My Word's
Worth:

a weekly column by
Marylaine Block

vol. 2 # 35, April 11, 1997

VISIGOTHS



The journalists and politicians who man the Sunday talk show circuits and the Crossfire sorts of programs--all members, I suspect, of some secret society of professional posturers--are always on the lookout for the new barbarians, the vandals who are undermining everything good and decent in Civilization-As-We-Know-It.
The New Barbarians have included "60's radicals" (read: Bill and Hillary), rap singers and Hollywood producers, illegal immigrants, and mysterious oriental men with large wallets and great political connections.


A recent addition to the New Barbarians list is--are you ready for this? Librarians.


Are you scratching your head and saying, "Huh?" Because a milder-mannered bunch of underminers of civilization you're never going to come across.


Don't believe me? Well, how about the impassioned article in the New Yorker a few months back, attacking librarians who were doing away with card catalogs? How about the director of the brand new, state-of-the-art San Francisco Public Arcade, er, Library building, all but tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail? How about the article in the March Harper's called "Silence, Please: the Public Library as Entertainment Center"? All of this has been picked up on by the talk show crowd, ever-alert for creeping political correctness.


They charge us with:



Well, yeah. We just don't think there's anything wrong with that. As a matter of fact, we think we're making our libraries more useful to more people.


The thing is, our critics seem to think that we do these things mindlessly, because we are trying to be hip and trendy. I have news for them--computers cost a bundle of money. Converting millions of paper records to electronic records also costs megabucks, and requires an overwhelming amount of staff time to boot. Everybody who works in libraries has had to be totally re-trained. This is not something we do lightly.


In fact, we have had to spend years planning and budgeting for new technology. We have had to convince our boards and taxpayers that we need more money so we can provide these services. For that matter, we have had to convince some of our own staff who were wary of computers. (I should know--I was one of them.) We're COMFORTABLE being stodgy, so we don't change every traditional way of doing things without being convinced it will allow us to deliver better, expanded service to our users.


Those who lament the passing of card catalogs and paper indexes are people who apparently never had any trouble finding things in them. In other words, they are not our normal everyday library patrons, our befuddled seekers,


Mind you, I am not saying that our customers are defective. I am saying that information retrieval is complicated, and people who don't understand all the rules will fail to find what they want much of the time, even though the library has the material.


The problem with card catalogs and paper indexes is that users have to guess right about what subject headings the system will use. When they don't, most library users give up and walk out empty-handed. Or they walk out with what they'll settle for, rather than what they wanted--the woman who wants information about breeding silver tabbies walks out with general books about cats instead.


Electronic catalogs and indexes improve on card catalogs by searching for key words, through titles, subtitles, and subject headings, which means that library users have a much better chance of finding some of what they're looking for in the way they're looking for it.


Since electronic catalogs don't occupy physical space, or require human labor to file cards for every single subject heading, catalogers can put in far more subject headings, to make it more likely people will find what they will need. They can even add contents notes to every anthology or compact disk, to help users find individual plays or stories or songs inside those compilations. And because the catalogs are online, our users can dial in from home or office or school to find out what we have, or, for that matter, what other libraries have.


Another thing about those revered paper indexes and card catalogs. Our carping critics may adore them. But children and teenagers won't go near them. Why should they, when they can get better results by computer, with less effort? And then print out the results besides?


The fact is, libraries have to serve all their customers. This includes young people. Systems that satisfy many of the older library users, but frustrate and annoy kids, will leave libraries without customers when those kids grow up. They, after all, are our future users and taxpayers.


I guess that's another thing that bothers people about librarians. We think children are actually people. We respect them, and try to supply them with the information they ask for, just as if they were grownups.


Many adults are more interested in protecting children from knowledge than in giving it to them. They are worried about children being exposed to sex and violence and secular values, and they want other cultural guardians, like teachers and librarians, to help filter out dangerous ideas and images and words. This is not a liberal versus conservative thing, either. Liberals and conservatives alike worry about children seeing pornography on the internet. Liberals and conservatives alike worry about pedophiles in the chat rooms. Liberals as well as conservatives are uncomfortable with homosexuality being openly touted as a lifestyle choice on the internet.


Even though these dangers have been exaggerated, they are there, so there's no question about it, librarians and parents are going to have to figure out ways to help children use the internet safely. And we're going to have to do this in public, working with our boards and with local citizens. Whether we resolve the issue with requiring parental permission for internet use, or making training in internet use a requirement for using the system, or using surf-protection software, we will have to do this with community understanding and consent.


But let kids on the net we will and must, because it's the greatest educational toy ever devised. On the net kids can meet other kids from other countries, learning geography and culture in the process. They can tap into museums and libraries for information for their school work. If their own teachers haven't made algebra clear to them, they can maybe understand it better by seeing online how other people are teaching it. They can work together with children all over the country to gather environmental data, assisting scientists in their research. They can read other kids' writing and publish their own, see other kids' art and post their own, view other kids' pages and create their own. Kids on the net can see themselves as people who contribute ideas, not just passive spectators of other people's thoughts. The net is a place where children can gain a sense of their own competence.


The media have frightened parents about the net, without telling them about the nifty stuff. That's why we librarians have another major job on our hands, teaching kids and parents alike how to use the internet. (And, for that matter, the electronic catalogs and indexes.)


We librarians will need to play our traditional role in selection of library materials on the internet by creating our own web pages. We will need to create children's pages, linking in amusing and entertaining sites as well as educational ones--Yahooligans, the Electric Origami Shop, Bill Nye, the Science Guy, Tales of Wonder from all over the world, that wonderful database of words to all those Kids' Songs you've forgotten. For adults, we will link in the useful things our patrons need and don't even realize they can get for free online, like the Car and Driver Buyers Guide, or the gardening information, or the site which explains every step in the process of buying a home, or the searchable database of retirement communities, or the sites that help us find book and movie reviews.


We have always selected our books and magazines within certain limits--what we can afford, what we should have available, what our patrons ask for all the time. This means that the completely oddball requests have gone unanswered in most traditional libraries--if 99% of our users are Southern Baptists, the odds are we won't have many books on hand about Zoroastrianism when you come asking about it. With internet access we'll be able to answer these non-standard questions, and do a better job of serving all our customers.


Of course people are worried that the computers will drive out the stuff they came to the library to read. But libraries won't be doing without books and magazines just because they have the internet. We will still be sending people out the door, books in hand. It's just that our satisfied customers might have printouts in hand as well.


If librarians are the new barbarians, it may be because we have done such a dreadful job of explaining ourselves to our public. The director of the San Francisco Public Library seems to have left out that critical first step of asking its users what they liked and disliked about the old building. He should have realized that people expect to see books in plain sight when they walk into a library. He could have done a whole lot better job of involving his users in the planning process, and explaining the kinds of changes that had to be made. He could have taken the Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club and the League of Women Voters on tours of the building before the library opened, and then invited them to be on hand at the opening ceremonies to help show other people how to use the new gadgets.


Perhaps we are so used to being, well, nice but boring, it never occurs to us that people could be interested in what we do, let alone ready to storm the Bastille over it. Since we're presiding over this difficult transition between looking for information the way our middle-aged users are used to doing it, and looking for it the way our kids do it, we can't be all books and catalogs and indexes and magazines for our older users, any more than we can be all computers and things that go beep to please our young users.


If we do a better job of explaining ourselves to our public, maybe we can stop being the new Visigoths, and be seen as something a little more like tour guides, leading our users through a strange but exciting new landscape.


Who knows? We might even go back to being boring.



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