one: I really enjoyed the book clubs last week! There was a lot of good discussion going on, and it was great to have a couple of hours to talk about non-academic stuff with other people.
two: Library assignments
I thought that this was a great example of how to show people what the library can and cannot do for you (or your students). Maybe there's some way at public libraries to do a similar outreach to area teachers to avoid some of the same issues from K-12 students? (and to convince them that database articles should count as print sources, or at least not as websites, as I've heard horror stories about?) A couple sentences from the article intrigued me, and I wish that the author had explained or investigated further. The first statement was in the phrasing of assignment section, under misinformation: "deliberate negative reinforcements, such as an instructor who feels that, since he or she finds the library confusing and hostile, students should be educated on this fact of life." I wish that there had been some further explanation of this, or at least some examples, because I'm having a hard time visualizing what this would look like in terms of assignment guidelines. The second was feedback from the workshop, the person who said that the workshop "served to show participants the schism in educational assumptions between liberal arts and hard sciences." I'm curious to know what the participant meant by this, mostly since I'm from a liberal arts college that occasionally had something of a battle of egos going between the sciences and the humanities. But I guess that's a feature of feedback forms, that you get incomplete information that you'd really like to know more about what they meant, but you're never going to get that information.
three: ALA Code of Ethics
double-plus good. (sorry, couldn't resist). Seriously, I like the ALA Code of Ethics, and reading it for the first time was one of the things that made me sure that I wanted to be a librarian. The point that I can see myself having the hardest time with, though, is article VII: "We distinguish between our personal convictions and professional duties and do not allow our personal beliefs to interfere with fair representation of the aims of our institutions or the provision of access to their information resources" -- what happens when I have a Fred Phelps-ish patron walk in requesting help finding materials saying that gays are an abomination and are going to roast in hell, just as an example. I hope that I'd find some way to serve them in a professional manner, but some issues are too personal to be easily disattached from.
four: the HarperCollins/Overdrive mess
a) I have real problems with Pattern Recognition saying that as a small academic library (HarperCollins doesn't publish for the academic market) with abnormally low circulation (!), the new policy would cost them a whopping $194.85, so libraries should stop whining. Ze does go on to say that it's still a terrible move from a political/rhetorical perspective, but seriously, (1) your library has little in common with the ones that stand to lose the most from this policy, and (2) if the plural of anecdote != data, the singular of anecdote really doesn't.
b) Is the argument that just as physical books have a finite lifespan and have to be repurchased, ebooks should also have a lifespan, even if it has to be artificially enforced (since it's not like the format suddenly became obsolete, or that each time the book gets checked out, it slowly corrupts the bits that store the books data, or something) a valid one? Maybe, but it feels a lot to me like Yahoo putting the shelf back in. If there's no reason inherent to the format to impose these limits, I think that it's really limiting the full potential of the medium, and that the people who don't try to impose limits derived from older media onto digital objects are going to be the ones who come out ahead.
c) Neil Gaiman makes a good point that the best way to get people to buy things is to give away free samples. I know that I rarely buy a book from a bookstore that I haven't read already, or at least read a lot of books by that author. Libraries are where people discover new books for no risk, and I wish that HarperCollins would remember that.
d) There's a traceback on Free Range Librarian in Hungarian. That's when you know something is really a big deal, when it jumps out of the Anglophone sphere and into a translingual dialogue.
I agree with you that the author's argument at "Pattern Recognition" was weak, and that a sample size of one library cannot be used to generalize to how much this will cost all libraries in general. I also don't think the author's intent was such a generalization. Rather, as the author mentions in response to critical comments, I think it makes the point that libraries need to do more research about how much decisions like this will "cost" them, financially, professionally, and socially. Librarians need more data - both qualitative and quantitative - to effectively communicate to the outside work why this issue is so important and to argue their point against these policies in a more effective manner.
ReplyDeleteI also really like ALA's code of ethics. And I would agree that your example would make it difficult to serve certain types of patron requests. I think that it is necessary to always serve the patron, even when it may be difficult to do so. I guess that aiding freedom to information comes along with certain risks - and I'm guessing that if someone were to come in asking for books on say, suicide, I'm not sure that access to the information will really influence a decision like that. Otherwise, the librarian could point such a person in the direction of all sorts of books of suicide, including those designed to help such a person cope.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that you think about the application of the ALA Code of Ethics. My group is going to do it for the upcoming One-Shot Workshop, hoping to get the discussion to interrogate and assess the Code. In Marilyn Johnson's "This book is overdue," she includes an anecdote about a library that though it had a glitch with circulation holds but it turned out that a couple of librarians were deleting holds to bump themselves or family/friends up the hold list for that item. As librarians, we are expected and should keep our own personal opinions in check and give the patrons what they ask for, even if we don't agree.
ReplyDeleteI really loved Neil Gaiman's post in defense of giving away free copies of his books. He's obviously very passionate about connecting people to books and he had a lot of great (and true!) points.
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