Subject/Object

Updating my post on Michael Casey and Laura Savastinuk’s recent statement on Library 2.0. A blog I have just discovered, the Proletarian Librarian (adding another to The ‘X’ Librarian trend), has some comments on the Library 2.0 post as well.

An insightful addition to the discussion:

I’m all for finding out what our users want and how they want to get it. I’m also for attempting to guide our users towards quality materials and services and I’m afraid that often Library 2.0 chastises librarians who hold this belief.

I don’t think this chastising is unique to Library 2.0, but it does crop up in a lot of the rhetoric so-called progressive librarians make and have made against so-called conservative librarians. We’ve heard it before in the Reader’s Advisory movement of the 1980’s: who are we to say what reading is good and bad. And now, who are we to say what information outlets are good and bad. We should, as they argue, give them what they want.

I wrote a recent essay examining which is more democratic, the imperative of the library to inform and educate its citizenry, or to give them the materials they request, because they have paid for them. It is a difficult balance to walk–I don’t know if my essay came up with a sufficient answer. Will post it later.

Great little article by Anthony Grafton, recounting the history of reading, publishing and organizing books, ending with Google and other smaller efforts to digitize books. Conclusion:

Sit in your local coffee shop, and your laptop can tell you a lot. If you want deeper, more local knowledge, you will have to take the narrower path that leads between the lions and up the stairs. There—as in great libraries around the world—you’ll use all the new sources, the library’s and those it buys from others, all the time. You’ll check musicians’ names and dates at Grove Music Online, read Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” on Early English Books Online, or decipher Civil War documents on Valley of the Shadow. But these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate, rather than eliminate, books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.