Blatant Berry: Dehumanizing the Library
We lose more than we save with self-service
John N. Berry III, Editor-in-Chief -- Library Journal, 8/15/2004
The Rush to self-service, the current fad of library administrators, is robbing libraries of one of their unique and very important qualities. It separates libraries from other agencies and institutions of life in modern society: city hall, the motor vehicle department, the supermarket, and even the doctor's office and the pharmacy. It is the guarantee that when patrons use a library, they will be afforded human interaction with people who are smiling, like their jobs, and know they are there to help. It takes a trained, educated human to make certain the patron's encounter with the library is as rich as possible, especially those first and final bits of business, checking borrowed materials in and out.
These thoughts were triggered by my son Tom, whose summer job is in a local library. The high point of his summer came when he was "promoted" from a variety of other scut work around the library to serving patrons at the circulation desk. Tom welcomed the human interaction and came home every day with stories of books and movies he'd discovered in the materials coming in and going out. He found that patrons frequently wanted to discuss the items, giving him reviews, or asking for his. Patrons welcomed his conversation.
In many hard-pressed libraries, that first and final interaction is frequently delegated to support staff. Sometimes during busy hours, they get a bit harried. Some staff are always a tad difficult. Anyone who has tried to engage the clerks on the circulation desks at some large urban libraries knows that at busy times the encounter will be hostile at best, or dysfunctional at worst. But in many, probably most, libraries the encounter, whether handled by a librarian or a support staffer, is a positive one, spiced with the usual pleasantries and often with some dialog about the book being taken or the DVD movie being returned.
At one library school where I taught, another member of the faculty needed to consult the many volumes of the Public Library Inquiry, that famous study of our profession from the 1950s. When he went to the circulation desk with the whole set, the adolescent clerk on duty said, "Wow! If you read all those, you'll know more about running this place than we do!"
It is bad enough to turn this crucial human exchange over to a burnt-out library employee who should have retired or whose rulebound attitudes suggest he or she would have been happier as a rent-a-cop at the library door. It is equally unfortunate to give the job to a surly, untrained youth who can't wait for the place to close so he or she can get on with the night's entertainments.
Still worse, however, is to turn the first and final encounter between patron and library over to a machine. This immediately subverts the experience of the library into a duplicate of the dehumanized experience with disinterested workers of the supermarkets and the machines and phone menus in our lives. You lose the human touch, the quality that sets libraries apart from all those automated places.
I'm worried about the possibility that RFID and other electronic circulation tools will allow governments to spy on my reading. But I'm much more worried about what that self-service transaction, empowered by all these new technologies, will do to the valuable human interaction that is the sine qua non of good library service. We must not turn that first and last patron connection to the library over to some dumb machine.
