Communicating Off the Page

I was looking at old issues of The U*N*A*B*A*S*H*E*D Librarian last week and thinking that, in a sense, it was the original library zine: a personal magazine where the editor/publisher's philosophy and passion for his subject permeated every page. Moreover, Marvin Scilken's zine was a forum where other librarians could share their own tips and tricks on "How I Run My Library Good."

He also served as a filter, reading widely and sharing brief excerpts from every piece he thought would be useful or provocative. Which is to say, he was also running one of the first weblogs (or blog), albeit without the web. If Marvin had been any good at typing, I'm sure he would have published it on the Internet. As it is, he created a model of self-publishing followed by many who now are on the net.

Marvin died in early 1999, just before the number of online zines and blogs exploded. (The newsletter was later acquired by Westchester PL's Mitch Freedman.) Now, there are zines by lipstick librarians and laughing librarians, anarchist librarians and progressive ones (though no conservative ones that I can find). There are web sites for librarians who call themselves renegade, cool, ska, marginal, modified, pernicious, and psycho. There are blogs galore, Jessamyn West's Librarian.net, Steven Cohen's Library Stuff, the shared blog at LISNews, the Internet Scout Weblog, and more.

Marvin might not quite have liked all of those, but he would have enjoyed sites like Rory Litwin's Library Juice, where librarians who call themselves progressive or radical share good sites and quotes, print exchanges of letters urging American Library Association (ALA) executives to broaden their policies, and argue about things like holding ALA at the Marriott while the labor dispute was going on.

He would have appreciated the nimbleness of weblogs, which Kevin Werbach (writer/producer of Release 1.0) defines as offering "frequently updated observations, news headlines, commentary, recommended links and/or diary entries, generally organized chronologically." The speed with which they share links to news stories and commentary about major developments like the Tasini v. New York Times decision is impressive; by the time his own magazine could have printed that news, people would have been reading the decision and arguing about it on weblogs and forums for more than a month.

Marvin would have loved the interactivity, the immediacy of response. Not that he didn't get his share of contributions and letters to the editor, but the time it takes to write a letter, address an envelope, and find the stamps discourages comment. The informality of the net, and the ease of e-mail, leads readers to see blogs and articles on the net not as complete, finished pieces but as the beginning of a conversation, an invitation to add their own voices to the fray.

When I surveyed 20 librarians who publish zines and blogs for this article, all the respondents said that the greatest pleasure was getting feedback from all over the world. For Blake Carver, of LISNews, creating an online community was the actual goal—"I wanted a site that had a bunch of people contributing what they thought was important…. Slashdot for librarians." T.J. Sondermann, the "Library Geek," says, "I do it for a sense of belonging. To both the library community and the weblogging community."

Juanita Benedicto, cofounder of New Breed Librarian, says, "I've communicated both online and in person with some fabulous folks, and I wouldn't have had the chance if it weren't for this project." When I asked Jessamyn West why she began Librarian.net, she answered, "The best thing for me about the Internet is that if you are a freaky person with fringe interests you can find someone else to share those interests with. Who would have known there was a tattooed librarian subculture?"

What accounts for the sudden efflorescence of librarians' zines and blogs? Scott Bauer, who runs the Redwood City Public Library LibLog, sums up one of the answers: "It suddenly became real easy to produce a weblog."

In 1995, when I began Neat New Stuff I Found This Week on the Net, as part of my Best Information on the Net web site, you had to know at least rudimentary HTML, and you had to have server space to put it on. That meant either you had to pay an ISP (Internet Service Provider), or you had to do it on an institutional server, which forced you into a semiofficial tone (the Catholic university I worked for would not have sponsored the belly dancing librarian).

By 1999, though, there was web publishing software that made it almost unnecessary to know any HTML, blogger software that essentially required nothing more than filling in the blanks in the templates, and free web site hosting services like Geocities and AOL. When it's that easy, why wouldn't you start a zine or weblog?

Eliminating technical obstacles opens the door to more potential publishers, but it doesn't really explain the motivation. The reasons librarians create zines and blogs are as varied as the librarians.

I'm the only one in the lot who hoped to make money doing it, at least indirectly. When I quit my job to become a full-time writer and Internet trainer, I needed a place to display my wares and give people a reason to hire me. I took Neat New Stuff with me to my new web site, but I also started an e-zine called ExLibris, where I could talk about any professional issue that occurred to me: My "Rules of Information"; a rant about the self-defeating nature of the Association of American Publishers' campaign against libraries; a tribute to OCLC; etc. I also got to meet some of the great Internet librarians by running a series of "guru interviews."

My zine has served my professional purposes by leading to reprint requests and other writing assignments. But I've come to love even more the chance to influence the dialog in the library community, to put ideas in play that are often picked up and talked about by librarians all over the world, in electronic discussion lists, bulletin boards, even library schools.

For Gary Price, the indefatigable finder of reference sources on the invisible web, his weblog, the Virtual Acquisition Shelf & News Desk, is simply an easier way than e-mail to let his followers know about new sites he's added to his many web pages. For Library Geek Sondermann, it's a way of helping him to stay current with professional issues. "Because I scour the net so much, looking for links, I'm continually updating my knwledge base," he says.

For many of the self-publishers, it's a chance to render a service, to fill a hole in the web of information. Jenny Levine was one of the first to do this, back in 1995, with her late lamented Librarians' Site du Jour. "I began it to bring home to the librarians in my system the power of this new tool," she says. "The two biggest complaints I heard about the net were that people didn't have time for this new stuff, and, even if they did, they didn't know what to do once they got online. So my goal was twofold: 1) to highlight valuable resources, and 2) to give librarians a reason to go on the web every day."

Chris Dodge began his Street Librarian site to provide a "one-stop links list of alternative presses and magazines." John Guscott, who publishes an actual print magazine, Library Futures Quarterly, with a companion e-mailed newsletter, Library Futures Express, began his site because there was no library publication that was trying to consolidate in one place much of the current thinking about the future of libraries. He sees his publication as a current awareness tool, as well as a planning resource, for harried library administrators.

For Brian Smith, FilteReality is an "attempt to make the filtering debate more honest and rational," because he thinks "a lot of nuances were regularly overlooked."

Juanita Benedicto and Colleen Bell began New Breed Librarian because they wanted to provide more of a full-service publication, that combined news items with articles, interviews, a job section, and advice (Ask Susu).

It's also true that most of us think self-publishing is just fun. We enjoy what Dodge calls "unfettered self-expression" and what Eris Weaver, the "Bellydancing Librarian," calls "the ability to put just whatever the hell out there with no editing or censorship." She loves busting stereotypes and figures there can never be too much humor. The web, as Matthew Wright of Library Underground notes, "offers freedom of speech to a maniacal degree."

Linda Absher originally thought Lipstick Librarian would just be a chance to "make a few friends laugh. I had no idea I'd receive so much response and notoriety." Steven Cohen of Library Stuff says "I loved writing about libraries when I posted for LISNews. Library Stuff gave me full control and an avenue for creativity." Brian Smith began one of his other web sites, Laughing Librarian, because he's "written and drawn parodies and other funny stuff for as long as I can remember" and thinks it's important for librarians to be able to laugh about their profession.

None of the zine publishers or bloggers think what they're doing threatens the standard library magazines. Though, because we can alter content so rapidly, we do pose some of the same issues that the speedier CNN posed for the traditional news media. And we may lead to the same sort of redefinition of their core function.

The zines and blogs are particularly adept at posting good links and prompting discussions, but the trade publications are better at research and comprehensive coverage of new books and other materials—it's one thing to say "hey guys, here's a neat book" and another to systematically review several hundred new publications in all disciplines and formats. It's one thing for me to ask my male readers to tell me about what it's like to be a man in a largely female profession, and another thing altogether to publish the results of a survey of over 400 male librarians on this topic, as Library Journal did in 1994. Whose results would you trust more?

Just as significant are the differences in the culture of the professional literature and the culture of the blogs and zines. They are part of an Internet society that values attitude, community, and breezy informality. To some, it makes the formal library literature suddenly look a bit stodgy and behind the curve. To others it becomes more apparent what professional editors are up to all day long.

Without being direct competition to established journals, weblogs and zines are a new source of information in the lives of many workaday librarians. These new nodes on the net are perhaps more analogous to year-round conferences. Editors of the professional journals will need to visit these sites routinely for the same reasons they attend conferences: to listen in on discussion groups, to find out what issues are hot, to expose themselves to a wider range of viewpoints, to prospect for new writers, and to find out where they could enlighten a discussion by commissioning research.

In time professional publications will take on some of the attributes of web publications, perhaps relegating all news functions to blogs they'll offer on their own web sites. West notes that H.W. Wilson briefly experimented with a blog format and then dropped it: "That was really too bad because it was good to know what those guys were up to."

Library publishers could well do what the traditional news media did when the web came along: take advantage of the possibilities it offers for interactivity and reader responses to articles in the magazine, because the new generation of web-based librarians doesn't want to just read an article or discussion, they want to contribute to it. Publishers could use their web sites for lively opinion, discussion groups, and spot surveys. By combining peer-to-peer journalism with traditional library journalism, they could smoothly transition a new generation of web-based librarians to their magazines.

If that happens, librarians could have in one package the best of both worlds—the reliability of serious and systematic research and problem-solving, from some of the most knowledgeable librarians in the business, with the immediacy, playfulness, diversity of voices, and complete interactivity of the zines and blogs.

Marvin Scilken would have loved it—the logical extension of the revolution he started in library publishing.