Dumbed-Down Core Values

Pity the writer on a task force! That poor soul can only cry out in the committee wilderness and rail against the triteness of the groupspeak product. She (or he) cannot save her golden words, diluted and deleted to neutralize the message. The larger beast, the task force or committee, usually finds that banality to which any and all can agree. Some committees rise above that pressure. Rare ones are saved by a member named Jefferson, or, in our field, a Ranganathan.

Alas, no Jefferson nor Ranganathan is there on our American Library Association (ALA) Core Values Task Force. Its lack of a graceful word makes me feel a lot less guilty about reducing further mentions of the task force to an economic, if acronymic, CVTF in the rest of this affectionate, if critical, opinion.

It's not like we have never succeeded at this committee writing/editing stuff. You can compare the best of the CVTF's fourth draft of our "Core Values" with many existing ALA policies. First, of course, you have to figure out which of the CVTF statements goes with the older ALA policies: the former are so general and vague, the latter so surprisingly direct.

The CVTF's "Assurance of equitable access to recorded knowledge, information and creative works," while inoffensive, is simply no match for the direct power of two clean, clear ALA policies on fees for library service. One says, "The American Library Association asserts that the charging of fees and levies for information services, including those services utilizing the latest information technology, is discriminatory in publicly supported institutions providing library and information services." The other existing policy puts it even more directly: "The American Library Association opposes the charging of user fees for the provision of information by all libraries and information services that receive their major support from public funds."

I'm guessing that the CVTF's "Connection of people to ideas" coupled with its "Freedom for all people to form, to hold, and to express their own beliefs" is supposed to cover librarianship's commitment to intellectual freedom. How weakly those CVTF statements sound when they are compared to just two sentences from our Library Bill of Rights. First there is "Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment." Second, that one that gets us into so much trouble: "A person's right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views."

The truth is that when you try to reduce the values we "hold in common" to 63 words arranged in eight nonsentences, you block any meaning from coming through. There are not enough words in the CVTF draft to convey even a hint of how deeply, how strongly, how radically we hold to those values. Some of our values are in conflict with those of some others in our society. We learn that every time a politician tells a librarian to "Charge for it!" or a censor says, "Remove that book!" When that happens we can't simply roll over and restate those values as some inoffensive, excessively general press release. These are our most revered beliefs, but, as stated by the CVTF, they are not values at all, only diffuse, indistinct shadows of what we really believe. The CVTF has turned our values into the stuff of publicity agents and spin doctors, not literate librarians.

Let's give the CVTF high marks for trying. Let's thank its members for their six bland statements. Issue each hard-working participant a certificate of our gratitude as we recognize that theirs was a thankless, probably impossible task. Let's then agree that the codification of values is better left to God, Jefferson, and Ranganathan. Let us agree to disagree, because our best bet is to encourage every librarian to continue to debate those values, in ALA, in libraries, wherever library workers talk to each other. From that debate on what we believe are our professional values we may be lucky enough to get the kind of stirring rhetoric we need for the public. Whatever we do, let's not let these vague generalizations be mistaken for our deepest convictions.