Blatant Berry: The Google Divide
Those who inherit it should design the future
John N. Berry III, Editor-at-Large -- Library Journal, 10/15/2006
Frustration with one another is often the primary tie connecting those library staffers whose careers began in the “pre-Google” era to the “post-Google” newcomers. I realized that during dinner conversation with an excited group of young leaders of the library digital revolution who traded stories from their work.
It took me a few minutes to figure out why the anecdotes from these young change agents sounded so familiar, even to someone whose career began long before computers. This generation of developing leaders finds the revolution in creative library applications of technology, but their complaints about those who resist the future are nearly identical to those in the precomputer prehistory of librarianship, when I started. That was so long ago that my cohorts and I forget that awful frustration. It has always been part of library life.
Today, like yesterday, the frustration camps out in every kind of workplace in our field: from the faculty of LIS programs where tenured traditionals hold off the digital drive from the new Library 2.0 students to the smallest public libraries where young digital innovators try to bring change to a staff and public who still view the role and purpose of the library and librarians much as Dewey did when he first called it a profession. It was there when Jim Welbourne rallied library school students to a Congress for Change in the mid-Sixties. It was there when Pat Schuman and a band of young librarians convinced the American Library Association to oppose the Vietnam War. It was even there when the young Charlie Robinson first shouted, “Give ’em what they want,” and when Fred Kilgour and Hugh Atkinson made shared cataloging a reality with their new OCLC.
As a profession, we have always given vehement lip service to innovation and creativity, to change and progress. So those who were and are new to our profession were and are always surprised in their first, second, or even third jobs to find deeply rooted resistance to new ideas and innovation. Those who made it to top spots, most of them after years of struggle against the same resistance to change, either forgot their frustrations on the way up or want newcomers to go through the same pain they did. It sometimes looks like an initiation rite, since there is rarely any right or wrong in this struggle. Oh, sure, sometimes the new ideas are really crackpot schemes. Sometimes there is a genuine shortage of resources, and a library can’t afford the time and money to make the innovation work. Once in a while change even brings negative criticism that could do political damage.
More often, though, resistance to change is based on fear. Some are wary of reactions from the governing authority and public that rarely materialize. Others imagine their own obsolescence. (When you’re my age, you’ve probably experienced your own obsolescence several times.)
There is fear on both sides of the Google gap. Many library staff are apprehensive about the rules that stifle innovation by spelling out who can go ahead with an idea or speak out about the library in the new channels the digital world has made available to all.
My dinner companions told of a librarian who started a MySpace site for the library without asking permission. There were lots of other tales of librarians saying things on blogs and wikis that older staff deemed “inappropriate.” I wish I was wise enough to suggest a way to bridge the Google gap, but I’m not sure we can. I believe that we can survive the transition. Maybe we can even try to understand each other and move the best stuff on both sides across that divide.
From here, it looks like the future of libraries and librarians is on the post-Google side. So I suggest that those of us on the pre-Google side listen carefully to the newcomers. After all, it is their future, so they should be given the autonomy and support to begin to design it right now.
