My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #33, March 27, 2000

CHANGE A WORD, CHANGE A WORLD

As someone who respects words, I am bothered when people try to gain more respect by changing what they call themselves. The progression is almost always from clarity to vagueness; we know what janitors do, but are less sure what custodians and sanitary engineers are responsible for. My own profession is now in a wholesale flight from the words "library" and "librarian," with a similar loss of meaning; we know what libraries and librarians are, but not what learning resource centers and information specialists will do for us.

Words are more than just their dictionary definitions; they have history and public understanding and personal memories attached to them. If you give yourself a more respectable title, you are bound to narrow your self-definition and lose some of those associations. You might start feeling you're too good for some of the scutwork you used to do under the old job title. I notice that the few remaining schools still offering the master's degree in librarianship, not content with renaming the programs and degrees, apparently consider it beneath them to offer courses in basic skills like cataloging, reference and selection.

It's not that I don't understand the frustrations involved in being part of a poorly paid profession, let alone one whose users don't always seem to distinguish between the professionals at the reference desk and the people at the circulation desk, or understand that what we do requires skill and training and education.

But among the fine healthy babies librarians are throwing out with the bathwater here are our history and tradition of service. Why replace the word "library" with "Learning Resource Center" (one of those pompous pieces of linguistic flatulence administrators are given to)? Tell students to go to the Learning Resource Center, and they'll stare at you blankly until light dawns and they say, "Oh, the LIBRARY."

People also know that librarians are people who will cheerfully find a recipe for grilled portobello mushrooms for them, or information on presidential candidates, science fair projects, the trip to Jamaica they're planning or the disease they've just been diagnosed with. They know librarians can tell them who to read when they've finished reading all the Nero Wolfe mysteries. They come to us to look up the law when they've been screwed over, or for philosophy and theology to help them understand and accept injustice.

They have no problem asking a librarian these things, because in practice, librarian has traditionally meant "friendly, helpful knowledgeable person." But "information scientist" doesn't exactly suggest eager public service. If anything, the term seems designed to intimidate other people, to exalt librarians at their expense. Would people feel comfortable asking information scientists to look up addresses for their Christmas card list?

If not, they risk losing over a hundred years worth of tradition and public good will that are attached to the words "library" and "librarian," which often translates into money for new library buildings even while other expensive projects are voted down. One would think librarians would cherish this good will and do everything possible to cultivate more of it. If we want people to respect us for our mastery of the new technologies as well as our better known skills, we can put our knowledge on display on our web pages, and provide internet and database training free of charge. We can enlarge the public understanding of what libraries contain, and what librarians do.

But not if information scientists are not taught basic library skills in their professional training. If the renamed library schools don't teach cataloging, who do they think will do it? I have a futuristic nightmare vision of the last lone remaining cataloger, dying at her desk at the Library of Congress, leaving nobody who knows how to carry on her work; millions of books would die with her, forever unclassified, and thus forever lost to the world.

Librarians have had a key role in the taming and organizing of the web because we have learned the very classification skills and principles of selection that the new schools of information science consider too lowly to teach. We have found the high quality material on the net and matched it to our users' needs because of the reference skills they don't want to teach anymore.

The "information science" designation also assumes that all that anyone seeks in a library is information, which is absurd. Children want delight and wonder as well, so children's librarians buy wonderful books and put them at child's eye level where children can look at them, touch them, savor them. They tell stories, read books out loud, put on puppet shows and Halloween parties, and sponsor reading programs for kids. Because people want entertainment, libraries buy popular novels, videos, and CDs as well as literature and nonfiction. People want a broad collection so they can learn about anything that interests them, at their own speed, in the manner of their choosing, whether in private, with books or articles or the internet, or in discussion groups or in public forums, and a good library provides all those opportunities. People also seek comfort, solace, wisdom in books that may be decades or centuries old but have never stopped being truthful.

I strongly suspect budding new information scientists will not be taught any of this. I think the narrowness of the title means they will be taught that all the knowledge anybody could need is in databases or on the web, and all they have to do is manipulate them skillfully.

The "information center" could eventually eliminate personal contact, or for that matter, libraries, altogether. And once the library is nothing more than an information scientist and a collection of databases at the other end of a phone line or internet connection, in what way does it differ from the heartless machines reciting menus at us in every other corner of modern life? I'll take a librarian over a machine anytime -- for one thing, a librarian would never say what I heard one machine say once: "Gender: please select from list."

Words matter; they create entire worlds. The aura of kindly personal concern associated with "doctor" does not carry over to "HMO," which has its own aura of "that perfectly good money we're spending on you could be benefiting shareholders." The word "undertaker" suggests we might be able to get away with an inexpensive casket and ceremony, but "grief counselor" does not. When businesses replace old words with vaguer, more professional, more corporate language, they lose our fondness and trust, and risk our suspicion and hostility.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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