send me a new one.  How do you expect to succeed if you don’t know the basic idea that the customer is always right?”

Now, listen, I had a hard job.  Also, I was in library school and listening to a lot of conversations about the “commercial model” for public libraries, about the patron as “customer”, and I was mostly keeping my mouth shut.  So…yeah…I might have been a little a bottled up.  But what I said was, calmly but firmly:

“That’s true but the difference here is that you’re not a customer.  You are a citizen of this community.  You have a responsibility to the other citizens in this community.  I have a responsibility to the citizens of this community to hold you responsible for the damage you caused to property that the library holds for the benefit of the community.  That’s the difference.”

Happily for me, something truly remarkable happened.  She said, “you’re right”.  She took out her checkbook and she paid for the novel.  In my memory, she stood a little straighter as she walked out the library but that might be me getting all cinematic on myself.  What I do know is that she always made a point of saying hi to me, of smiling at me, of talking to me, after that day.

And I’m just so discouraged that we seem to have lost the skill of thinking of ourselves as citizens and without that sense of citizenship the less palatable aspects of our culture (greed, superficiality, anti-intellectualism, etc) go unbalanced by our finer qualities.  Maybe it’s because I was raised in a small town, maybe it’s because I had a very compelling civics education but I still actually believe that seeing yourself as responsible to your community and through that, frankly, to your country is, well, noble.

(As an aside, I just saw OSF’s production of “Our Town” and the following line struck me, on this topic:  “Over there — are some Civil War veterans. Iron flags on their graves — New Hampshire boys — had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than fifty miles of it themselves”. And, yeah, I know patriotism can be a breath away from chauvinism and jingoism and that as I am essentially a pacifist its weird for me to be venerating soldiering…but there you go.)

Citizens have dignity, customers do not.  Citizens are adults, customers are children.  What I love about American culture is, in theory, we’ve got both in good measure.  We’re giddy, shameless, exuberant customers and it makes us great.  But we’re also hard-working, self-sacrificing, barn-raising citizens and it makes us greater.  But, these days, it seems to me (and others), that Americans think of themselves as consumers first and citizens perhaps not at all.

I feel like everyone, all over the place, treats me like a customer.  And that’s awesome at the dry cleaners but I don’t know.  I don’t really want politicians to treat me that way.  I don’t want the media to treat me that way.  Frankly, I’m tired of being treated like a customer, I want to be treated like a citizen.  Even though that would mean I have responsibilities, that I have to work at some things, that I have to sacrifice sometimes for others.  It’s hard to be a citizen on your own, no matter how much you might want it.  Most of us, including me, really benefit from having a community of citizens, preferably with leaders, who inspire and guide us and help keep us honest.

So, yeah, when I hear all the stuff about trying to make our libraries more like businesses and trying to make our patrons more like customers it makes me despair.  Despair because, for one, if we seriously think we can compete with commercial booksellers at their game we’re seriously effing deluded but more importantly, I despair that we would even want to.  What we have to offer is something so much more precious, more valuable than being a free bookstore.  We can offer our patrons a chance to be citizens.  When we think about how we want to “position” ourselves we should think about that patron walking taller on her way out of the library (whether she really did or not).  If we could be instrumental in helping people in our communities regain the dignity of being citizens, we could help change the world.  Honest.

Early hype of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader raised the question of whether it could revolutionize the book industry the way Apple’s iPod had recorded music. “Revolution” and its variants are some of the words I most commonly read or hear in discussions of the Kindle.

The Kindle is available now at a reduced price of $359. It makes me wonder, who is this revolution for? Amazon is transforming who’s reading? For how much?

My teachers tried to warn me in 4th grade. “The American Revolution was a revolt of the aristocracy in the colonies against the aristocracy in England”, they said. Revolutions don’t mean anything. Revolutions are for the rich. Was I dulled into complicity, or warned about the future?

A typical Oregon school library has a materials budget of $3,000, and the mean for the whole state is $20 per student (source: Oregon State Library). Or, assuming all the content was free, a school library serving 500-1,500 kids and their teachers could buy 8 new kindles every year. Let’s pretend they get a 20% discount and get 10. Big woo.

Given these circumstances, here’s what I think Amazon should do to revolutionize reading:

The Kindle should be indestructible or near to it. These things are going to be dropped, thrown, stepped on, sat on, smashed, run over with bicycles, chewed by dogs and spilled on. And that’s just what would happen at my house, if I had a dog.

I imagine them coming in bouncy foam rubber cases and thick scratch proof screens. I’m thinking Nerf Etch-A-Sketch. I want them to last 4-6 years.

Any detachable parts are going to get lost, so the power adapter has to be part of the device. It’s a moving part that also has to be indestructible. The pull-out USB plug on Flip video camera is kind of what I have in mind.

Students should be able to load whatever they want on their Kindles, but they should come at the beginning of the year with sharable content selected by teachers. Not by a committee, or the principal, or the district superintendent or the state department of education, not Texas or California or some frickin federal law.

And I know that textbooks don’t come out of a school library’s budget, but I think $20 is a good starting price. Cursory Google-Fu tells me textbooks are about $30 each. So lets price them at $25 - even if a school could afford to buy new ones every year, they still need to be cheap enough to be replaced regularly and to leave room in the library and textbook budgets for regular-old books.

And then we can see if we can spark a revolution.

Now, I know there are some problems with this idea: if a kindle is $359 today, then the latest, greatest Kindle is always going to be around $350-$400 regardless of the cost of materials, the engineering or the economy in general. If Sony or someone else can get it together to have a $200 model, so will Amazon.

I know this because my walkman in 8th grade was $100, and the iPod shuffle I bought three years ago was $100. We can think of this as a ‘price point’ - what I am willing to pay for a music player, but Dan Ariely, in Predictably Irrational, shows that the first price we see for something influences, long-term, how much we are willing to pay for it.

And I may be the only person who expects an iPod to last 6 years. It will be 4 in February and I really have no idea what I am missing. Even better shuffling? I was recently awkwardly interested and relieved to notice that Rachel had a phone with lots and lots of buttons. She said it was also 4 years old or more. So maybe I’m not the only one.

But still, if a Kindle lasts 3 years, it will probably be because Amazon screwed up the release date of the next model. It would be a shame to have to be giving kids old tech all the time. I remember working as a systems librarian in California, someone was always trying to give away the library’s old computers to needy third world countries. Why did they assume a 286 was not going to end up in a landfill in Africa? Why don’t charities ever give new computers to third world countries?

And then there’s the content - publishers (and distributors like Amazon) will make money any way they can, so schools will be sure to foot the bill for “converting” all of that paper into ones and zeroes.

But all of those reasons why my cockamamie idea won’t work also show why we need a revolution in electronic books to begin with, because last and most importantly, reading is not equivalent to education. We need devices to write and share books as much as we need ones to read them with, and ones that we aren’t actually looking at all the time.

The XO Laptop is probably closer to what I am looking for. It’s cheaper to start with, anyway.

This is no good. It’s not how the world works anymore. To be found on the internet, you have to be indexed on search engines, and our stuff is not. To be found at all, you have to be on the internet.

So we need to learn to leak. Drip. Seep. Ooze. We need to show up where people don’t expect us. People need to walk around like, “oh shit, I just stepped in some library”. Pretty soon, people will start to look for us everywhere, digging through other peoples recycling - one woman’s trash is another one’s vertical file. They’ll be walking on the beach, scanning for seashells, sand dollars and citation indexes.

This is well and good, and the how-to is well-covered elsewhere. It’s not what I’m thinking about now. I’m thinking, great, it’s easy to leak information, or data, or bits, or whatever comes in the next order of magnitude down from that.

But I’m also a firm believer in human-mediated information services, so what I want to know is, how do we leak people?

Jamie LaRue talks some about sending reference librarians to meet the information needs of community groups and city councils. He’s done it himself, also, and won the hearts of book-banning renegades in the heart of his own community.

That’s a start, but it’s a bit like walking around the garden all summer, aiming the hose at everything in its turn. Making things grow is satisfying, for sure, so why not install an irrigation system? What you lose in personal touches you more than make up for with a vigorous, healthy community that is the envy of all of your neighbors.

I was talking to a colleague on the phone today and we were discussing this very subject. Who is at the forefront of the people-leaking business? Bloggers, mostly, and political machines - they are great at putting things out there and having the rest of us find them (or their candidates).

So libraries can write blogs, and I don’t mean just blogs like this one where the audience is other librarians and sundry professional intellectuals, I mean we can really blog, for the people. We can put good information together, make good mixtapes and let everyone else just find our stuff, and by way of our stuff, they’ll find us. It’s a little convoluted and time consuming, but it just might work.

And yet the problem with people is that they are so darn inefficient, so actually where I’d like to start is not with leaking people but leaking artificial people. Bear with me here (you have so far), but I really and truly think the future of library services just might be in spam.

Consider:

Spam is efficient. E-mail and comment spam is efficient because the cost to send it is next to nil. Even the one in a million chance that a spam message sells some poor sap a pack of penis pills is more than made up for by the fact that it cost only pennies to send a kajillion of those messages.

Spammers are at the forefront of artificial intelligence. More and more, the spam I see is engineered to get past both filters and my brain.

It started out innocently enough, with more and more mail getting through that contained the name of someone I knew, and a few years ago I started getting mail from other people named Caleb.

And then at some point they started sneaking me bits of literature:

they have begun to arrive already, he said when he caught sight of Dwalins green hood hanging up. He hung his red one next to it, and Balin at your service! he said with his hand on his breast.

Ok, so it isn’t rocket surgery, but clearly the spammers are on to something.

Spammers blog. The most insidious kind of spam I’ve seen in the last year or so is trackback spam, where the spammers pose as a fake person with a fake blog who is interested in a certain topic (fakely), including whatever it was you just posted about.

The beauty of it all is that the mechanisms for finding targets and attracting their attention are built into blogging conventions. The spammers subscribe to an RSS feed of search results from a blog search engine for a keyword or two. Your post shows up in a tidy XML format, no screen scraping required, and the trackback spammer posts an excerpt on their fake blog, adding “this was really interesting” or something to that effect and links to your blog, which shows up as a trackback in your comments section.

Now, the problem with spam is that people don’t like it. But what if, instead of getting spam about mortgage rates, we got spam about something we were actually interested in, such as the relative energy efficiency and costs of different models of standalone freezers? An article like that might be interesting to a few people at a certain time, and the trick to finding them just might be sending it to everyone, over and over.

In Library School, the Reference Professor told us about “Selective Dissemination of Information” (SDI), where librarians would provide regular literature searches as a service for their favorite faculty and important community members.

Howzabout instead, we start up some Indiscriminate Dissemination of Everything (IDE)? Flood the internet with library resources. If we use OpenURL-resolving links, we’ll be sure to reach someone, and if we send millions a day, by e-mail or by comment, most of it will get trapped in spam filters - some links to materials about knitting are going to end up looking like off-topic trackbacks on classical music blogs, but when millions upon millions of messages go out randomly, at least one or two citizens is going to like what they see, or at least be intrigued, and click.

What will they get? They’ll get that leaked data, and more than that, they’ll start to meet and wonder at the people letting it all out of the bag: librarians.

The cost is next to nothing and the potential return on investment is so great; we’ll have a better informed and a better educated citizenship that values truth and learning. What price won’t we pay?

But, lately, I’ve got to tell you that I’ve been feeling really discouraged.  Like really discouraged.  And I know it’s not like there hasn’t been plenty of bad shit going down making us all feel pretty discouraged but this feeling of profound discouragement is rare enough for me that I want to examine it a little.  or, probably, a lot.  Here I’m going to examine, mostly, reasons that I can plausibly related to libraries.  (Note: I can pretty much relate ANYTHING to libraries as long as you don’t poke at it too much, if you do you’ll see how far I had to stretch it).  So here it is…part 1 of “why Rachel might snap at any moment”:

I think the idea of “balance” is one of the most horrible, corrosive things that could have happened to our discourse.  And by “balance”, I don’t mean true balance, I mean this fake, intellectually bankrupt idea that has permeated the media, the classroom, and, yes, quite profoundly, the library.  The idea that when you’re discussing something about which there are multiple opinions you must, to be responsible, present “both sides”.

First of all, “both sides” is fake and lazy.  BOTH sides?  I have a hard time thinking of ANYTHING for which there are just two sides.  Dude, even the proverbial coin actually has that whole swath of surface area between the two sides.   I’ll tell you what, want to provide balance?  Start by recognizing that there are rarely two sides.  There are twenty sides.  Twenty thousand sides.  Two million sides.  When journalists (or teachers or librarians or whomever) constantly and relentlessly show “both sides” in the interest of fairness they collapse a whole range of opinion into a fake, facile pro/con.   “Both sides” is easier for all of us.  It’s easier for us as consumers of information, it’s easier for journalists as reporters of information, it’s easier for librarians as collectors and sharers of information.  Unfortunately, it also doesn’t really exist.  Except, how it kind does now because that idea BOTH SIDES has been hammered into us so relentlessly at this point that we’ve lost our skill for subtlety and our desire for nuance.  (see?  discouraged!)

So, yes, I question the whole “both sides” idea at its very root.  But say there are two sides, for the sake of argument.  Those two sides, they are not always equal.  In fact, they are often not equal.  We will take as our example global warming.  Why the hell did it take us so long to get serious about global warming?  Well, a huge part of the reason is that whenever we heard about global warming we heard “both sides”.  It is pretty reasonable for a busy, lazy, skeptical person (ie, most of us) to conclude that scientists disagree about global warming when every “good”, “unbiased” article they read shows them “both sides”.  What those stories mask is that one side is, like, 5 lunatics who can’t get even get papers published because, YOU KNOW WHAT?, they’re WRONG! and the other side is SCIENCE.

If the media would just man-up and refuse to play that game, imagine how much richer our conversations could be.  If we didn’t waste 20 years on “does global warming exist” just because there were a few ass-hats saying it didn’t and instead have the “sides” presented to us be about things that are actually debatable.  Like, say, what to DO about it.   The mainstream media is so shit-scared of being called “liberal” that they’ve more or less washed their hands of doing any kind of respectable journalism.

Actually, Anne-Marie and I experienced this first hand at ACRL in Baltimore.  Shopping in Hampstead the day after John Waters’ hilarious lunchtime keynote, shop-keepers and residents kept asking us some variation of “WHY DO LIBRARIANS HATE JOHN WATERS?”.  We were pretty baffled, having just sat in a room full of librarians ranging from drooling fangirls (okay, maybe that was just me?) to people who were at least amused by Waters’ talk.  We SAW the standing ovation.  We heard the hoots, hollers, and laughter.  So why did all of Hampstead think we hated his talk?  Well, they’d read the article in the Baltimore Sun.  What would you think if you read it?

Although during the speech about a dozen people left the room, most audience members guffawed and chuckled, sometimes shaking their heads as though in disbelief.

“I think it was a very engaging speech,” said Pamela Snelson, president of the ACRL and a librarian at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. “It was a clear representation of freedom of speech. He’s not afraid to approach controversy. He struck a note with the audience.”

But Anne Schwelm, a librarian from Cabrini College in Radnor, Pa., who walked out during the address, said she was offended by its vulgarity. “It was shameless self-promotion. A vaudeville act would have been more interesting. I came not knowing what to expect, but generally [in a keynote address], there’s a message.”

Hmm, yeah.  So there were a couple thousand librarians there, about a dozen walked out, but the quote from the hater gets equal time.  I have to say, as these things go, this isn’t even that egregious but the people we met were still left with the completely wrong idea.  I did an experiment with my class after I got back.  I had them read the article and then asked them if they thought the librarians enjoyed the talk.  Overwhelmingly, they reported that “there were a lot of people walking out” and “people were really offended”.  Now, clearly there are information literacy/critical thinking issues going on here but it would be nice if stories could be reported in such a way that we could use our critical thinking skills on actually dealing with the information that’s being reported instead of just trying to parse the truth out of lazy-ass reporting.

And librarians?  This whole “balance” thing is tricky for us.  In many ways, libraries represent the very best of true balance and neutrality.  Libraries provide, foremost, physical and intellectual spaces for the utterly free flow of ideas.  The proposition that I can walk in to a library and I pick up something glorious, something crappy, something beautiful and something hateful and make my own decisions about what I’ve read is what made me want to be a librarian more than anything else I could have been.  And, as a professional value, you can’t get much better than neutrality.  The librarian’s respect for her patron’s mind, for her patron’s absolute right to inquire and to come to crap conclusions, is one of the things that makes the librarian different from the book peddler, what distinguishes the patron as a citizen, not a customer.  But balance, objectivity, and neutrality are tricky beasts and if you’re not vigilant they can shift on you.  Thinking about this reminded me of Rory Litwin’s piece in Library Juice 4:7 “Neutrality, Objectivity, and the Political Center“.  I read this while I was in library school and it had a profound effect on me.  Litwin really clearly described something that had been bothering me about the rhetoric in a lot of my library school classes.  You should really read the whole thing but I’ll quote at length here from two parts of Litwin’s piece that keep rattling around my head the last few days:

Ultimately, we can’t communicate about facts without lending our own point of view to our representation. However, objective information, if it is not falsified by its representation, has a way of advocating for itself, as a result of calling into play human values.  What this means is that good opinions are founded on objective information and objective information will lead authentic beings to adopt opinions and act on them, according to their understanding of their interests. Accordingly, we are making a mistake if we regard information sources that express opinions as less than objective.

and, also:

Finally, the Political Center.  Of course, centrism isn’t touted as a professional value or consciously sought out in reference sources.  But having a bias toward the political center is often mistaken for objectivity, and the effect of “neutrality,” as it is usually understood, is to support the interests of the political center, the existing balance of power.

The political center exerts a strong attraction for those who prefer not to think for themselves. There is an erroneous sense that the truth is to be found at the average of what various people believe, that the truth must be “somewhere in the middle.”  This comes partly from a graphical representation of a political spectrum that ranges from one side to another on a horizontal plane.  But this is not the most accurate representation of the political field.

The currently existing…balance of power is what is commonly understood as the “political center.”  It should not be mistaken for objectivity, though it often is. And it should not be supported by our interpretation of professional neutrality, as it often is.  We should understand objectivity as referring to whatever is verifiably true apart from what anyone might believe, without an implication that to be objective means to lack a point of view or an opinion.

Try as I might, I don’t think I’m going to be able to say any of that better than Rory did.  Librarians contribute to this “both sides” cancer on our discourse when we confuse the concepts of objectivity, neutrality, and centrism.

We sacrifice our role as professionals when we cave to the notion that objectivity and opinion are mutually exclusive.  It doesn’t matter what I perceive the middle to be, where I see the “balance”, the freakin’ glaciers are still going to be melting.  And when confronted with that objective information (the glaciers are melting), I form opinions.  My opinions might be different from your opinions, and that’s cool, let’s talk.

What Litwin doesn’t talk about in the piece is how bloody hard it is to be neutral (in the good sense) but to also have opinions.  To use your professional judgment to build collections, provide services, and do programming that reflect objective information, not “balanced” information in a culture that does not prize objectivity and that values spectacle over conversation, contemplation, and dignity.

I feel like we’re headed back to the dark ages and fake “balance” is just the tip of the (rapidly melting) iceburg.

Join me in the next installment where I will despair about the future of participatory democracy in a country where the people regard themselves as customers not citizens.