Technology Newspeak & Humanistic Librarianship

I got this on another ALA-related discussion list and I couldn't help being taken aback by the rhetoric and tone.

start original blurb here:


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Subject: ACRL ULS Campus Administration and Leadership Discussion Group

Colleagues -- FYI.

(some Librarian)
(An Academic Library)



What Do You Do When . . . ?




Your library agenda is 21st Century

with dreams of institutional repositories,

open access, digital preservation, Google and Library 2.0.



But your provost's, president's, and chancellor's agendas

are stuck in the 20th Century

with tired old worries about tuition, faculty productivity, and student credit hours.



First, You've Got to Get Their Attention!



Join the ALA Midwinter meeting of the

ACRL ULS Campus Administration and Leadership Discussion Group as we talk about successes and failures

in getting the attention of our bosses and in transforming their agendas into our agenda.



Saturday, January 20, 2007

10:30 am - 12:30 pm

Westin Seattle Room: St. Helens



For more information, e-mail

(same Librarian as above)

Discussion Group Chair


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Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

...Anyhow, it's the kind of rhetoric that, after reading critical LIS lit by Thomas Mann of LC, or John Buschman, Rory Litwin, et. al. of PLG, that I'm now quite suspicious of.

I'm a little hesitant to post my "WTF!?" reaction to the original list as a whole, for fear of coming across as a reactionary fuddy-duddy, but...

I read the blurb below..."stuck in the 20th century with 'tired old worries' about tuition, faculty productivity, and student credit hours".

Now, I can only speak about tuition, but with the way it's spiraling upwards, and becoming ever more out of reach for ordinary people, it's still a worry, and quite a 'trendy', 'cutting edge' worry at that!

"...stuck in the 20th Century with tired old worries about tuition, faculty productivity, and student credit hours."

the subtext practically sneers: "and heaven help you if you still care about those even more passe 19th and 18th century ideas about universal literacy, informed citizenry educated to fully participate in democratic life, moral self-improvement, etc, sheeesh...."

>>....with dreams of institutional repositories,
um, okay.

>> open access, <<
empty feel-good buzzword--sounds lovely, but what do you really MEAN?

>>digital preservation,<<
...still highly problematic.

>> Google <<
ditto

and Library 2.0. <<<
--and I still don't fully know what the hell this means, either, precisely.


On a side note, I really enjoyed the hell out of John Buschman's last book, and Ed D'Angelo's new book too, from Library Juice Press; Ed's is a real page turner and packs a lot of good stuff into a tightly bundled package; We (Progressive Librarians) make our arguments forcefully and passionately. But we seem to talk past our opponents in mainstream Library practice, and they politely ignore us. For a change, I'd like to see a well written polemical dust-up, where one of us takes on any one of the more mainstream, uncritical techno-consensus writers and really tries to engage them head on, challenge them and their vision over what librarianship is and ought to be explicitly. I'm not talking about the few self-described "right wing" librarians out there. Screw them. They're willfully stupid. No, I'm talking about more mainstream opinion makers, respectable LITA members all.

I've also come across some of the buzz about the "Second Life Library". My gut reaction is "uh, my first life is quite full & busy enough, thanks."

I'm equally dismayed about "Gaming in Libraries", etc, including some recent articles in American Libraries on the topic that had me pulling my hair out.

I want to sarcastically write...."aw, shit, if only this research had come out earlier, I wouldn't have wasted all that time reading, I would've spent even MORE time goofing off playing Atari 2600, Zork, Ultima III, etc."; Given my age, I keep insisting, sort of against the grain of conventional wisdom, that the 1970s and early 1980s were also part of the "Digital Age".

Some educator wrote an article that my mom, who is a school librarian herself, showed to me not long ago (and now I can't find it, damn it) ...the article was going on and on about the dichtomy between what it termed "digital immigrants" and "digital natives"...contrasting older gen educators & librarians having to learn technology in their later years, to younger people who've always known it, because they were "born" into it. It played on the metaphor of the American immigration experience & cultural assimilation, etc. I wrote a creative response to this (as an email), riffing on the fact that although I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, this was still part of the Digital Age, and thus, people of my age group were like first generation immigrants; we may have been born in "the old country" (pre-high tech age), but we came to "America" (hi-technology) very young; We have a foot in the old and in the new. We learned English (technospeak) but are also familiar with the native language of the "home country" (humanistic, non-technical discourse). We like the new, but still have respect for the old ways...It was an email I sent to my mom, and no, I didn't save it, nor did she. I do that too much. I write very philosophical, introspective emails then never save them.

It seemed as though, for a bright shining moment, from, say, 1998 thru 2002, the Humanists had won the battle, made the All-Digital Brigades look foolish, and achieved a truce recognizing the need to balance out viable print collections with augmented, cutting edge electronic resources, especially in the area of serials and serials management, or high-demand, high-circulation monographic items being augmented with their Ebook equivalent as needed.

But with the two successive Bush administrations, the Digital/Info-Capitalistic barbarians are renewing their assault.

One of the ironic things about PLG, SRRT, and all the so-called "Left/radical" library groupings is that, although in the realm of Politics we are all Liberals, Radicals, Leftists, Populists, etc.
in the realm of Librarianship, narrowly defined, we are indeed the TRUE CONSERVATIVES of Librarianship...in the best sense of the term, in the same sense that Neil Postman declared himself a conservative and further declared that in comparison, Ronald Reagan was not.

Conservative in the sense of "to conserve", to fight for the best of the Humanistic (& largely Anglo-American) library tradition in opposition to the crass, vulgarizing, "market-based", hi-tech/technocratic approach to libraries. That Humanistic tradition of libraries which is a socialism that-dare-not-speak-its-name. And the force behind the assault on that tradition is the ideology of free market fundamentalism, inextricably bound up with high technology, transforming from the paper society to the "pay-per" society as Vincent Mosco so neatly puts it.

Soneone recently coined a valuable turn of phrase...."the new Digital Dark Ages", bemoaning declining real, informed literacy despite burgeoning electronic resources. Of course, it's not all bad...some of my best news and info comes from the web, especially from Alternative and Independent sources. My dad watches CNN, FOX and MSNBC nearly every day for hours, while I get my info from emailed alternative news aggregators and websites and blogs. Guess who's better informed. My dad will continually come up to me with "new" breaking stories in the MSM that I've known about for months, in some cases. Even when using just MSM sources, I don't restrict myself to US sources. I regularly read CBC, BBC, Deutsche Welle, Moscow Times, Liberacion, L'Humanite, Australian Broadcasting Corp, Asia Times, etc.

Of course, the move against "Net Neutrality" is a ham-firsted attempt to "ghetto-ize" alternative/independent, uncontrollable sources of news and information.

Well, anyway, enough babbling from me. Peace.

-JJR