Fungible Convictions

A private school librarian writes in Sunday’s Washington Post that kids aren’t reading and that, in turn, the professional purpose of English teachers and librarians is disappearing. First a snippet, and then a critique of this argument that shows up once a year in every general interest publication:

Typically, many people in my line of work no longer have the title of librarian. They are called media and information specialists, or sometimes librarian technologists. The buzzword in the trade is “information literacy,” a misnomer, because what it is really about is mastering computer skills, not promoting a love of reading and books. These days, librarians measure the quality of returns in data-mining stints. We teach students how to maximize a database search, about successful retrieval rates. What usually gets lost in the scramble is a careful reading of the material.

[. . .]

Conventional wisdom has it that teenagers don’t read because they’re too busy. Only after high school, sometime midway through college, do young adults reconnect with their childhood love of reading and make books their partners for life. I don’t think so anymore. The 2004 Reading at Risk report by the National Endowment for the Arts concluded that literary reading was in serious decline on all fronts, especially among the youngest adults, ages 18 to 24, whose rate of decrease was 55 percent greater than that of the total adult population.

1. Despite its popularity as a starting point in the reading crisis discussion, the NEA study is deeply flawed (not to mention self-serving). Its scope is a mere twenty years, from 1982 to 2002, with a third survey in 1992. It doesn’t allow for comparison of other decades affected by technological change. It takes as a given that literary reading declined in each of the intervening years—forcefully implying, without evidence, that the trend from 2002 onward will be down, as was the trend from the Renaissance to 1982.

2. The study and literary apologists like the librarian above assume that literary activity is synonymous with reading literature, which is b.s. The health of the literary life is measured not just in books read but in conversations had and letters and articles read about books, in events attended, in one’s own writing. I don’t doubt that fewer people are reading Dickens and Austen. But more people are discussing Dickens and Austen than ever before, and literature is healthier for it.

3. No one is in a position to speculate what kids fifty years ago thought about the books they read, or whether kids fifty years ago who read as kids went on to read as adults, or vice versa. We don’t have the data. There is no golden age of reading to cite. And there’s certainly no evidence that a society that reads Big Books is a saner or less violent or more just society. (Heck, Thomas Jefferson’s vaunted literacy didn’t keep him from turning the presidential campaign of 1800 into the filthiest in American history.)

4. Librarians have traditionally been information managers. And information used to be more exclusive, a lot less manageable when there were just books and musty rooms. I couldn’t tell you when librarianship became conflated with literacy education—perhaps with the creation of the public library system. But it’s not the primary job of librarians or English teachers to get young people interested in reading literature. (That’s the job of writers and other readers!) Librarians do have an advocacy role, but they can’t be expected to advocate to teenagers on behalf of an entire medium. And English teachers are responsible for the development of students’ capacity to appreciate and use the English language—a task that necessarily involves great literature. The job description is “teach the language, broadly and deeply, to our kids, because broad, deep knowledge of language results in a better person.” The job description is not “convince our kids to read literature.”

Anyway, that’s enough for now. What do you all think? Am I off my rocker?

Richard Cravatts, you’ve going to have a lot of explaining to do after insulting some of the brightest—and increasing influential—professionals in the country: library scientists. Your Boston Globe op-ed today “When Librarians Protect Terrorists” is the #1 e-mailed story of the day. You take a controversial stand on the legality of investigative seizure of library records, and you make a good point, that records aren’t private because a library itself is public, at least in the recent case of a Waltham Newton, MA, librarian who denied the FBI access to a library computer after a bomb threat against Brandeis University was traced back there.

But then you write:

More to the point, why are librarians, whose professional training concentrates on mastering the use of the Dewey Decimal System, making any decisions that affect law enforcement?

How can someone be so naive? You’re just asking for letters to pour in from around North America—some probably addressed to the Globe and to Boston University—pointing out the mind-boggling rigor of a librarian’s education and the importance librarians now hold in the fields of computer science, corporate archiving, curating, records restoration, and—above all—law. Let’s look at a sample of coursework from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information Science, which along with Michigan and UNC is probably the best program on the continent:

FIS1210H Information and its Social Contexts

An introduction to the economic, political and sociological dimensions of an information-rich environment, including the historical development of information studies, knowledge production, issues of control versus free flow of information (such as intellectual freedom, intellectual property rights, and public policy), the social organization and distribution of knowledge, and ethical and legal aspects of information services. (Caidi)

FIS1342H Designing Information Systems

Designing information systems in the face of competing goals from multiple stakeholders, e.g., efficiency, cost, reliability, security, privacy, usability, adaptability, reusability, time-to-market. Systematic techniques and models for identifying and evaluating alternatives. Non-functional requirements and architectural design. Organizing design knowledge for reuse. (Yu)

FIS2158H Management of Corporate and other Special Information
Centres

Critical survey of theory and current practice pertaining to information services in special libraries. A major component of the course is a professionally supervised practicum which provides students with opportunities to apply management and information practices and skills.

FIS2165H Social Issues in Information and Communication Technologies

Examination of major social issues related to the computerization of society. A unifying theme is the view of information technology as providing the means for social as well as technical control, with the various advantages and drawbacks this can mean. The social issues that are explored in greatest depth are those related to the computerization of work (displacement, skill, control, monitoring) and access to information (privacy, surveillance and freedom of information). Additional topics may include: information infrastructure development, social vulnerability and risk, militarization, social choices in design and the ethical responsibilities of information professionals. (Clement)

FIS2181H Information Policy

Introduction to policymaking and the players and stakes involved in information creation, access and use. Emphasis on the political, economic, legal and social issues affecting information and its institutions, including relevant social theory and analytical methods. The focal policy issues considered in depth will vary from year to year: e.g. government information, intellectual property, intellectual freedom, (universal) access, cultural content, community networking, and privacy. (Caidi)

As if that weren’t enough, check out the requirements for Toronto’s combo J.D./M.A.I.S. program. And so you know the kind of people who will be writing those letters, you might want to look at these biographical sketches of graduated FIS students.

Librarians, archivists, and the like are some of the most important behind-the-scenes actors in our society. They’re the keepers of our collective memory and take their jobs—and the law—very seriously. Librarian Kathy Glick-Weil’s intransigence was nothing short of noble civil disobedience: there’s a bad law on the books, it allows for undue collection of information on peaceful persons, and she took a stand. She deserves our admiration, not a derision of her education, intelligence, or calling.

Cravatts bio

Write to Richard!: cravatts@bu.edu

Or better yet, write to the Globe!: letter@globe.com

Update: The anti-privacy trend continues . . . as of today, by law, all job sites, even ones run by private universities, are required to keep a copy of your resume—that is, a copy of your whereabouts from one year to the next. BoingBoing: “Feds require job sites to keep copies of resumes”. Just like telecom companies allowing the feds to wiretap you because “senior government officials” asked them to, job sites are now making resumes permanently available to the government without first informing their users. USA Today “Telecoms let NSA spy on calls”