Just picked my courses:

FIS2127H - Collection, Development, Evaluation and Management FIS2172H - Readers’ Advisory:Reference Work and Resource FIS2300H - Special Topics: Information Literacy FIS2199H - Special Topics in Info. Studies: Advocacy and Library Issues (no direct link, at bottom)

This last one is by distance–my first distance class–and I heard is amazing. It is with the ex-President of the Canadian Library Association, who gave a talk last year. I am also very excited by Information Literacy and Collection Development…. and even Readers’ Advisory, even though I am not really interested in public library work.

Next semester:

FIS2131H - The Literature of the Humanities and Social Sciences FIS2181H - Information Policy

These two I want for sure. Not so sure about:

FIS2137H - International Organizations: Their Documents and Publications FIS2132H - The Literature of Science and Technology or FIS2125H - Information and Culture in a Global Context (links on this page are really broken)

I have signed up for Science and Technology for now, but I don’t know if I am more interested in professional courses or theory courses this time around. And, frankly, the selection this year was not very fruitful.

A quote from Library Garden:

But how did we get to this stage? Why do we have professional librarians who refuse to keep up with the professional and technological requirements? How did we reach a point where the patrons’ needs were less important than the traditional way of doing things? All along, the job of a reference librarian has been to find the information patrons need. We are in the business of connecting people to the information they require… so why care about the format that information is found in?

My reply brings up a lot of issues I have been realizing about Library 2.0 and librarianship in general.

Of course we should always keep up with the times. Librarians have always been seen as the avant-garde of information technology (even beginning with the codex).

I think the real danger is to see technology as the complete solution. Patrons not coming to the library: must be because there is no Flickr group. Reference service stats down: must be because IM reference is so horrible, or non existent. Teenagers choosing Google over books: we need a Second Life presence.

There is a problem in society and culture right now where people choose cheap and easy information satisfactions over long, difficult but ultimately more enriching ones. True, we should use technology to fulfil the later, but it is not going to do the work for us, nor solve all of our problems.

Sometimes people just can’t have it cheap and easy. And the library has to keep promoting the hard and rewarding path and instruct (gasp!) patrons as to why that path is rewarding.

Much of this discussion has been called “Library 2.0,” and John Blyberg has given a sufficient summary of the supposed challenges and opportunities which confront the library. I say supposed, because it is quite unclear which of these issues are real, and which just speculation; congruently, this means it is increasingly difficult to make a distinction between which changes are necessary, which are superfluous, and which are in fact dangerous to what we–not just librarians but the totality of this democratic society, both past and present–believe the library to be.

Without making definite conclusions, some of these changes almost completely unproblematic, such as promoting access to the Internet, and the unprecedented opportunities it presents both consuming , interacting and creating the information and knowledge which makes us grander human beings. Others, without a firm grasp of our concept of the library, can be more questionable, such as the conversion of the library into a cultural center for “Millennials” (quoting John Blyberg) with video games and rock concerts.

To suggest a “fundamental change in [the] library’s mission” (again quoting) is needed right away fails to raise the question that possibly the aesthetic of the “Millennials” is not sustainable if our culture is to be informed and empowered enough to ask the tough question of those in power, both in government and elsewhere. Libraries since the rise of liberal democracy have always been an important support for the democratic ideal, and there are certain tools people need to successfully articulate their democratic freedom. Postmodern ideas of the library have severely criticized those tendencies of the modernist library to act as an agent of “civilization” for the unwashed masses. However, we have to stop and ask ourselves whether our actions are doing society a disservice. I myself right now do not have the answer.

I may have come to this discussion late (although I have studied closely Walt Crawford’s review article), however, I think that much discussion on the Internet lacks a sufficient look at where we have come from, and what it is that defines us. These are the dual problems of the history and philosophy of the library.

This insufficiency I think comes from the influence the “information studies” paradigm which I have discussed before, and favours a social scientific and technological conception over a humanistic one (from the academic perspective; the professional perspective is related but unique). Personally I do not know the answer to these two questions. Hopefully over the next year I can address them both, because I think they are too often forgotten or overlooked. Regardless of whether you feel the mandate of the library has changed, if we are to discover some kind of continuity in what we give the name “Library” it must continue to have a fundamental connection to a particular history and philosophical perspective.

As you may have noted, I am not a once a day poster. Over the next year I would like to address these questions more, through my reading and research, and perhaps present essays or the skeletons of essays on these topics. Hopefully you can remain as interested as I am as we delve through these issues, and hopefully we can use the light of the past to illuminate our examination of the future.

The first thing to admit: maybe Internet culture is not that good.

I’ve been part of this “information revolution” since even before the Internet. When I was young I caught the tail end of BBSing. I can remember when the bulliten boards began offering the option to connect to the graphical world wide web. After that I signed up for my local Freenet, and here I am.

In that time I have seen hundreds and thousands of cool webpages. Some of them artistic, hip, kitschy, nostalgic, historical. Some of them I can remember, although I don’t visit them at all anymore. Like the great flash essays with jazz soundtracks from Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. And Postsecret is very nice, and I liked Exploding Dog when I first discovered it. These are only ones off the top of my head. I must have viewed tens of thousands of webpages which I thought were original, thought provoking or just plain fun. Part of the reason why I cannot list them all is the motivation behind this post.

I read boingboing religiously. Could I name one thing the editors have discovered this week without browsing to the website? No, although there are some generally cool things, and some things that are very original and artistic. I have a del.icio.us account. However, things tend to go in and never come out again. Why is that? Lack of appropriate tagging, or lack of a desire to every look at things twice? To be honest, I think people spend more time deciding on tags then the average amount of time they look at entries twice.

So let’s just have it out: Internet culture is just not up to snuff. Take all these webpages I have experienced–are any of them worthy comparisons with human creations of the “real world”? I am not even making comparisons to Homer, Dante or Shakespeare here. I like re-reading Stephen King much more often then revisiting the majority of “static” webpages (i.e. not social networking sites or message boards, which work on a paradigm of dialogue and not publishing. And not sites like Wikipedia, which are works of reference.)

I debate this within myself because I do not want to be a snob. I really think mash-ups should be considered art. I do think that the Internet allows everyone (with access to a computer) a voice to create, and presents a platform for creations which would not be possible in real space.

And yet, why would I feel the need to re-read a book, but I feel no need to check in on You’re the man now dog after that original 30 mins of hilarity. How many hundreds of YouTube videos have I watched once and never again?

Anticipated counter-argument: the paradigm of the Internet is different. It is ephemeral in its very nature. It is more akin to the unrecorded oral culture of the past and is not suited to the static paradigm of manuscript and print.

I don’t know about that, because while the creations of oral cultures were lost with each retelling, through their repetition and transmission they gained novelty and were slowly improved. Stories were told over and over, and people religiously listened to them because each telling was a new experience, either through additions to the story, or reinterpretations, or just the skill of the teller. Musical pieces were constantly worked over, passed on and blended with other styles.

I believe that essays (if that is what I can call this) should never hold definitive answers. I could change my mind tomorrow if I wrote this again. But right now I would much rather reread any one of my books, listen intently to a nice jazz or classical album, or study intently some great paintings over re-loading some website. The Internet may be great for inherently dialogue oriented applications, but we have to question its importance in many respects.

Why do spend endless time on here then? Because it is easy and it makes me lazy.