I've been invited several times as a guest speaker on "The Dissidents" podcast. During the month of September, as a lead up to Banned Books Week (September 22-28) one of the hosts (Elizabeth) and I read LaRue's book and recorded four half-hour(ish) conversations about it. Last night, as a finale, we invited the author to speak with us about his work on a livecast. It was a fun (and hopeful) conversation.
Listen to all of our conversations:
I spotted this collection of essays on the New Books shelf at the library as I was looking for something to read over the holidays. While this wasn't really light reading, it was the only book I finished of the three I checked out. The other two were novels that just didn't keep my interest.
The essays in this book explore leadership, feminism, racism, sexism, diversity, and intersectionality (among other things) within the library profession. It is most definitely an academic book, written primarily for other academic librarians
Of course it is no surprise to those of us in librarianship that "white heterosexual men in feminized professions...benefit from 'the assumption that they are better suited than women for leadership positions'". However, as Maura Smale quotes Chris Bourg out in the first essay "Always a Novice"
If all of you who don't want to play politics, who don't want power & influence to change your values, and who want to have a healthy work life balance shy away from leadership positions; it might mean that you are leaving the leadership of our profession in the hands of those who aren't concerned about those things.
It is a truth that men tend to get the leadership positions in libraries. My own library just hired a white male as our new Dean. In collective memory of the university "white male" describes every library leader we have ever had.
"Isn't feminist leadership just about being a decent human being" is the question explored in the final essay "Feminist Praxis in Library Leadership". While the question may seem simplistic it spiraled into quite a lengthy essay. Through targeted interviews with eleven library leaders the authors asked six open-ended questions
From there three more questions emerged
December 10 was Dewey Decimal System Day The date was chosen to coincide with the birthday of the system's namesake Melvil Dewey. In honor of this day I checked out a biography of Dewey from the library where I work (which does not use the Dewey Decimal System). I noticed that his birthday is mentioned several times throughout the work, starting with the first page, and including the fact that he was appointed to the New York Board of Regents on December 10, 1889 (this was included without highlighting the fact that it was also his birthday).
The book, simply titled Melvil Dewey, was published in 1944, and mostly has praise for the man we now recognize as sexist, racist, and anti-Semitic. Although there is some mention in the work of these latter two identities they are downplayed. His clear bias toward Christianity can be found in the Dewey Decimal Classification system itself. The 200 range of the system is where books on Religion are found. Christianity is covered in the range of 220-280, and "other religions" are relegated to only the 290s.
His sexism is disguised in the book with passages such as this one:
All through his life, women were more congenial intimates with him than men; he was more at ease with them; he worked more to more purpose with them; he played with them with greater zest.
While he did admit women to the Columbia University, essentially forcing the University into co-education, when he started the Library School, we now know that his reasons were less than altruistic. While he believed that well-educated women would make jim-dandy librarians he also left a legacy of low pay as women "were also more likely to get sick or leave the profession to pursue 'home life'". Furthermore, male librarians deserved more pay than women because they "could also lift a heavy case, or climb a ladder....There are many used for which a stout corduroy is really worth more than the finest silk." (See the link at the end of the post for more information on this.)
About 20 years ago the then-president (a man) of my university actually told the librarians (all of whom at the time were women) at a meeting to discuss salaries that we knew when we went into a female-dominated profession that we would make less money - that it was "societal". And that, after all, he couldn't be expected to solve this "societal problem". Why he couldn't try to solve it on our campus is another question. That president's sexist legacy lives on here as well. Librarians continue to work a twelve-month contact for less money than our faculty colleagues who work a ten-month contract.
Melvil Dewey was also obsessed with simplifying things, especially spelling. He learned and taught shorthand, and changed the spelling of his first name from Melville to Melvil. As well, he attempted to shorten his last name to "Dui".
An example of his writing included in the work reads
In skool in Adams Center I rebeld agenst compound numbers. I told the teacher that jeometri taut us a strait lyn was the shortest distance between 2 points & that it was absurd to hav long mezur, surveyor's mezur & cloth mesur; also absurd to hav quarts & bushels of difernt syzes & to hav avoirdupois, troy & apothecari weits, with a pound of feathers hevier than a pound of gold. I spred out on my attik room table sheets of foolscap & desyded that the world needed just 1 mezur for length, 1 for capasiti & 1 for weit, & that they should all be in simpl decimals lyk our muni.
He very much liked the metric system and advocated for the United States to adopt it. I remember when I was in Junior High in the mid 70s that we had to learn the metric system in math class because it was coming to the United States, and soon! President Gerald Ford and after him President Jimmy Carter were going to make it happen. Then Ronald Reagan was elected and just like that people stopped talking about the metric system and we are left only in the company of Liberia and Myanmar as the only countries not to have adopted the metric system as the standard system of measure.
While we cannot deny the legacy Dewey has left on the library profession, we are also experiencing a reckoning of the damage his legacy has left. Two years ago the American Library Association changed the name of the Melvil Dewey Medal to the ALA Medal of Excellence. More about Dewey's sexism and racism can be found in this article from Slate.com.
I noticed the title of this book while I was looking for something else in our library catalog. (I don't remember what I was originally searching.) The author begins with a discussion of the Library of Congress catalog subject term "Paraphilias" - a word I had never heard of before reading this book, which is exactly her point. Very few people know this word, and even if they could guess its meaning, they probably wouldn't think to search for it in the library catalog even if they had heard of it. Using the word as a subject heading effectively hides the work even as it is available on the open shelves of the library.
(At the time of this posting my own library had six titles listed under the subject heading Paraphilias.)
Through the exploration of this term Adler demonstrates that how we classify books has more to do with librarians determining what is "normal" (rather than simply reflecting it) especially when it comes to sex. Furthermore, the Library of Congress
disciplines sex and sexuality by privileging scientific domains and text, granting such disciplines authority while obfuscating the humanities, popular literature, and emerging interdisciplinary and local knowledges.
She also demonstrates how whiteness and heterosexuality are presumed "normal" by searching the catalog for specific terms.
Much of this book is an exploration of the now defunct Delta collection of the Library of Congress - a little known collection of erotica, works deemed obscene, or those containing information about "perverse" or "aberrant" sexual practices. The Delta collection was restricted - those wishing to use it had to ask. By putting certain works in the Delta collection librarians had power in determining what was considered obscene or "aberrant". Now long gone, Adler discovered that even finding information about the existence of the Delta collection was hard to come by. An excerpt from her book about the collection was published on Literary Hub (which you can read here).
Those of us who work in libraries are no strangers to the use of the library as sexual space. Many a library worker can tell you a story of coitus interruptus or of finding post-coital evidence while straightening books the stacks. Adler also sees the library itself as a sensual and seductive place
The library is an erotically charged space. Some might even regard the pleasurable experience of browsing and losing and finding oneself in the stacks as an exercise in sadomasochism. The classificatory apparatuses in the library, with their disciplinary divisions and regularizing and shaming techniques, often bar opportunities for cross-disciplinary play, prohibit the intermingling of bodies, and cut the perverse from the normal (as if such an act was actually possible). In the library space, submission to and enactment of technologies of control facilitate and inhibit promiscuousness in browsing, perverse reading, and bodily pleasures.
I am always interested in what people have to say about book banning. Adler quotes President Dwight D. Eisenhower who had this to say about it in 1953
Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they never existed. Don't be afraid to go into your library and read every book.
Be like Ike.
Colleges and universities have traditionally been places designed...to make people uncomfortable. Education can and should be joyful, but it should also be challenging, difficult, and sometimes unsettling. Yet increasingly we hear that the faculty's right to academic freedom must be limited by the "right" of students not to be "offended" or unduly disturbed by material or ideas they encounter in and out of class.
Campus administrators have been successful in convincing students that the primary goal of the university is to make students feel comfortable. Unfortunately, comfortable minds are often not thinking ones.
Faculty members who speak as citizens often speak about topics far from their academic specialty. Physicists or engineers, for example, may express controversial views on political or social issues that have no bearing at all on their fitness to teach or conduct research in physics or engineering.
Academic capitalism's stress on measuring, assessment, and quantification has yielded what David Graeber colorfully calls 'the bullshitization of academic life: that is, the degree to which those involved in teaching and academic management spend more of their time involved in tasks which they secretly - or not so secretly - believe to be entirely pointless.
The humanities train critical thinkers and citizens. That may be inconvenient for politicians who see their constituents as merely 'work force' but it is definitely good for our democracy, as well as our economy.
His computer science and math courses have prepared him for the work; so have courses in the liberal arts and his experiences with campus engagement.
Elective courses in philosophy “helped me understand broadly how to articulate these non-quantitative concepts,” such as fairness, Troutman says. A particular Honors College course about how the media uses faces and how we internalize what the faces represent stuck with him.
A society does not educate the next generation in order for them to contribute to the economy. It educates them in order that they should extend and deepen their understanding of themselves and the world acquiring...kinds of knowledge and skill which will be useful in their eventual employment, but which will no more be the sum of their education than that employment will be the sum of their lives.
My husband and I listened to the audio version of this work, which features interviews of writers about books, reading, and writing. I had never heard of many of the interviewees, and my book and author ignorance was magnified when they began discussing other books and authors I'd never heard of. Which is not to say it wasn't a good listen. It was a bit stilted though since Pearl and Schwager were simply reading questions that had already been asked and answered in real conversations with the authors, and the responses were read by people who were not necessarily the original responders. Nevertheless, we enjoyed listening to enthusiastic discussion about books and reading, and the many responses that indicated a love for libraries and librarians. After each conversation Pearl and Schwager would read a list of some of the books and authors in each interviewee's library. I was struck by how many included Richard Adams' Watership Down - a book I have never read, but at least I've heard of it.
From the amazon.com website:
The authors interviewed in this work are: Russell Banks, TC Boyle, Michael Chabon, Susan Choi, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Louise Erdrich, Richard Ford, Laurie Frankel, Andrew Sean Greer, Jane Hirshfield, Siri Hustvedt, Charles Johnson, Laila Lalami, Jonathan Lethem, Donna Tartt, Madeline Miller, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Luis Alberto Urrea, Vendela Vida, Ayelet Waldman, Maaza Mengiste, and Amor Towles.
Publicly, Filippo de Strata fretted that the 'brothel of the printing press' would lead readers to cheap salacious entertainment...Privately, he may have been more concerned about his own job security.
The research studies that are reported in the popular press are not a random sample of those conducted or even of those published. The most surprising studies are the ones that mate the most exciting articles... When science writers cast scientific studies in popular language, they sometimes omit important caveats, offer stronger advice than is justified, present correlations as causal relationships, or extrapolate from findings in lab animals to suggest immediate application in humans
Find out how comparisons are being made between x and y. Comparisons may be between two different kinds of things (apples to oranges) or there may be some arbitrary condition thrown in that skew the results
Statistics have been cherry picked so that readers will generalize, or an incomplete picture is drawn with only partial data reported. Go to the original source to get the real story. I actually practiced what I preached here with the story about abstract spin (above). Once I read the article in the in Inside Higer Ed I found the original study and read it, too.
The thing about the ecology metaphor is that it highlights the interconnectedness of all these different things coming together in one place. It emphasizes the co-evolution of technology and people. Its [sic] about people and tools together.
Perhaps the most useful reason for dropping the tool metaphor is that tools require convergent thinking. You cannot create a tool with divergent thinking, where many possibilities exist...
...by switching our focus to seeing our technological systems as ecologies, and thus using divergent thinking to address the design and engineering of these systems, we can move beyond the limitations of tool-based thinking and design systems that are made to be used by diverse people.This gave me a bit to ponder, and will change the way I teach people to think about and use our databases.
...we need to recognize that fake news stories - and propaganda more generally - are not fixed targets. These problems cannot be solved once and for all. Economist Charles Goodhart is know for "Goodhart's law"..."When measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." In other words, whenever there are interests that would like to game an instrument of measurement, they will surely figure to how to do it - and once they do, the measurement is useless...As soon as we develop algorithms that block fake news sites, the creators of these sites will have tremendous incentive to find creative ways to outwit the detectors.The more we, as individuals, know the better we each can become at identifying fake news, fake research, and propaganda. My advice is to read as much as you can.
Time spent evaluating claims is not just time well spent, it should be considered part of an implicit bargain we've all made. Information gathering and research that used to take anywhere from hours to weeks now takes just seconds. We've saved incalculable numbers of hours of trips to libraries and far-flung archives, or hunting through thick books for the one passage that will answer our questions. The implicit bargain that we all need to make explicit is that we will use just some [emphasis in original] of that time we saved in information acquisition to perform proper information verification.Levitan also makes clear the importance of librarians in the information age. He specifically mentions asking a librarian for assistance in finding the origin of a quote often misattributed to Mark Twain ("It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."). He tells of consulting expert research librarian Gretchen Lieb at Vassar who explained the difficulty in tracking it down explaining that "Quotations are tricky things. They're the literary equivalent of statistics, really, in terms of lies, damn lies, etc." The quote in question most likely originated with humorist Josh Billings.
Did you ever? I mean, did you ever think that being a librarian meant dealing with poop? Talking about it finding little piles of it in the stacks, writing about it on the Web. I certainly never thought that I would have to write about it. In fact, one of the things that appealed to me about this book was the intellectual, cerebral, almost disembodied nature of the subject of librarians in the digital age...I imagined the wired world of information and literature, full of brilliant, helpful, visionary librarians...I didn't want to be sitting in a sticky chair thinking about poop.I don't think poop was one of the topics we discussed in any of my classes in library school, but I certainly had to deal with it as a librarian at a public library. How someone could mistake the elevator for a restroom I'm not sure, but there you have it.
Wonder and silence are better for dream keepers than for image makers. Reading can balance our noisy, hurry-up, present-minded world with what Keats called "silence and slow time". Whatever else you do in life do not fail to experience the simple pleasure of being alone with a good book on a rainy day.
I love libraries because their names have not yet been appropriated like those of sports arenas by the the likes of Pepsi, Fleet Bank, or National Car Rental. The notion that anyone would name a community library the Tropicana Branch sounds absurd, and it should, because we own our libraries.Palfrey goes on to explain that this means that "we are free to pursue our own interests and ideas, without fear of reprisal or economic consequence."
support all children as they learn to make sense of today's new information landscape, not just those who can afford to download any book they like onlo their Amazon Kindle. Digital savvy should not be limited to those who can pay for it, and school libraries play an essential equalizing role in this respect.This is true even as we continue to see stories about school libraries, and librarians being among the first to go when budgets need to be cut.
Librarians worry, with some reason, about what protections readers will have when the police come calling for information about books they have checked out. Librarians have long fought encroachments on civil liberties of this sort. The debate over the USA Patriot Act was a major cause célèbre for librarians, for instance. The notion that a reader's interest in a book about Islam might tip an investigation toward a particular suspect sent chills down the collective spines of librarians.Interestingly, at the aforementioned RILA conference I attended a program on patron privacy with respect to third party vendors, and discovered that while librarians may respect patron record privacy our vendors do not necessarily share our views.
