Civil Wars: On Leadership, Geeks, and Being Nice | Peer to Peer Review
Let's look around, find our Cassandras, and listen to them for a change Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN Apr 28, 2011 |
| Photo by Debora Miller |
Sometimes I think those of us who work in libraries are the harshest critics of our own profession. Eli Neiburger has recently proposed that we should dump reference services and hire more geeks. Reference is dead and, as he previously pointed out, books are an outmoded technology; we are so screwed. What we really need to do is promote libraries as a platform for local experience and expression. And that means we'll have to hire geeks—and, presumably, fire librarians to create these new lines since we don't have a lot of money floating around. Besides, librarians obviously have failed to rise to the occasion.
Then there's Jeffrey Trzeciak of McMaster University, who also pretty much thinks reference is dead. He got rid of the reference desk, the cataloging department, and a third of the library staff. He doubts he'll ever hire another librarian. Post-docs and IT professionals are much more clever and enthusiastic than librarians. This, not surprisingly, caused a certain amount of heat. To be fair, he was told to be provocative; telling a profession "you're useless" works a treat.
It's a guy thing
Like Mita Williams, who blogs at New Jack Librarian, I sense an intriguing gender angle to all this. Geeks are, after all, mostly guys, right? Well, I'm not so sure. I've always felt librarians were the ur-geeks. We were geeky when "geek" was a carnival performer doing disgusting things to small rodents. We were the slightly-obsessive smart kids who used computers to do cool stuff before most people had ever laid eyes on a computer. But we are also a largely female profession, a service profession, a profession that might as well have been raised in Minnesota, we're all so nice and eager to get along. We're accommodating to the point that we often smile and nod and agree to things that make us roll our eyes in private. But we are a service profession, after all, and we don't want to get into arguments with people who have more power.
That niceness does not qualify us to be geeks, which (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) also means "overly intelligent, diligent, unsociable... extremely devoted to and knowledgeable about computers." Nice girls aren't like that—or are we? We've lived with similar stereotypes since Donna Reed clutched books to her chest, doomed to become a lonely spinster in the dark alternate reality of It's a Wonderful Life. Have we fought off that image of being socially awkward and too smart for our own good so successfully than now men have colonized it and made it cool?
I don't think we've abandoned being smart or being good with computers. There's something else going on. The fact is, it's okay for men to dress down, act up, and sound off. Women tend to get punished for that.
The madwoman in the library
When the future of libraries is the topic, how often are the "experts" called upon to speak male? Williams points to a Library Journal-cosponsored symposium scheduled for next month in which women speakers are outnumbered seven to one. Are women just not good at technology, so timid about change? Could it be because women are less inclined to dismantle libraries, or at least say so gleefully in public, so we aren't as much fun to listen to? Or is it that women who ask tough questions are not considered leaders, but are seen as shrill and strange Cassandras?
Williams raises an excellent point. Who would put Cassandra in charge of anything? What a loser. She's given the gift of prophecy along with the curse of being ignored. Everyone thinks she's crazy, and it goes seriously downhill from there.
I know a lot of smart women who don't back down from conflict, but rarely are they held up as leaders. They're more likely to be considered awkward and difficult, people to be avoided. At the same time, I know a lot of librarians who gnash their teeth when common-sense solutions to our problems are called too radical or too disruptive, but they don't paraphrase Dick the Butcher in Henry VI and say "the first thing we do, let's kill all the librarians."
I don't doubt that librarians are in a difficult position, dealing with publishers who care more about their bottom lines than about the future of libraries. After all, our mission is very often not their mission, and when even our missions are similar, as in the case of scholarly societies, our proposed solution becomes their problem. Open access does not appear to be the fix when income from libraries has sustained the society's activities. In the case of public libraries, trade publishers have no algorithm for putting a value on the way the public library creates and sustains a reading culture and, because libraries are not the biggest spenders, their share of the market seems less significant than it really is. Besides, when we get angry, they don't think we're visionary; they think we're being shrill and hysterical. That gendered word is a favorite way to dismiss librarians' principled stands.
What I've learned
I take Neiburger's point that we're ceding too much power to vendors and corporate publishers, because they offer the large-scale technology we need and the content our users insist on. Academic libraries have gone too far down that road. If we could get bigger servers and more technical know-how and if we could coax our public to come on over and use it, we might come up with sustainable alternatives.
I even take Trzeciak's point that library organizations that were designed for a different kind of work need to be reorganized, that new skillsets are needed. I'm just not at all convinced that librarians as a class are incapable of or unwilling to learn those skills.
But I have learned something valuable. When I hear Neiburger say that books are an outmoded technology and I just have to get used to it, I am getting a clearer picture of how offensive my calls for open access might sound to our faculty. The reason I go to the public library is to get books. What do libraries know about publishing? How will some crazy DIY solution ensure high standards? How will it even work?
As a public library patron, I would not be happy if told I had to work with the library to break the stranglehold of corporate publishers, that the library's new job is to help the community make their own creative works. Um... no, thanks. That outmoded technology you just dissed? It's really important to me. I came here to get a book and you're telling me you won't do that anymore? Who put you in charge?
Double agents of change
Finding myself on the other side has reminded me that I need to find ways for faculty to own the issues and not disparage the qualities of traditional publishing that matter to them. We urgently need to stop being accommodating when it makes us unable to serve our cultural purpose: to share and preserve resources communally. But we have to make sure our calls for radical change don't insult the communities we serve. And when we talk to each other-which is when most calls for radical change are aired-let's not insult one another, either. The women who have defended library values for generations are not the problem.
What I suggest is that we look around, find our Cassandras, and listen to them for a change.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), was published last year by Minotaur Books.
