Blogging with Class

As some of my group members may have begun to realize, I understand things best by critique. I don’t really know what something is made of until I’ve started poking holes in it. So when I was reading Christopher Harris’s article on School Library 2.0 and came across what the author called ”Walt Crawford’s cautionary Perspective: “Library 2.0 and ‘Library 2.0′“, I was intrigued. When I found out that the page’s link to the article was broken, I couldn’t help it and found the thing myself. It was interesting. Crawford isn’t entirely upbeat about the Library 2.0 phenomenon. He wants to be fair about it, but he doesn’t understand why a series of changes to library operation have to be transformed into a movement. At times, he resents the assumption that libraries didn’t know what change was before Library 2.0 came along. It turns out that both Michael Casey and Michael Stephens are featured in this 32-page analysis, and while the attention isn’t always positive and Casey comes under particular scrutiny, the criticism is never petty. To my mind, Crawford comes off as curious and vaguely confused as to what people actually mean when they start using phrases like Library 2.0. He goes so far as to list a series of contradictory definitions, some of them coming from the same people. He’s not being mean so much as precise and maybe a little finicky. He’s looking for the kind of definition he’ll never find.

Crawford’s brand of careful, cynical searching got me thinking about the readings in an entirely different way. Library 2.0 (or participatory service or whatever you want it to be) has become what you want it to be, so long as you can claim it’s forward-thinking, and very few of these things are terribly new. Casey and Savastinuk’s book wasn’t about the details of Library 2.0 methods so much as it was about getting your organization accustomed to change. Harris sees the 2.0 movement as a shift in the way that a younger demographic views information and education. All of the articles about getting rid of Dewey and introducing coffee shops are about inviting in the users, a movement which is at least as old as the late 19th century, when John Cotton Dana decided to let his patrons browse the stacks. When I finally got through the articles, I didn’t know what to think. The video about the Transformation Lab didn’t help. Is the library of the future intended to be a mediocre art installation? Or is the Lab simply an example of trying out stuff in your lobby, seeing what your patrons respond to, and making decisions from there? I sincerely hope it’s the latter, because I’m all about experimentation, but sometimes I’m a little disturbed by the purposes contained in the constant and purposeful change.

Some of the statements at the end of the Lab video hit me the hardest. ”The users like to become involved as long as it is not too much trouble and providing that it brings about an instant result.” Don’t get me wrong. I understand that no one ever lost funding by underestimating the intelligence of the public, but I don’t like the conclusions a person can make based on statements like that. Another interesting one was, “The users have been forced to dismiss the book as library brand” [my italics, clearly]. If the library is supposed to be about catering to the needs and demands of the user, I’m not sure we would want to force the users to dismiss a brand which is continuing to serve the library in good stead. Once the narrator began using corporate nonspeak like “culture of innovation”, I began to have fever dreams that “Library 2.0″ was becoming simply another rhetorical tool to get crowds of people to do what you want. 

Naturally, it’s not as bad as my dreams would like it to be. Library 2.0 and environs clearly appear to inspire a great deal of librarians to make constant and positive change within their institutions. We want our users involved with their libraries in a real and tangible sense. We want the library to try out new technologies to see what works. We want libraries to be a force of education in the world. This is what libraries have done for a long while. The one real difference lies in the statements of purpose which try to explicate how libraries do so. Buckland, back in the prehistory of 1992, was able to say that “the central purpose of libraries is to provide a service: access to information.” Now that people can get their information a hundred different ways, the central purpose of libraries is foggier, which is why people like Crawford have a hard time getting a handle on definitions. The best I can say right now is that the central purpose of libraries is whatever our users want or need it to be. Which is the worst answer in the world. But it’s all I got. For now.

I’m trying, people, I’m trying.