Editorial: Even Dewey Knew It

As editor of Library Journal, I get to hear about the best of what is happening in the profession. Over the past two decades, I have watched librarians transform a broad swath of libraryland through technology and effectively extend its benefits to their constituents. Most librarians I know are exhilarated by the changes, including many who once cringed at the challenges of technology.

I get to hear about the worst in the profession, too. I hear about directors who don’t get it (whatever “it” is), staffs who don’t get it (ditto), boards, users, and politicians who don’t get it (ditto).

I’m tired of those who not only don’t hear one another but don’t want to, from the critics on staff to the directors and boards. I’ve had it with older, and younger, librarians who see the world through myopic generational glasses and who think their way—whether it’s all technology all the time or all classics and classic services all the time—is the only way.

There are librarians out there who are still looking for the library’s role—and their own—in the new century. Is the library an information and entertainment resource, a mainstay of democracy, a community center? Is it an education agency, a literacy partner, or all of the above? They criticize their colleagues for buying into so many missions. They say the library has been commercialized and that librarians have ceded their position as guides and trackers through the books and other materials (electronic or not) that make up the collection.

But the library has always had multiple missions. It is a crucial institution in a complex society, and the librarian’s role has never been richer. Years ago I remember being told a dirty little secret by one librarian: “We don’t want more patrons; we can barely serve the ones we have.” Now librarians are using online services like MySpace to draw nonusers as well as users (see Front Desk), providing ATM-like kiosks at malls and train stations to meet users where they live, and setting up blogs to increase interaction with and among users. These strategies barely touch the surface of the new ways we define “outreach.”

I’ve also heard stock responses like, “We’re not social service agencies,” from library staffers, but that’s exactly what libraries have been for decades. Now they’re becoming the de facto headquarters for people to find out how to apply for government social programs and to connect to them online, for Medicare drug benefits, FEMA assistance, aid to children and families, tax forms, federal student loans, and much more.

In the first issue of LJ (then American Library Journal), Editor-in-Chief Melvil Dewey wrote that the librarian must look “carefully at the wants of his [sic] special community.... The time was that the library was very like a museum, and a librarian a mouser in musty books, and visitors looked with curious eyes at ancient tomes and manuscripts.” Now, he wrote in 1876, it is “not that we have less scholarship, but that we have more life. The passive has become active, and we look for a throng of people going in and out of library doors as in the markets and the stores.”

Amazingly, his words are still relevant. Along with markets and stores, libraries have been transformed and gone online. We’re still open for the throngs of patrons, despite some misguided laments to the contrary. The phrase one door closes and another opens, which echoes through the movie Prairie Home Companion as the final radio show airs, seems particularly apt for the library world right now. Doors are slamming on libraries as we knew them and opening on the 21st-century library and librarian.

fialkoff@reedbusiness.com