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October - December 1997        Volume 18   Number 4

ENDURING VALUES

a talk given at the meeting of the Pacific Northwest Medical Library Association Portland, Oregon, 16th October, 1997 by the keynote speaker:

Values and value.
We live in an age of uncertainty. Despite economic prosperity and the end of the Cold War, most of us, though happy enough with our present circumstances, fear the changes we see and, even more, the changes yet to come. This uncertainty pervades our working lives. Controversy swirls around the future of librarianship and libraries and it is hard to deal with the various futures that are foreseen by pundits, especially as most of them seem to question the very existence of our profession. The discontinuity between academic theorists, "information scientists," many library educators, and all the self-appointed leaders of our profession on the one hand and working librarians and library users on the other becomes ever more obvious. While the second group laments declining materials budgets; run-down, overcrowded libraries; and the terrible pressures of always doing more with less, the first group publishes incomprehensible papers about digital libraries, issues fantastical reports (like the execrable "Benton report"), holds conferences that float on an abundant supply of hot air, and generally basks in the delights of shooting the rest of us in the foot. The gap between the elitists and the workers in and users of libraries has never been greater. Those of us who believe in real libraries serving real people need, now more than ever, to reaffirm our values and value.

In my opinion, the following are the values that should underpin our work in libraries:

• stewardship
• service
• intellectual freedom
• rationalism
• commitment to literacy and learning
• unfettered access to recorded knowledge and information
• democracy.

Every single last one of these values is explicitly or implicitly under attack from those who tout "the virtual library," "the library without walls," and all the other vapidities of the digerati. I am well aware that there are a number of specialized areas of librarianship--including medical librarianship--in which technology looms very large. It is possible that such libraries will have a preponderance of electronic services and resources--perhaps an overwhelming preponderance. I do not believe that, because the balance between electronic and "traditional" services may vary from one kind of library to another, the fundamental values of our profession do not apply in some kinds of library. My remarks are mostly concerned with the generality of libraries of all kinds and the future of our profession as a whole, but I do recognize that your working lives may be quite different in many ways from the working lives of general academic or public librarians.

One encouraging development is the number of recent publications that have begun to question the digital fantasies of the elites. (I am not referring here to the faux nostalgics like Nicholson Baker or Clifford Stoll--the Richard Simmons of the anti-technology movement--but to serious people who have looked at the technological visions and measured them against reality and history.) Listen to A. Michael Noll (former Presidential Science Advisor and Bell Labs and AT&T employee):(1)

...the superhighway is a lot of hype and fantasy, promising services that most people do not want, nor are willing to pay for; that the superhighway would be costly to build; that much of the technology exists only on paper and is not real. As you can imagine, my critics accuse me of being a Luddite; of having no vision or faith. To them, I say faith belongs in church. I tell them that their Utopian vision is old hat and will for some become a financial nightmare.

Visions based on faith do belong in church, but visions and values based on reason, experience, and history are necessary to sustain and encourage daily working life. We should take our values and use them to shape a vision of the future library that can challenge the bleak technologists' vision of the end of real libraries.

The library as place
One would have thought that the last thing the world needed was another force tending to isolation and alienation, but that is exactly what is implied in the chatter about "virtual libraries," "libraries without walls," etc. Insofar as the practicalities of a "virtual library" are known, they must include the abolition of the library as a place; human beings interacting with the records of humankind in isolation and communicating with other human beings electronically; and an economic model that is predicated on access to recorded knowledge and information being conditioned by, and dependent on, a fee-for-use basis. If such a future were to come about--which it will not for a variety of practical reasons--can you imagine a more potent recipe for social alienation?

The "virtual library" is also called the "library without walls" (a favorite term of those who do not give a hang about libraries but know how much library buildings cost to build and maintain). First, libraries have always reached out beyond their walls and will continue to do so--such service being greatly enhanced, but not changed in nature, by electronic communication. It suits people who push the digital solution to everything to characterize libraries and librarians as place-bound, but saying does not make it so. Library service is rooted in places called libraries but has never been bound by those places. Just look at, for example, mobile libraries, services to the housebound and the incarcerated, telephone and e.mail reference services, and inter-library resource sharing.

One simple reason why we need and will continue to need places called libraries is that we will have to house, arrange and make accessible collections of physical library materials for the indefinite future. To believe otherwise is to believe that, for the first time since the invention of writing, new technologies will not enhance but supplant forms of communication based on previous technologies. Let me quote Gregory Rawlins (2) on technological innovation:

We [humans] are good at some things and bad at others. Doing long calculations and weaving intricate silk patterns are two things we are bad at. So we invent devices that can do easily what we find hard.

The points he goes on to make are, first, that we needed to invent machines to do these tasks and, second, that the consequences of the invention of calculating and weaving machines were many in number and were felt far beyond their original purposes. It is the same in the field of communication. New forms of communication arise and flourish when there is a need. A need makes itself known and innovation is the result. We still carve words on stone for certain purposes but stones have not proven to be the most portable medium; we still write words by hand on paper and vellum but handwriting has not proven to be the speediest method of creating many copies of the same text; we still go to concert halls to listen to music but rely on sound recordings to listen to music at home at a time that is convenient to us. We do all these things and we revel in the speed of electronic communication for short texts while using books for the sustained reading that literature and recorded knowledge demand.

It is not generally acknowledged that those who push the "all-digital future" are, in fact, preaching a narrowing of choice. In their conception of the future, electronic technology is a Procrustean bed into which all human communication has to be fitted, irrespective of its suitability for being so transformed or the desires and needs of the users of that form of communication. It might come as a surprise to the laptop toters who infest airplanes these days that one can do an awful lot with a yellow pad and a pencil. (Perhaps it would be no great surprise since many of them seem to resort to electronic Solitaire early into the flight!) The essential point that I seek to make is that the history of human communication has been one of flowering and enrichment, one that welcomes electronic technology for its enhancement of communication and will welcome future methods of communicating yet undreamed of. The alternative path which the technology-obsessed wish us to take is both narrowing and constraining, one that restricts choice and seeks to supplant existing forms without regard to either practicality or economics.

We also need the library as a place because we are human beings. Religious people may, and do, pray in private but most feel the need to assemble in churches, temples, synagogues, mosques, and other places dedicated to the idea of religion. Why do they do that? Certainly it is to get the assistance and mediation of people--priests, imams, rabbis, bonzes--more learned in their religion than they. Equally surely, it is because of the human need to gather with other humans and, in so doing, to sanctify that place of assembly so that even, say, a revival tent becomes a sacred place. Personally, I do not think it is too far-fetched to suggest that there is a parallel with libraries. They are places that embody learning, culture, and other important secular values and manifestations of the common good and that there is a human need to visit such places. People go to them for the assistance to be obtained from other people--librarians in this case--who are more knowledgeable than they about recorded knowledge and information. Also, just as individuals go to religious buildings to pray alone sometimes, individuals go to libraries sometimes to pursue their interests without assistance from librarians. Analogies are treacherous things, more often misleading than illuminating, but I think it is worth at least a passing thought that TV evangelism and religious sites on the Net have not led to calls to replace religious buildings with "virtual houses of worship." Come to that, shopping by catalogue, on TV, and on the Net have not led to calls for "virtual shopping malls." There is a human need for human contact and appropriate buildings in which to foregather, and the proponents of "virtual libraries" ignore that need at their peril.

What is the alternative to the bleak vision of the virtual library advocates? I believe the answer lies in exactly the opposite direction--in expanding the roles of the library as place, not in abolishing that public place. Robert McNulty (3) says

A library can be 'the great good place in the city'--a literacy, Internet, and film center, a place for lectures, concerts, and exhibitions ... A library can also host coffee houses and restaurants, serve as an information center for visiting tourists, be a safe place for kids and a meeting spot for civic groups.

(Pierce points out that Andrew Carnegie built a boxing gymnasium into one of his Pittsburgh libraries and a swimming pool into another, so the idea of the expansive library as place is hardly new.) A friend who runs a small public library in Iowa gave me the following list of activities in, and functions of, her library (4):

window displays, changing 2-dimensional art work, adult literacy tutoring, tutoring of school-age children, word processing and printing, photocopying, meeting rooms used for just about any non-profit group, staff fax for patrons (for a fee) ... our outdoor sculpture that children climb on ... live music occasionally, bulletin boards and brochure holders for library and non-library information ... place to be out of the elements ... a place to escape from unpleasant surroundings (a safe place) ...

Academic libraries, too, can play that central role in their university and college communities and should look beyond their traditional roles and services to enhance those roles and services. In many cases, and certainly in the case of the CSU, a "virtual library" would be a cruel imposition on many of our students. Those who get all swivel-eyed about the prospects for the Net and the all-digital future seem to forget that many, many people live and work in circumstances that do not offer them a quiet place to study and think. For many such students, the library is the only place that they have that is free from the distractions of everyday life. To the affluent and the comfortable, quiet space is as available as air and the concept of a home workstation connected to the world's "information" must seem affordable and attractive. To the poor and the struggling, such a set-up would be unattainable and replacing real libraries and real library service with electronics is yet another fantasy, another cruel hoax. It seems to me that we need more walls, not fewer; more library buildings with more to offer, and not phantom libraries catering to alienated and isolated individuals bereft of human warmth and a human context.

Unchanging values
I would like to talk now about each of the values I mentioned earlier and to relate them to real libraries in a time of technological change. My desire is not to beat back that change or to advocate electronic sabotage, but to assess the impact of technology in terms of inclusion and incorporation in real libraries and real library service.

Stewardship. Librarians have a unique role in preserving and transmitting the records of humankind on behalf of future generations. I do not use the word "unique" lightly. Many of our values and missions are shared with other groups and interests, but we alone are dedicated to the preservation of recorded knowledge and information. Publishers, booksellers, teachers, researchers, museum keepers are among the people who benefit directly from the fact that the records of the past are available to them, but only librarians are engaged in the wholesale preservation of those records. If a substantial amount of the world's recorded knowledge and information were to be available in, and only in, digital form, we would be facing a crisis in the preservation of the human record that will dwarf anything that we have seen hitherto. It is imperative that librarians work together to produce a grand plan for future stewardship that contains practical and cost-effective means of ensuring that future generations know what we know.

Service. Librarianship is a profession defined by service. We serve both individuals and humanity as a whole in what we do. Every aspect of librarianship, every action that we take as librarians can and should be measured in terms of service. Webster's Third contains 20 main definitions of the word "service"--most with a number of sub-definitions. It is important to get away from the negative aspects and definitions of the word (it is unfortunate, in this respect, that "service" has cognates with associations such as "servile" and "servant"). The two Webster's definitions that express my interpretation of service best are "Professional or other useful ministrations" and "Effort inspired by philanthropic motives or dedicated to human welfare or betterment." Those few words sum up the goal of our profession. Our service can be as large as a successful integration of library instruction with the undergraduate curriculum or as small as a single brief act of helpfulness to a catalogue user--but it can and should pervade our professional lives so that it becomes the yardstick by which we measure all our plans and projects and the means by which we assess success or failure of all our programs.

Intellectual freedom. Librarians believe in intellectual freedom because it is as natural to us, and as necessary to us, as the air that we breathe. Censorship is anathema to us because it inhibits our role in life--to make the recorded knowledge and information of humankind freely available to everyone, regardless of faith or the lack of it, ethnicity, gender, age, or any other of the categories that divide us one from the other. I strongly believe we should be absolutists when it comes to intellectual freedom and carry out our tasks without reference to our own opinions or the opinions of those who want to restrict free access to knowledge. I should acknowledge here that we academic librarians are comparatively better off than our fellow librarians in other areas. After all, we work in institutions that are overwhelmingly dedicated to the idea of academic freedom; we tend to work for people who share that ethic; and we are usually not professionally isolated. Compare that context to the lonely battles that are fought by librarians in small, rural public libraries and by solitary school librarians battling obscurantist school boards. If you look at the lists of challenged and banned books that are issued each year, you will see that those are the people in the front lines. All the more reason to support ALA's Office of Intellectual Freedom and the Freedom to Read Foundation in the great work they do on our behalf to protect this most important professional value.

Rationalism. There seems to be a great tide of fundamentalism, superstition, and plain craziness in the world today. From faith healers to militants of all stripes, the world is full of people who are convinced that they know the One True Way and are aggressively intolerant of those who do not share or, worse, laugh at, their irrationalism. It seems to me that libraries are, above all, children of the Enlightenment and of rationalism. We stand, above all, for the notion that human beings are improved by the acquisition of knowledge and information and that no bar should be placed in their way. We stand for the individual human being pursuing whatever avenues of enquiry she or he wishes. We also stand for rationalism as the basis for all of our policies and procedures in libraries. Bibliographic control, collection development, reference work, library instruction, etc., are all based on rational approaches and the scientific method. Librarianship is a supremely rational profession and should resist the forces of irrationalism both external and internal.

Commitment to literacy and learning. Literacy is not a simple question of being able to read or being unable to read. Nor is it a question that is of marginal importance to academic librarians. (I am not speaking here of the reading abilities or willingness to read of the average high school graduate--though that is a separate matter of concern.) Literacy is a process by which, once able to read, an individual becomes more and more literate throughout life; more and more able to interact with complex texts and, thereby, to acquire knowledge and understanding. It is a key element in the enterprise--learning--to which academic libraries are dedicated. Instead of seeing the world as divided between the illiterate, a-literate, and literate, we should see literacy as an open-ended range of possibilities in which librarians, educators,, and students work together to learn and become more learned using sustained reading of texts as a central part of the life of the mind. In this respect, the distinctions between kinds of librarian become unimportant--a children's librarian or school librarian is as important to the early stages of literacy and learning as a public librarian or academic librarian is to the later stages. We are all involved in the same process--providing the materials, instruction, and assistance that enable individuals and societies to grow and to thrive intellectually.

Unfettered access to recorded knowledge and information. I have already spoken about the importance of intellectual freedom to libraries. Linked to that is the question of access to library materials and library services. It is important to make everything accessible to everybody without fear or favor, but it is equally important to ensure that such access is practically possible and not biased in favor of the better-off or the more powerful. Such unfettered access is brought into question by some aspects of technology. We are seeing a burgeoning scandal in the dissemination of government documents. It is documented that the information and recorded knowledge generated by the government is not as available to all citizens as it is to some business interests and the excellent system of depository libraries is under challenge from some elements of the present Congress in their zeal to proceed to electronic dissemination of government documents. (We should never tire of pointing out that we, as taxpayers, have already paid for this information and knowledge and are entitled to free, timely access to it.) More generally, the idea of charging for access to library materials and library services is much more popular today than it was before and the whole "virtual library" idea is, essentially, an elitist construct that writes off sections of society as doomed to be "information poor." I am not saying that libraries that use technology intensively as an enhancement to their services are inevitably going to betray the value of unfettered access, but I am saying that there are some inherent contradictions in society and in our use of technology that should make us very sensitive to maintaining libraries that are freely available to all--irrespective of social standing and economic circumstances. The ideal library of the future will be one in which access to all materials and services (including electronic materials and services) will be freely available, without barriers imposed by lack of money or lack of technological sophistication. This value is especially important to those academic libraries like the CSU libraries that serve a population containing a majority of economically disadvantaged students.

Democracy. Theodore Parker (5) called democracy "The American idea." It is an idea that depends on knowledge and education. It is a sad irony that as American democracy has reached its theoretical ideal--the enfranchisement of all adults, irrespective of gender and race--it is in danger because of an increasingly ill- informed, easily manipulated, and apathetic electorate. The rights for which, at different times, the revolutionaries, women, and ethnic minorities fought are being vitiated by a culture of sound-bites, political ignorance, and unreasoning dislike of government. Libraries are part of the solution to this modern ill. As an integral part of the educational process and as a repository of the records of humankind, the library stands for the means to achieve a better democracy. The best antidote to being conned by TV is a well-reasoned book, article, or other text. All our other values and ideas are democratic values and ideas--intellectual freedom, the common good, service to all, the transmission of the human record to future generations, free access to knowledge and information, non-discrimination, etc. A librarian who is not a (small d) democrat is an almost unthinkable idea. Libraries have grown and flourished in the soil of democracy and our fate is inextricably intertwined with the fate of democracy.

Not only is democracy the environment we need to succeed, but we should also commit ourselves to democracy within the library. I am as heartily sick as the next person of the annual management fad to which universities seem to be fleetingly addicted. What is striking about all the alphabet soup of management fads (MBO, TQM, etc.), apart from their barbarous management-speak and their essential similarity each to the other, is the fact that they all embody values and ideas that have been commonplace in many libraries for decades. It is always galling when it dawns on one that the jargon of this year's management fad may be different but, essentially, it is preaching the same old cooperation, tolerance, participation, mutual respect, encouragement of innovation and diversity, etc. They always add up to what a former colleague of mine called "applied feminism," and are manifestations of the democratic nature of well run libraries.

Envoi
Change is all about us, in libraries and in the wider world. We are dealing with new ways of doing things, with the incorporation or invasion of technology into all aspects of libraries and their services, and with the psychological dislocation that such pervasive change brings to all of us. But change is just concerned with processes; it is a serial event not the heart of what we are. All the more reason then, if we are to survive and thrive in such a time, to distinguish between the process of change on the one hand and the meaning and values of what we do on the other. We will have new libraries and many of our programs and services will be new and different from what we have known, but our mission remains the same and the values that inform that mission remain the same. It is, it seems to me, a time, above all, for clear-headed appraisal and for the ability to distinguish between new methods and enduring principles. Thank you.

1. A. Michael Noll. Highway of dreams: a critical view along the information superhighway. Mahwah, N.J. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997.
   
2. Rawlins, Gregory. Moths to the flame: the seductions of computer technology. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1996.
   
3. Institutions as a fulcrum for change / Partners for Livable Communities. Washington, DC, 1996. Quoted in Peirce, Neal. "The magic of community assets." National Journal, Sept. 21,1996.p.1707.
   
4. Personal communication from Evelyn Murphy (Newton, Ia, PL).
   
5. Speech at an Anti-Slavery convention, Boston, 1850.