Why librarians annoy me
SAN ANTONIO — The library director at the University of the Incarnate Word has canceled the library's subscription to The New York Times to protest articles revealing a covert government program to track terrorist financing.
I'm sympathetic to this viewpoint politically. But you don't jerk your serials around like that. Like them or not (and I don't), the NYT is and is likely to remain the paper of record in this country, and is used constantly as a research tool. Professionally, I think it was a poor decision.
But that's not why librarians annoy me. This is:
Library staff members said they were shocked by Morgan's e-mail."The censorship is just unspeakable," staff member Jennifer Romo said. "There is no reason, no matter what your beliefs, to deny a source of information to students."
There's no "censorship" going on here, unless she really thinks that the curatorial function of collection management is censorship, in which case she really needs to get into another business. Since you can't collect everything (not even the Library of Congress can...or keep track of it once collected, according to one of our faculty members), you have to decide what doesn't get collected. And politics plays a role in that. I'm not saying that it should (or shouldn't), but that it does. If Jen Romo collects at all, I could probably find evidence of bias in her collecting. (She probably doesn't; I note the "staff member", and while I deplore the "no MLS=not a librarian" mentality, I suspect from the depth of her analysis that she's some student book-shelver.)
With such confusion about the notion of censorship, it's not surprising that the ALA has been reluctant to slap Castro's wrist over his treatment of private Cuban libraries.
As for the denial of information charge, the NYT is so ubiquitous that nobody who really needs it is going to do without. If that were the intent...
"In the real world, it's an almost futile act on many levels," [Kelly McBride] said. "From what we know about the reading habits of college students, it will not make a difference because they read online."
Thanks to WorldNetDaily.
Comments
Posted by:
Posted on: July 1, 2006 02:24 PM
I thought all the people in Case's libraries are considered "staff", so maybe you are too stuck on titles.
If a resource were removed for money reasons or it did not meet collection goals, it would fall in normal operations of a library. If a resource was removed in protest of a few articles, that would be censorship.
Posted by: Jeffrey Quick
Posted on: July 1, 2006 09:02 PM
I'm not stuck on titles. But, being library staff myself, I would like to believe that anyone in a reasonably responsible position would have more sensible thoughts on the subject than Jennifer Romo; ergo, I assume she's not in a responsible position. The other possibility of course is that she was massively misquoted and made to look stupid (and as a class, I find journalists whole magnitudes more annoying than even pro-Castro librarians).
As for censorship, Mr. Anon, you just don't get the concept. If you come into my living room, even invited, and start talking trash, I have the right to tell you to shut up, and to throw you out if you don't do so. That is not censorship; it is me exercising my property rights. If you are talking trash in your OWN living room, and I send a bunch of thugs in to make you shut up, THAT is censorship. I assume that the University of the Incarnate Word is a religious institution. I would bet that their collection disproportionately reflects a religious viewpoint (since that's what they teach) and is probably fairly light on anti-religious viewpoints. Is that "censorship". or is it tailoring the collection to the needs of students? If UIW had never subscribed to the times, on the grounds that it's a godless newpaper, would that be censorship? Dumping a paper just because they committed treason, er, printed an article the librarian disagreed with is bad librarianship, but it's not censorship. The library belongs to UIW, and the librarian is acting on their behalf. If their administration finds that not to be the case, they have a number of options, including dismissal. And none of those would be censorship either, though micromanagement of your employees' decisions, like micromanagement of print serials, is just bad management.
Posted by:
Posted on: July 1, 2006 09:31 PM
If a librarian dumps an item due to their personal beliefs or bias, they are participating in personal censorship. Normally I would not consider a librarian's actions censorship, as they are restricted by money or collection policies. In this case, she decided to censor the NY Times from her campus, because of her personal beliefs and not those of a collection plan. She painted herself into this corner and now will have to deal with the consequences.
Posted by: Jeffrey Quick
Posted on: July 1, 2006 10:21 PM
We agree that it's not a karma-free position. We disagree on the nature of censorship, and I don't think it's merely a semantic disagreement. I note that you haven't addressed the points about property I made above, and repeatedly calling this "censorship" doesn't make it so. Further, you claim that she "decided to censor the NYT from her campus", when she did no such thing, nor had the power to do so. If she had started calling security every time anyone brought the NYT into the library, THAT would be censorship in the library, not on the whole campus. We would agree that that would be odious, and we even agree that the actual actions were somewhat odious. But as you rightly point out, she doesn't answer to you or me, but to her employers. What she actually did was make a collection decision based on politics. This is not good librarianship, but is fairly common, and generally only gets commented on when the deciding librarian is anywhere to the right of Ann Sparanese.
Posted by:
Posted on: July 2, 2006 04:58 PM
I guess that is where we disagree. As someone that works in the library profession and has the degree, I treat the collection as the property of the users. I do not let my personal beliefs get in the way, as the needs of the users should be the only driving force.
Since she made the cut as a political statement (which she openly disclosed) and not to meet the needs of her users, she was censoring the content from her users.
Posted by: Jeffrey Quick
Posted on: July 2, 2006 08:04 PM
And on that point, we are actually in agreement: the collection needs to be at the service of the users. I don't look at that as "property of the users" (gods know our patrons consider the collection to be their personal property often enough as is; if the collection is their property, yellow highlighters are OK, right?), but as property of a university which exists to serve its clientele. On that basis, collection management by hissy fit is inappropriate, as it doesn't serve the patron, not even in some ideal rule-utilitarian sense in which the NYT would change its behavior and thus help Bring Our Boys Home; that change and that result isn't going to happen here, so the patron won't enjoy a benefit in exchange for the very real inconvenience of no access to NYT. I don't need to agree with your inappropriate label ("censorship") for that inappropriateness to agree that it's inappropriate behavior, so I'm going to let it go.
And even under the notion of the collection serving the patron, there will never be a perfect objective match between what the patron needs and what gets collected. Biases happen; which patron are we collecting for? But without such a notion, there's no way to keep personal biases in check.
Posted by:
Posted on: July 3, 2006 02:27 PM
While the collection is not literally the "property of the users", thus allowing your example of highlighting, if it is thought of this way it removes personal bias. Therefore, I spend my user's money to build "their" collection.
Posted by: Jeffrey Quick
Posted on: July 4, 2006 05:53 AM
If the metaphor of "ownership" works for you, great. I don't personally like it because the concept of ownership is muddied enough in this society. And it seems to minimize the functions of curation and time. If undergraduates, or any individual faculty member, or a librarian bought what they would like to own, the collection would be the poorer. But all these users, balanced against each other, can help create a really powerful collection. In our music library, undergraduates "own" ML410 and circulating performance parts, and that's about it. Faculty have a deeper stake in the research collection, because they're here longer, and this evolves over time. Since I've been at Kulas, I've witnessed the transformation of the musicology department from a basically Germanic orientation to more of a French orientation, and this has controlled much of our buying. But there's still that strong Germanic layer. There are things we have which bear the imprint of Arthur Shepherd, 60 years ago. So if there's ownership involved, it's like a city where each generation builds in a different style of architecture. And then there's the librarian. I freely admit to a certain amount of "advocacy buying". If there's an obscure composer I'm interested in, others might be interested too, and I'm happy to share that knowledge. But there's an element of balance at work. Several CDs of, say, Rued Langgaard would be appropriate in the collection. Everything recorded of his work would not, as he simply isn't that important a composer. If I want a weird unbalanced collection, I can do that at home. :-)
Right now we're buying opera DVDs. The patron feedback we've gotten suggests that there isn't a constituency for Cute Director Tricks, like Catholics in "les Huegenots" in Nazi uniforms. So I'm going to some trouble to ferret out reviews and find out which productions are "traditional", i.e., have some sort of relationship with what the composer would have expected to see on stage. Does this mean I'm prejudiced against such productions, or that my patrons are? Maybe that's not the relevant question; maybe it's "which type of production serves the needs of my patrons best?"