Restore
the noble purpose of libraries
Focusing
so much on their technology actually dumbs them down.
By William H. Wisner
from the July 17, 2009 edition, Christian Science Monitor
Laredo, Texas - Libraries
were once a sacred secular space of silence and reverence – a place
where one automatically lowered one's voice. As a direct heir to the
Enlightenment, the establishment of libraries was a testament to the
self-evident integrity of mankind, the belief that we all desire to find the
truth through knowledge.
Librarians
once framed our mission in those terms – before libraries became the
noisy computer labs they now are, with their jingle of ringtones, clattering
keyboards, and unquenchable printers. And we reference librarians had a
higher, more dignified calling than merely changing the printer paper.
In
some libraries today it is actually impossible to find any place quiet enough
to simply read and study undisturbed. What I call the postmodern library
– the library plus technology – deconstructs itself.
Modern
librarians who prioritize information over knowledge perpetuate a distraction
from the real purpose of a library. A library facilitates the patient
gathering of knowledge – whose acquisition is superior to almost every
other endeavor. Religions have adapted to technology for the most part
without being destroyed by it, so why can't libraries? It might not be too
late.
Information
on the Internet may come across as authoritative, but much of it is one giant
Ponzi scheme, especially in the hands of the young, where it can become a
counterfeit for the reading and memorization that true learning requires.
Scholars are made through the quiet study of one chapter at a time. For that
we need silence. We need to restore an appreciation for the close study of
words.
Without
that we are putting ourselves out of business. It should disturb us that
fewer people are browsing the stacks, asking reference questions, or reading.
I went
to my own public library the other day with my 11-year-old daughter and was
horrified to see a television monitor running videos in the children's
section – not a kid in the stacks and all the rest lined up to play
games at the computers. It was a library that had gotten everything exactly
wrong.
My once
gentle profession has prostituted itself, aided by library schools, which,
embarrassed even to call their graduates "librarians," now opt for
the sexier term "information scientists."
It is a
bid for status that doesn't work – from our patrons' point of view we
are still people who change the printer paper and reboot the computer when it
goes haywire. We're not scholars, of course, never that. A librarian is
someone who just might be able to quote the Prologue to "The Canterbury
Tales" in Middle English.
Once
the captains of the information superhighway, librarians are now thumbing a
ride into history.
Libraries
are currently popular only because everything's free. And yet library budgets
are shrinking (a litmus test of viability and patron support) and branch
libraries are closing.
In focusing
on access in all its forms and hoping for the best librarians have slowly
stepped away from being readers or scholars, like their forebears in the
Middle Ages who could recite whole books from memory. You cannot defend what
you do not know. And you cannot know what you do not love.
As it
happens, there may be some hope for libraries. There are reports of unique
attempts to restore the inherent dignity of the library. At the community
college library where I work, we do it one cup of coffee at a time.
Nearly
three years ago I established Coffee Mondays, a new library service offering
a cup of coffee free of charge to any student or professor who wanted one. It
turned out to be work, but it was well worth it.
We take
a humorous tone at Coffee Mondays – the coffee center is decorated with
posters detailing interviews of me with Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt
(fictitious, of course). The humor is human, and the result is humane. The
library has been "personalized," as it is with the exhibits I help
organize with our art department here, exhibits famous for being constructed
on a shoestring budget.
Young
people are drawn to these imaginative approaches. It is through that humane,
humorous connection that we are trying to win back hearts and young minds to
the library. At the coffee center, I am able to meet and talk with students
about, oh, maybe Plato or Japanese Noh theater or the paintings of Jasper
Johns. And that is exactly one of the blessings of a library.
Before
librarians put themselves out of business one printout at a time, libraries
must explore similar creative ways to engage the community without dumbing
down their mission.
There
is a way for libraries to uphold their noble purpose. They must carefully
balance wants and needs of the community – they must stop being
one-stop shopping centers.
William H. Wisner has been a librarian for 22 years. He is
the author of "Whither the Postmodern Library?"
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