Is This "Gormangate"? ALA President-Elect Draws Fire

Three months before taking office, American Library Association (ALA) president-elect Michael Gorman has touched off a firestorm by taking on bloggers in the pages of Library Journal. At press time, Gorman's "Revenge of the Blog People" (BackTalk, LJ 2/15/05, p. 44) had librarians and bloggers—from within and outside the library community—buzzing, with over 1000 responses on popular technology site Slashdot.org. In addition, emails poured in to LJ and to Gorman himself, who received more than a hundred responses. [For more, see Editorial, p. 8, and Feedback, p. 12.]

Gorman's BackTalk piece was motivated by bloggers' heated response to his December 17 op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times that questioned Google's digitization initiatives. Unfortunately for Gorman, his colorful rhetoric in responding to his critics was largely seen as an attack on blogging. Rather than advancing the discussion of Google's usefulness, Gorman instead ignited a discussion about whether ALA, Gorman, or libraries in general are out of touch with technology.

"It is people like Michael Gorman who weight down and even stall the progression of cutting-edge technology that library users want and ask for," wrote one librarian to LJ. Others, including novelist and comics author Neil Gaiman, joined in questioning Gorman's "defensiveness." Still more wrote to call attention to the power of blogging as a tool for distance education or as a powerful marketing tool on library association web sites.

A minority, however, supported Gorman. "There was actually some concern way back when that the flood of data provided by the Internet was not the same as knowledge," wrote one librarian. "I'm glad to see that ALA has kept this in mind."

Rhetoric aside, libraries and librarians have been early and enthusiastic adopters of and contributors to new information technologies, including blogging. The 2005 ALA Midwinter Meeting was blogged by Public Library Association members, as will be the Association of College and Research Libraries conference, April 7–10, in Minneapolis. Further, there are well over 300 blogs from librarians and libraries (see list at http://dmoz.org/Reference/Libraries/Library_and_Information_Science/Weblogs/), and more coming every day.

Some university libraries, such as the University of Minnesota (UM), have even become the center of blogging on their campuses. UM librarian Shane Nackerud directs the university's UThink blogging program, which offers, maintains, and archives free blogs for the academic community.

"We can tie blogs together based on department, college, major, research interest, or specific classes and bring people together who maybe would never have met if not for the system," Nackerud told LJ upon launching the program last year. "The beauty of all of this is that the library is the center for all of this activity."

Gorman, meanwhile, insists he understands the power of technology and says his blogging critics miss the point. "The majority of my correspondents believe that I either wish them to desist from blogging and/or have the power to make them stop," a bemused Gorman told LJ. "Few seemed to have got any of the jokes in the piece," he added, saying that most of the responses were "humorless, pompous," and "thin-skinned to the point of paranoia."

Karen Schneider, an ALA Council member who also writes the Free Range Librarian blog, dubbed the controversy ("albeit very tongue in cheek") "Gormangate" and worried how Gorman's words portray the library profession. "I'm not sure what effect Gorman was aiming for," she wrote on her blog, adding that she doesn't necessarily buy Gorman's humor explanation. "[I]t made ALA look like the backward organization many of us secretly worry it is."

Although Gorman, dean of libraries at California State University, Fresno, stressed that his views do not represent the views of ALA, or of his employer, Schneider wasn't so sure. "Gorman has to be speaking for all librarians," she posited. "We elected him, didn't we?"

Gorman, meanwhile, remained defiant in the face of his critics. "It is the oldest trick in the world to conflate the special—reservations about the efficacy of the Google digitization project and the worth of blogs—with the general—a hatred of technology—and call the object of the conflation a Luddite or worse," he observed. "But saying it doesn't make it so."