"social relations involving authority or power"
[wordnet]

"A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage."
[devil's dictionary]

It's been an interesting time to be an American, especially an American librarian. Americans have been a bit mired in politics lately and for that we apologize. example: library hours

You are the first audience to ever see this next little slide show, want to know why...?

An abridged history of progressive librarianship

First, there was the Library of Alexandria.

It contained a great repository of writings from all over the world and a lot of fat and happy librarians who got to wear long flowing comfortable robes and didn't even need so-called "casual" Fridays.

The Library of Alexandria had zero public access terminals and no photocopying machine. Life was good.

It was burned to the ground, several times, by people who hate freedom.

This was the start of the great librarian scowl, and crappy work clothes.

And, since enemies of our enemies are our friends, we now love the freedom to read.

Dewey was a great scowler.

He was an enemy of disorder. And he liked his words spelled simply. Always erudite, he wrote this letter to his alma mater on Library Journal letterhead.

"Sum day, dear Amherst, may it be my happy lot tu pruv how great iz the love I bear yu. Proud, always, everywher to be counted among yur sonz, I am Very truly, Melvil Dui."

Father of modern librarianship indeed.

A few things could make old Melvil smile, however...

• Marrying his deceased wife's secretary
• Creative accounting with the funds of the American Library Association, the Spelling Reform Association, and the American Metric Bureau
• Establishing a country club that didn't admit Jews and resigning rather than change club policy
• Asking female applicants to Columbia's library school to provide "descriptions and photos of their physical attributes"

Melvil brought new meaning to the phrase "the personal is political" [and I'm kidding about the smiling, I've never seen a picture of the guy smiling]

Ranganathan is considered the father of library science ... in India.

Just as Dewey thought that there was one God [231], and all the other religions got stuffed together in the 290s, we also think there is one "Father Of Library Science" and another "Father of Library Science, Indian"

Ranganathan proposed Five Laws of Library Science which brought the idea of user services to the forefront of library discourse...

1. Books are for use.
2. Every reader his or her book.
3. Every book its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. A Library is a growing organism.

This list has been adapted recently to the web world. See Lennart's page for the rest of it, but most notably he said:

• Save the time of the surfer

Ranganathan had a rich professional life unblemished by scandal, quickie resignations, unseemly affairs, or harrassment allegations at ALA conferences. He never talked smack about library patrons and would always tell them what time it was, even when he was sitting right next to the clock.

And as a result, no one outside of the library profession has ever heard of Ranganathan.











This despite the fact that his principles of facet analysis are the basis for the schema used by Yahoo and other web directories.

Various upstarts -- noticing the general disconnect between the Dewey method of efficiency at all costs versus personal, human interactions with the people who keep our libraries open -- caused all manner of rabble-rousing troubles over the years. Some organizations they founded include

• ALA-SRRT & non-ALA PLG
• BiS [full site in Swedish]
• CEBI [Study Circle on Political and Social Librarianship]
• More at the PLAW site

Sometimes the troublemakers got together and -- with the help of lefty sympathist publishers and printers -- got the word out.
[if you're looking for real history, please read Toni Samek's book or Jennifer Cram's paper]

Not coincidentally, the original Revolting Librarians was published in 1972, the year Ranganathan died.

Editor Celeste West [no relation] was featured topless.

Authors were listed not with their affiliations but with their sun signs.

I read Revolting Librarians in my straight-laced library school and realized that librarianship offered a rich life beyond learning Dialog queries and memorizing SUDOCS numbers.

I learned that I could use my library superpowers for good -- social good as well as just nebulous "library" good.

[the end of politics, or is it the beginning?]

oh yeah and I edited a book Working in a library gave me not just an opportunity to provide access to information, but also to use public resources to address various sociopolitical concerns, directly and indirectly. Such as...

• homelessness - library cards for the homeless, safe places to congregate during the day, public restrooms
• the digital divide - email and technology classes, public computing facilities, free books about technology
• unemployment - resume writing books and software, certification tests in online databases, access to daily papers for classified ads
• poverty - limits to fee-based services, equality of access, free programming, free ILL services

These are mostly straightforward patron services. What about less obvious, or more nuanced examples? it's all about choices, and choosing FOR one thing often means choosing AGAINST something else.... like the internet being the world's biggest library.... overt rules and decisions often create unforseen and unintended consequences

choices & unintended consequences?

• Do you own your ebook? What DO you own? [do you own the ability to read it out loud, to sell it, to change the format?]
• RFID - does it conflict with a privacy policy? Do you have a privacy policy? [difference between privacy policy in the US and Europe]
• are all your patrons equally facile in the new technologies you are considering? What is your plan for those who are not?

choices & unintended consequences?

• Money spent on any subscription services [virus checkers? library calendars] is money not available in the budget anually, not just once... upgrade costs are a big unknown
• Operating system lock-in. Did you choose your OS? Did you evaluate it the way you would evaluate other items in a collection development fashion? Are you aware of any security holes it might have, and the ways to prevent their exploitation? viruses are mostly Windows viruses
• Staff who do not understand technology make bad technological decisions. Purchasing technology is NOT the same as purchasing books or DVDs.

antidote: WebJunction can help, technology planning will ease the pain, there will always be some bugs.

choices & unintended consequences?

• see above: subscription services
• "out of the box" configuration may not be to your liking, then what? Can you fix it? Will you? time, money, staff ability, upgrades
• The vendor makes choices you might want to make for your patrons. upgrade cycle, what upgrades to include, what to be compatible with?

antidotes: open source systems and in-house techs, Koha

choices & unintended consequences?

• buying products that filter for a variety of reasons often means you are overfiltering for whatever your specific purpose is [brief CIPA discussion here about what needs to be filtered by law]
• filters with unknown blacklists/whitelists may be filtering whoknowswhat... does your library feel comfortable ceding control of site selection to non-librarians?
• how does filtering web content fit in with existing library policies of access to materials by both adults and minors?

antidotes: Peacefire, further reading, links about the US/CIPA situation, open source filtering

choices & unintended consequences?

• the library is a public institution that has to think carefully about going against the wishes of the govenrment for PR reasons among others. Patrons will have questions, do you have answers?
• Conflict in USAPA vs. US's 1st Amendment needs to be carefully considered, for example
• ongoing legislation that may be affecting the library needs to be tracked and responded to at a national and a local level.

antidote: stay informed [ALIA makes it easy!] and inform others, a pro-active response beats waiting for the knock on the door

choices & unintended consequences?

• "chilling effects" of over-self-policing
• passing on misunderstandings to a whole new generation of confused people
• Digital Rights Management may not be based on law, people are basing policy on legislation in some cases not even passed [fair use may allow for copying, for example in certain contexts - government policy policy vs corporate policy]

antidote: how comfortable are you being a test case?
"security, cost, & copyright concerns will prevent [allowing CD burning]" [cite]

Jessamyn West is currently the outreach librarian at Rutland Free Library the editor of the weblog librarian.net and the co-editor of Revolting Librarians Redux.

IM her at iamthebestartist [home] or rutlandfree [work].

My gracious thanks to The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library for their sponsorship of my trip. The layout and stylesheet for this presentation are available to borrow via a share and share alike creative commons license. See source code for details.