New pages on The Surly Librarian

In case you haven't noticed, this blog now has both an About page and a Favorite Rants page, in addition to the Home page.

The introductory text to the Favorite Rants page is important enough that I am reproducing it here:

I take a couple of themes very seriously:

• First, the quality of human interactions between library professionals and their clients is far more important than collections or technology
• Second, the primary mandate of public libraries is to ensure free access to essential information, together with instruction on how to use it effectively, to those who cannot otherwise get or afford it (see Poor Richard Redux: A Manifesto).

These selected rants—and the whole blog, for that matter—are meant to get at the heart of genuine librarianship, which I believe requires authenticity, integrity and compassion.

And a sardonic sense of humor....

Have fun.

Vocabulary question #2

Can someone adumbrate with precision?

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[Spoiler alert: Don't cheat!]

A warning from the article on adumbrate by The Word Detective:

A cool word should have cool ancestors, or at least a nifty story about how its parents met (“I was raised Middle English, but one day a charming Romany verb came into our tavern…”).

But sometimes knowing a word’s history can dim one’s enjoyment. “Nice,” for instance, is a “nice” word meaning “pleasant or agreeable.” Too bad it originally meant “stupid” (from the Latin nescius, not knowing), eh?

And if I say that I’m “sanguine” about my favorite team’s prospects for the next season, I mean I’m cheerful and optimistic, which is quite a departure from the one of the word’s meanings in the 18th century, “causing or delighting in bloodshed.”

Dead on

When I was playing around with vocabulary websites for the previous post, I stumbled onto The Word Detective by Evan Morris, who also produces My Favorite Word.

On his About page, Morris explains that his father was Editor-in-Chief of Grosset & Dunlap and also wrote a syndicated newspaper column called Words, Wit and Wisdom, answering readers’ questions about word origins and language usage. The Word Detective, based on Morris' own syndicated column, continues that tradition with scholarly yet comical results.

Excerpts from one entry will give you a sense of what I mean:

Dead to rights

Dear Word Detective: All the media and late-night jokesters are having a field day with the latest OJ escapade, of course. Several times I’ve heard or seen the phrase “this time they’ve got him dead to rights,” and I think we all understand what it means.... [Just] when and where did it come from? — Ken in Houston.


“Dead to rights” is indeed an odd expression, dating at least to the mid-19th century, when it was first collected in a glossary of underworld slang (“Vocabulum, or The Rogue’s Lexicon,” by George Matsell, 1859).

The first part of the phrase, “dead,” is a slang use of the word to mean “absolutely, without doubt.” This use is more commonly heard in the UK, where it dates back to the 16th century, than in the US. “Dead” meaning “certainly” is based on the earlier use of “dead” to mean, quite logically, “with stillness suggestive of death, absolutely motionless,” a sense we still use when we say someone is “dead asleep.” The “absolutely, without doubt” sense is also found in “dead broke” and “dead certain.”

The “to rights” part of the phrase is a bit more complicated. “To rights” has been used since the 14th century to mean “in a proper manner,” or, later, “in proper condition or order,” a sense we also use in phrases such as “to set to rights,” meaning “to make a situation correct and orderly” (“Employed all the afternoon in my chamber, setting things and papers to rights,” Samuel Pepys, 1662).

In the phrase “caught dead to rights,” the connotation is that every formality required by the law has been satisfied, and that the apprehension is what crooks in the UK used to call a “fair cop,” a clean and justifiable arrest. (“Cop,” from the Latin “capere,” to seize, has long been used as slang for “to grab” as well as slang for a police officer.)

Of course, there’s many a slip ‘twixt the cop and the lips of the jury, so we shall see. Wake me when it’s over.

See what I mean?

Full of real info, but it's a stitch to read.

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Trivia bonus: Who can explain the meaning and origin of "it's a stitch"? Post a Comment.

Vocabulary Question #1

Can someone luxuriate standing up?

Ooooh, nooo...!

It's science project time again!

Worse news: I got the "radish question" again!

Fortunately, this time I knew to ask if this was about chemical versus organic fertilizer and took my young client to the organic gardening books.

Whew!

Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer

The Centered Librarian has an interesting post about Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer. The book includes a new collection of Edward Gorey's work—on postal envelopes and letters, of all things.

As blogger David Booker write:

Between September 1968 and October 1969, Gorey set out to collaborate on three children’s books with author and editor Peter F. Neumeyer and, over the course of this 13-month period, the two exchanged a series of letters on topics that soon expanded well beyond the three books and into everything from metaphysics to pancake recipes.

Here's an example of the envelope art:

Take a look at this fascinating book.

In Memoriam - Stetson Kennedy, 1916-2011

• In Memoriam, Oral History Association
• VOICES: Stetson Kennedy and the pursuit of truth, Facing South
• Person of the Year: 2009, Folio Weekly

The Human Library

This post is a footnote to the previous one.

I used an image there which I found on The Centered Librarian, a blog by David Booker which he describes as "Tracking innovation, development and experimentation in information studies and library science and spotting new technologies, trends, fun stuff and much more."

I hadn't heard of The Human Library project before, by Booker's article certainly caught my attention. Here's a bit from their About pages:

What is the Human Library?

The Human Library is an innovative method designed to promote dialogue, reduce prejudices and encourage understanding.The main characteristics of the project are to be found in its simplicity and positive approach.

In its initial form the Human Library is a mobile library set up as a space for dialogue and interaction. Visitors to a Human Library are given the opportunity to speak informally with “people on loan”; this latter group being extremely varied in age, sex and cultural background.

The Human Library enables groups to break stereotypes by challenging the most common prejudices in a positive and humorous manner. It is a concrete, easily transferable and affordable way of promoting tolerance and understanding.

It is a “keep it simple”, “no-nonsense” contribution to social cohesion in multicultural societies. Read more about the history HERE.

Booker's image is actually from a YongeStreet article about Toronto Public Library's Human Library project. The author Paul Gallant reports:

The Toronto Public Library held its first Human Library event at five branches on Nov. 6 [2010], attracting more than 200 users who checked out the likes of a police officer, a comedian, a sex-worker-turned-club-owner, a model and a survivor of cancer, homelessness and poverty. They're all volunteers whose lives would make good reading, but even better one-on-one chatting.

Follow all of these links. It's an exciting idea which fits very well with my contention in the previous post that libraries are about people, not information.

The wrong conversation

I think we library professionals have been having the wrong conversation for the past few decades.

We struggle to fund, deliver and market the content and technology we think our users want. We forget that what makes libraries unique among public agencies is the specialized research skills and service orientation of our professional staff.

Granted, libraries are masters at delivering content, and they have always been early adapters of new technologies. We were among the first to explore how computers could be used to label, store and retrieve information in practical and powerful ways for the public. As mobile digital content has become delinked from containers and locations, we have continued to keep up with the changes.

However, library folk tend not to think in terms of owning information, much less marketing it. More to the point, we know that what the public needs from us is not so much the information itself. Libraries provide that no other public agency does, the expertise of professional searchers, human specialists who can do intelligent, probing interviews, determine what the deeper information needs are, and then provide that information, regardless of format, in the ways which best suit the users’ situations.

Public service or marketplace

Our greatest disadvantage is that libraries are usually not profit-making entities. Precisely because we are not, we tend to be at the mercy of funders who have other priorities. This has always been true, of course. In recent decades, though, governments have replaced the public service needs-assessment model for justifying funding with the retail world's narrower, consumer-driven marketing model.

At first glance this seems to make sense. Given the steady decline of public revenue, it is plausible to assume that taxpayers will be more willing to pay for what they believe they want. That notion has led libraries and our public funders to skew our choices more and more in the direction of constantly shifting and difficult to measure "customer satisfaction."

The rationale given for this shift is that libraries are increasingly “in competition” with retail providers of the same “products” we offer. We have, in effect, been reengineering libraries into “free stores,” trying to stock whatever the most savvy—or at least the most demanding—consumers feel they are entitled to.

The “taxpayer revolt”

However, there are some fallacies hidden behind this shift in funding rationale. The first fallacy is that the decline of public funding is recent, due to national economic troubles. In fact, this decline did not begin with the crash of 2008 or the federal tax cuts of 2001. It has actually been accelerating ever since the early 1980s.

Historical reality suggests that the shift is due not simply to a decline in available revenue but to a broad decline in public and political willingness to fund public social services. Beneath the so-called “taxpayer revolt” of recent decades is a drastic change in core national values.

Many Americans seem to have lost their sense of civic responsibility, the conviction that those with at least basic material stability ought to contribute to the welfare of the whole community, regardless of what they need or want personally. This conviction was undergirded in earlier times by an awareness that such civic benevolence helped the givers as much as the receivers.

We now struggle instead under the illusory metaphor of the marketplace, the dystopian notion that we should only have to pay the government for what we want for ourselves. Even those of us who pay little or nothing in taxes tend to believe that any agency which the public funds should deliver whatever we imagine we are “entitled” to get from it, regardless of what that agency’s actual mandate and resources are.

People, not information

The sad truth is that now we are in a drastic, long-term economic decline. It becomes increasingly difficult to convince the public and the politicians to fund services which they were already defunding in boom times. That makes it all the more important to expose the second fallacy about library funding. That fallacy is that libraries can (and should) find ways to provide comparable goods and services with fewer staff people.

In the private sector it is gospel that, when you need to reduce the bottom line, you cut payroll, the most expensive budget category. Since the corporate world is where our culture “learns” about budgetary efficiency, this notion has been imported into the public sector. The key problem is that, in social services, the key ingredient is not “goods and services” but human interaction.

As I suggested at the start, my contention is that libraries are social services. What makes us unique is not information or access to information but, rather, human specialists who can interact professionally yet compassionately with their users, determine what those people’s needs are, and guide them to the information and to effective ways to use it.

People frequently come to us with ill-formed notions about what information will serve their needs, and with ill-informed notions about how to get that information. Human library specialists are essential intermediaries between these users and the whole dizzying 21st century array of “containers” and “media” for information storage and retrieval.

It is not information which we give away at public expense, so much as it is our expert interviews, searches, coaching, instruction—and, most important, human understanding.

The Surly Librarian post to which I linked earlier in this piece was called “It’s the infrastructure, stupid!” My argument here—my argument with both library administrators and with public funders—is that it’s the people, stupid!

Libraries cannot compete with Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Verizon and Google, etc., etc., etc.... I contend that we shouldn’t have to. What we give away that those commercial enterprises cannot sell is quality human interaction.

Interaction between expertly trained, caring, patient professionals, people willing to puzzle out—sometimes at great length and in the face of customer frustration and annoyance—what each person who comes to us really needs, and what path to satisfaction of that need she should take, either through our own collections or through the myriad publications, corporations, agencies and online archives to which we can lead them.

I’m not advocating that libraries should stop trying to keep up with the mobile digital revolution.

I am advocating that we should insist—demand—that our public funders recognize that our staff are our product.

If we had no collection at all but still had our staff, we could continue to be a public social service.

Am I crazy, or am I onto something?