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Always Persnickety, for no good reason
Aug. 28th, 2004 10:49 amI think that I just hate the whole privileged perspective of specialists. Most things (including Calculus and Chemistry, poetry as a reader, art as a dedicated viewer, etc) aren't that hard if you're willing to put in the time to learn the specialized vocabulary. Mathematics comes alive when you stop to read the arguments and bickering, the broken careers, dead marriages, dissolved friendships and ongoing feuds that lie behind seemingly simple consensus things like our terminology for infinity or our use of the infinitesimal.
But here I am, in Library School, which to my mind ought to be the temple of the Generalist. Libraries are about offering all the information, all the time, to all the people. I've always loved being able to walk into a library and learn about dead french people, living artists, strange arguments that someone really cared about 55 years ago. Or opening a book at random and learning something about Cesar Chavez or Simone Beauvoir. Or just pulling books off the shelves because they've got a little orange heart on the spine that says they're a romance novel and sitting down to read a few pages of an author whose name I've never even heard before.
A lot of the articles we've been reading for library school, however, sound more like specialists excited by their specialist status than like generalists excited to be playing with other generalists. Maybe that's just a function of who publishes, or of who publishes in the academic world, but I'm tired of this whole Us vs. Them mentality. Us is the educated, the readers, the librarians in this paradigm, and Them is the uneducated, the credulous, the quick-fix wanting users/patrons/customers (pick your term and deride the rest). I know that there are some problematic people out there in the library, looking at pornography on public computers, peeing on the floor in corners, and in general, just asking the same questions over and over. Just like there were babies leaking onto the floor while they toddled around looking at picture books in the Children's bookstore where I used to work. But does that have to be an excuse for starting to talk as if everyone who wasn't a librarian was some kind of deliberately ignorant person who needs to be looked down on?
As I see it, the whole point of being a librarian is mastering all the specialized languages of research so that other people don't have to. Sometimes, when I'm doing research, I just want to walk up to a reference desk and say "I'm looking for what it smelled like in a tavern in France in the 1700s" (<- actual question I asked for real research two months ago). Then the librarian gives me pointers because they know more about what sources or keywords might get me that information. If everyone wanted to master all this training, and learn to speak special query languages and type things in Boolean Algebra and so forth, there would be far fewer jobs for librarians.
I don't mind learning these things. I find them quite interesting, though not as interesting as iambic pentameter or nonstandard analysis. But I do object to the people who use these tools getting snooty that not everyone uses their tools. We don't expect everyone to be a great cook who utilizes candy thermometers and pressure cookers and other arcane (to me) tools. We don't expect everyone to be comfortable running routers and table saws (though I've used both, actually). So why should we expect everyone to be comfortable with search strategies? It just seems silly. That's what we're trained for, so that they can get information. And that's what other people are trained for, so that we can buy taffy and decorated chairs. It's called specialization, I suppose, but I think we should be generalists enough to not be so snooty about our particular specializations.
But here I am, in Library School, which to my mind ought to be the temple of the Generalist. Libraries are about offering all the information, all the time, to all the people. I've always loved being able to walk into a library and learn about dead french people, living artists, strange arguments that someone really cared about 55 years ago. Or opening a book at random and learning something about Cesar Chavez or Simone Beauvoir. Or just pulling books off the shelves because they've got a little orange heart on the spine that says they're a romance novel and sitting down to read a few pages of an author whose name I've never even heard before.
A lot of the articles we've been reading for library school, however, sound more like specialists excited by their specialist status than like generalists excited to be playing with other generalists. Maybe that's just a function of who publishes, or of who publishes in the academic world, but I'm tired of this whole Us vs. Them mentality. Us is the educated, the readers, the librarians in this paradigm, and Them is the uneducated, the credulous, the quick-fix wanting users/patrons/customers (pick your term and deride the rest). I know that there are some problematic people out there in the library, looking at pornography on public computers, peeing on the floor in corners, and in general, just asking the same questions over and over. Just like there were babies leaking onto the floor while they toddled around looking at picture books in the Children's bookstore where I used to work. But does that have to be an excuse for starting to talk as if everyone who wasn't a librarian was some kind of deliberately ignorant person who needs to be looked down on?
As I see it, the whole point of being a librarian is mastering all the specialized languages of research so that other people don't have to. Sometimes, when I'm doing research, I just want to walk up to a reference desk and say "I'm looking for what it smelled like in a tavern in France in the 1700s" (<- actual question I asked for real research two months ago). Then the librarian gives me pointers because they know more about what sources or keywords might get me that information. If everyone wanted to master all this training, and learn to speak special query languages and type things in Boolean Algebra and so forth, there would be far fewer jobs for librarians.
I don't mind learning these things. I find them quite interesting, though not as interesting as iambic pentameter or nonstandard analysis. But I do object to the people who use these tools getting snooty that not everyone uses their tools. We don't expect everyone to be a great cook who utilizes candy thermometers and pressure cookers and other arcane (to me) tools. We don't expect everyone to be comfortable running routers and table saws (though I've used both, actually). So why should we expect everyone to be comfortable with search strategies? It just seems silly. That's what we're trained for, so that they can get information. And that's what other people are trained for, so that we can buy taffy and decorated chairs. It's called specialization, I suppose, but I think we should be generalists enough to not be so snooty about our particular specializations.
