The Weeding (& Reading) of History in Libraries, reconsidered.

I recently finished an audio lecture series (Portable Professor by Barnes & Noble) delivered by Professor James Loewen, author of the landmark history book Lies my teacher told me. Loewen is a sociologist by training, but has long experience teaching history, and particularly the history of race relations in America. This is evident because the most outstanding, most eye-opening (to me at least) set of lectures delivered by Loewen in this series is the two part lecture titled The Nadir of Race Relations in America, 1890-1940. The lecture series itself is entitled Everything you've been taught is wrong: Fact, Fiction and Lies in American History, consisting of a grand total of 14 lectures on CD, plus a bonus CD of samples from other lectures in the Portable Professor series.

Loewen does far more than recount notable facts and dates and the exploits of great men in American history. He goes a level deeper to give his listeners an education in the nature of historiography itself. As a librarian, it has made me reconsider my attitude towards the weeding of Academic library materials, at least in the subject of history. At more than one point Loewen stresses not only the importance of primary source material (which every historian at least pays lip service to), but also points out that in relation to secondary sources, many times it is the older sources, closer to the time of the actual events described, where the more straightforward and honest, less embellished accounts of history can be found (and give clues on where to look with regards to primary sources). This sort of goes against the grain of our training in contemporary librarianship, where NEW is assumed nearly always to be inherently BETTER. And in Scientific and technical fields, this does tend to hold true. But this "insight" is potentially damaging when misapplied to the humanities, and particularly the field of History. Loewen's lectures really opened my eyes to the LIS implications of his research. I will think twice before recommending some older, dusty history series be chucked out because it's "too old" and "nobody" reads it. Loewen's own research patterns contraindicate this, and we ignore the needs of "expert" library users like Loewen at our peril, especially in academic libraries. I happen to have had the chance to physically handle these older history books very recently in my current ongoing Name Authorities project I am working on.

One byproduct of this NAF work is that periodically I will encounter a bibliographic record, usually of older materials dating from the TSCW or even "College of Industrial Arts" period of my current institution, where the record is basically incomplete/temporary, and seems to have been hastily added from a catalog card long ago and never upgraded; Often no holdings listed in OCLC, and some of these short local records even lack adequate LCSH's. So I physically pull the volumes, look them up in OCLC (frequently able to do so by LCCN, but generally only for materials published since the 1950s, mostly in the United States). With enough digging, I am usually able to find these missing materials, import the proper record, attach our holdings in OCLC, and overlay the brief record with the robust, full record that should have been there to begin with. Some of the brief records don't even fully match the book-in-hand their barcodes relate to (dates are wrong, a later second edition record is used for a first edition work, etc). It's kind of a mess that has been long overdue for this kind of cleanup, and I'm grateful to take a break from rather constant copy-cataloging and original cataloging during the regular semester to get this done.

When I first handled these books, my inclination was at first "ugh, why do we even still keep these around", but upon listening to Loewen's lectures, I have a deeper appreciation for these rarer books, and also an appreciation of making my home institution a better library citizen, by attaching our holdings and announcing to the world that these sometimes rare resources are available through I.L.L.

Of course, such work does require, for lack of a better word, something of a leap of library faith. You can't know for sure if any of your detailed, behind the scenes work will directly benefit anyone specific. It might not even matter in your lifetime. You're handling a collection that is bigger than yourself, something that will outlast you, but you have the awareness that decisions you make now will leave footprints later, directions taken now will either help (or hinder) research in the future. That's a humbling realization, and keeps one striving to do good and avoid doing harm in cataloging work.

My only criticism of Everything you've been taught is wrong is the lectures that touch upon Kennedy and the early 1960s. This is Loewen weakest material; though that said it's still better than many standard textbook accounts. Loewen also offers a criticism of Socialism early on that may well apply to certain total forms of state socialism, but do not hold true across all forms of Socialism. My own Socialist views are tempered by an anarcho-syndicalist/radical democratic streak. More Rosa Luxembourg and less Lenin. Loewen glosses over this distinction, painting with an overbroad brush. But these criticism are really minor. In the main, Loewen does a fantastic job of deconstructing, well nigh demolishing the Triumphalist/Nationalist (not to mention Neo-Confederate) View that dominates in the teaching of American history today at the secondary, and even the undergraduate collegiate survey course level.

As someone who lived though the ending of the Cold War as a young adult, I'm leery of the way history books are teaching this geopolitical drama to the younger generation who were too young to have any meaningful memory of it. I saw TOP GUN in High school, I watched the Berlin Wall come down on live television. It was very real, lived history to me, and people like me were in a unique position to critically re-examine the Cold War and realize just how much of a chimera and a charade much of it was. We were too young to be committed Cold Warriors (either pro or anti Soviet), so our views were still malleable, but the Cold War was also lived reality for us in ways it wasn't and can't ever be for those who come after us. It's not impossible for them to gain the same insights, but I'd assert it will be more difficult.

Heck, some of the Freshmen that will be starting this Fall will have no personal memory of the O.J. Simpson trial, let alone Rodney King and the ensuing L.A. Riots circa 1991. They were too young for these events to have any real meaning for them, and if they have any knowledge at all of the events, it's from immediate family and extended relatives who may talk about the events, or maybe they stumbled on a YouTube clip about it, or a Wikipedia article, or got curious about this stuff watching VH1 on cable.

It makes me glad to have cataloged a lot of ephemera we collected on VHS tapes which we inherited from the Minerva Center, a think-tank in Washington DC that studies topics pertaining to women and the military. Many of them were recordings of live television news programs and talk show discussions about 1980s-1990s debates surrounding women in the military, the Tailhook scandal, and Clinton era revived debates about gays and lesbians serving in the military. These are important pieces of history, too, right down to the corny 1980s television commercials in between the news segments.

Librarians, especially Academic Librarians, need to cultivate a finely attuned sense of history and historiography to fully treat their collections with the respect and care they deserve. I think most Librarians do make that effort, though with some Web/Libr 2.0 advocates I do wonder.

I would definitely recommend Loewen's lecture series as an audiobook acquisition even for Public libraries, and I am currently investigating other lecture sets in the Portable Professor series. Our local Barnes & Noble is having a clearance sale on them and I scooped up a bunch of titles for myself lately. I understand these will never be popular enough for B&N to keep on their in-store shelf-space and fully expect these to be internet-only available items. But these are items worth of consideration by collection development and acquisitions librarians. Precisely the kind of stuff we ought to be promoting that, though they will never be a commercial success at B&N, are nevertheless vital to the intellectual health of the nation. This is part of why Libraries differ from bookstores, and why we can and must exist peaceably side by side.