So sayeth Eve
I hate to disagree with you, Eve, but you’re bass ackwards on this one.
The sole purpose of Barnes & Nobles is as a repository of objects. The sole purpose of a clerk at B&N is to put a specific object into your hands. The purpose of a librarian and the librarians within it is to put specific information within your reach. The professions that takes on the task of preserving “artifacts” are archivists and museum curators.
My job as a librarian is to make sure you can find any information you may need. Only very rarely is the value of that information tied to the media through which it is provided.
Yes, I am a librarian (though I don’t work as one anymore) and yet I have read Double Fold. Baker makes some very important points that I think people are taking too far.
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Agreed that national libraries serve as both libraries and archives. It is disappointing to me that the Library of Congress has come to place more value on the former than the latter.
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Major academic institutions make institutional decisions on which topics they will act as archivists. The University of Washington maintains files of all books and newspapers related to the Pacific Northwest. Just because they at some point had a complete bound run of the Topeka, Kansas, Telegraph doesn’t mean they are obligated to do so forever.
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Librarianship is one of the most stupidly technophilic professions around. We have truly been early adoptors of just about every computerized technology that has come along for the last 50 years. Unfortunately the nature of libraries is such that gradual sytemic changes are not confortable and tend to be avoided. Too often an all or nothing decision is made (if you have ever made extensive use of a library running both LC and Dewey classifications, you’ll understand some of the reason for this).
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Very few librarians come from a scientific or empirical background. As a profession we were fed a load of crap on the ethereal nature of modern paper and it became unquestioned gospel over the decades.
On the other side:
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The primary mission of most libraries is providing information to their patrons. Community, corporate, and small academic libraries generally have neither the funds nor the desire to serve has historical repositories. Despite Baker’s assurances that “storage space is cheap” there is really no reason for a small public library to keep a book that hasn’t been used in 30 years (unless it is of extreme local interest, and even then it is more the role of the local historical society).
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With the exception of newspapers (the main focus of the book), most printed materials are not rare. Even the most obscure book is generally held in at least a half dozen reserach institutions.
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The medium of presentation is rarely important to the information presented. We can easily conjur up exceptions, but 99.9% of research needs fall into this category. A doctoral thesis in Dickensian studies will find the most recent printing of Oliver Twist just as useful as a first edition. A fully-searchable electronic copy might be even more useful (and can I tell you how many people come to reference desks in libraries expecting that the entire contents of the world’s books are fully searchable in some database).
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The secondary mission of most libraries is to provide as much information as possible to the most people. If the library spends to much time and money on maintaining and storing the rare and the valuable it impedes this mission. From the librarians point of view it is better to have 5 photocopies of Columbus’s original logs that can be put in the open shelves than to have the original logs kept in a locked case and can only be used by Ph.D’s and above with approved research goals.
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One of the things Baker cries out about is the loss of the “experience” of going through old newspapers. The feeling of sitting at a table and seeing how the page is layed out, of turning a page to find new information, the smell, the inkstained fingers, etc. It is not our job as librarians to provide “experiences”. It is our job to make sure you can find the information you need. Now, I admit that microfilming has proven to be a 90% failure, but that doesn’t mean we are obligated to provide an “experience”.
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Storage is not as simple as Baker thinks it is. You can’t just go out and buy a Costco shell and start filling it with books. You have to make sure the building is climate controlled. Yes, modern paper does have a half-life longer than claimed, but excessive humidity will still cause bindings to rot. Plus, all it takes is one mold explosion, one leak in the roof, one ruptured sewer line, a single pregnant paper beetle. All of these need to be controlled. Further it still has to be organized and cataloged. A system has to be put in place to quickly and efficiently retrieve and reshelf these items. I’m not saying it is an impossible task (hell, libraries already do more of this than most people would imagine - more than half of UW’s 8,000,000 texts are in storage) but it is not an easy task.
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Maintaining card catalogs as a useful reference tool is just stupid. The only way this can be done is to keep them where nobody can use them. When the University of Washington was about to get rid of their catalog a great cry went up about what a loss it would be. So they were kept and moved to an inconvenient (though easily accessible) floor. Guess what we learned? Students were viewing the catalog as a near infinite source of free notecards. We’d find piles of them on desks, in garbage cans, thrown out windows as confetti. Without active maintenance, the card catalog quickly became useless, even as historical artifact. Most people complain that they’ve lost the ability to browse or free associate. I agree that many of the more popular online catalogs used in libraries do not sufficiently replicate this, but such systems do exist and I wish they were more popular. Also, do you know how few people could really use a card catalog well? In my opinion, the nostalgia for card catalogs is almost as silly as the nostalgia for circulation cards (yes, we did have people complain that we were throwing them away, what a “important resource” we were told, “to know who had checked out a book in the past”).
Ok, this is disjointed as I am doing other things at the same time I’ve been writing this, but hopefully my main points come through. I, personally can’t stand Baker’s fiction and found the writing style in Double Fold to be almost as unreadable but he does make many important and valid points that I hope will resonate throughout my former profession. But I also feel he regurgitates many of the popular misunderstanding of what exactly a librarian is and what it is we do.