This Book Is Overdue! Page 3

  And how would you value the reference librarian who answered the question, “Where can I find a book on bootyism?”? Check Google for bootyism and you’ll find out all you ever wanted to know about booty shaking; Google didn’t prompt, as it occasionally does with presumptive misspellings, “Are you sure you don’t mean…?” But librarians are trained to prompt till they figure it out: Ah, not bootyism—Buddhism.

  Mosman Library, located near Sydney, Australia, sponsored a contest involving two librarians, one armed with the library’s online reference resources, the other with Google and the free Web. For five days running, they were given forty-five minutes to solve a challenging question—one was about alternative therapies for Parkinson’s disease, another about women writers of the Beat Generation. I couldn’t wait for the answers to be posted each day. There’s something about the game-show format that sharpens the teeth and quickens the blood. No outcome could be as exciting as the race itself—the blink of the library’s webpage as it refreshed and posted the updated results with the latest comments from their colleagues scorning Wikipedia or applauding the contestants’ speed.

  The librarian working the library’s databases was more efficient, accurate, and concise (she could find great answers in two or three minutes) than the one surfing Google, although he had been very resourceful wading through the junk to find authoritative answers. But the moderator of the contest declined to declare a victor. “You,” the patron, were the winner. And, yeah, we patrons are lucky; we get to use both the library’s resources and the Web. For my money, though, the librarians themselves were the winners, skillful jockeys who could tear through tracks of all kinds of information and race back with the prize, the right answers.

  In late 1996, the Benton Foundation and the Kellogg Foundation released a joint report titled Buildings, Books, and Bytes that questioned the value of librarians. Both foundations have been leaders in researching educational uses for media and the Internet, and this report was a valuable sounding, an effort to get a sense of what the public wanted from libraries.

  …the focus group participants placed libraries at the fringes of modern life, especially in relation to the technological revolution. Most telling, they did not see libraries leading the way in the digital revolution. In fact, they thought libraries should take a reactive role, adapting to new technologies. Libraries “should stay just behind the curve. We don’t need them to be on the curve because most people aren’t,” as one participant put it. Indeed, in a world of tight budgetary constraints, these Americans did not want to invest in libraries as technology leaders….

  When asked to think about the role of libraries in the future, they placed libraries firmly in the past. In 30 years, they said, libraries would be relegated to a “kind of museum where people can go and look up stuff from way back when.”

  The “public” the Benton report consulted were eleven white, middle-class, middle-aged people who described themselves as frequent library users. I’m guessing that these people had computers and cable television at home and lots of book and video stores nearby to provide entertainment and intellectual stimulation. To them, libraries were emblems of prestige, nice places to hang quilt shows; a library was like a pair of glasses their community wore to look smart.

  The focus group participants…acknowledged that librarians could perform a useful role as navigators in the as-yet difficult-to-navigate universe of the Internet. Yet they just as easily sanctioned the notion that trained library professionals could be replaced with community volunteers, such as retirees.

  It’s all too easy to picture, as their long discussion came to a close, the focus group relishing the piling-on phase. They had whaled and walloped on libraries for hours; it was time to go home. Replace librarians with community volunteers? I could see him, the smug citizen, leaning in to lob the last brick: “What’s the difference between a librarian and a retired volunteer? About $40,000.”

  The Benton and Kellogg researchers didn’t accept the conclusion that people wanted nothing more from their libraries. After further research, they suggested that people were nostalgic for the libraries and the librarians of their youth. They were loathe to see librarians change, but as long as they didn’t change too much, well, a little technology in their libraries might be all right. Librarians weren’t all that enthusiastic, either, not at first. “They resisted Internet access—but it was the only service that took off without any advertising,” in the words of one young librarian. The experience of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue was typical; there had been wifi in the periodicals room for years, but not in the reading rooms. No announcement had to be made when it was introduced there in 2007; within hours, everyone in the reading room was online. The wired library was inevitable. It was happening, whether people were ready for it or not. With Bill Gates seeding computers in libraries, and Al Gore pushing through legislation for federal funding for broadband access, the Benton Foundation prepared a briefing packet—and sample posters with slogans like “Surf the net, or dive into a great book”—to help librarians get out the message that there was room in libraries for both books and bytes.

  Late in the 1990s, I saw my local public libraries shake off their dust and stir to life. The new hardware was a crucial component, but no, really it was the librarians themselves who were making the difference. They got computer training. They took charge of the machinery, the computers and printers and copiers that often broke down or ran empty and dry; they had a designated computer troubleshooter on staff, and teenage computer whizzes who came in after school to teach patrons and help the librarians. They bought computers through their consortium, which kept them serviced and updated them every few years. Instead of tearing their hair out about what else had landed on their plate, and what else could go wrong with the cursed machines, librarians added another responsibility to their set of jobs.

  That spot behind the technological curve sucked, as anyone knew who had stared in frustration as impenetrable symbols cluttered the webpage, or watched his files disappear, or felt momentarily flummoxed when someone asked about his browser (Which one is the browser?). It felt like you were getting stupider. It felt like being trampled by horse hooves in the age of cars. And the experts, frankly, were obnoxious. How many times can you stand to hear variations on “You just don’t get it.” Really, it was simple: Where else could you go, who could you trust, what could you afford? For many of us, librarians are the best and sometimes the only answer.

  That early focus group was wrong. Librarians need to be ahead of the curve. And it was their lucky day, and ours, too, when computers came to the library.

  The silver-haired librarians who got their library degrees way back in the twentieth century came from backgrounds in history and literature. These days, it’s more likely to be computer majors wending their way through information science school—people like Jenny Levine: “Hi, my name is Jenny, and I’ll be your librarian today,” she announces on her blog The Shifted Librarian. Levine happens to be in Chicago, but that doesn’t matter. She lives on the Web, where anyone can find her. She has a following, built up over the years she wrote Librarian du Jour, a blog that sent those just learning how to use the social web off to explore new sites. Levine belongs to a new generation of librarians who proudly call themselves geeks. They pepper the Web with computer-savvy tools and techniques, and at every conference or gathering of librarians, Levine or her equivalent will be there to train, mentor, and troubleshoot. Welcome to Library 2.0, where librarians prowl the untidy streets of the Internet.

  The annual American Library Association conference in 2007 featured 27,000 librarians pouring through the streets of Washington, D.C., descending on the Walter E. Washington Convention Center and filling every nearby conference room. There were multiple Library 2.0 sessions on the program, such as “Once Upon a Furl in a Podcast Long Ago: Using New Technologies to Support Library Instruction”—a sexy title for a librarian panel. It made my heart beat faster, because I k
new about Furl (which has since morphed into Diigo), one of those free and ingenious bibliographic services that let you organize the articles you find online. The panel’s organizers had miscalculated the turnout, no doubt thinking, “Furl…podcast…how cute!” and had scheduled the panel in one of the smaller hotel conference rooms. The crowd was double what the space could hold. I had to step over librarians young and old in the hall and the aisles, then pick my way back through the tunnel of a room to find a chair. Of course librarians showed up for a presentation on using the new technologies. They need to know.

  The panelists, all academic librarians, presented a unified front. They agreed that computer users could be divided into digital immigrants (those of us who were trying to catch up) and digital natives (younger people seemingly born hardwired for the new technologies, or maybe it’s just that they’ve studied computers in school). With the exception of a few very young, edgy-looking women, most of us in the room counted as immigrants—me and the silver-haired librarians. In spite of our best efforts, we were never going to master this language that those born after about 1980 speak so fluently. We could learn the lingo and tools of the digital age, but we would always have a thick accent when we spoke. We were babushka-wearers (I don’t deny it; I’m sure I sound like Borat talking about computers). It was too late already to be whiz kids, though we could be trained. And, by the way, if any of us ever thought of teaching a class by standing in front of rows of students and lecturing, we should hop onto the back of the next sled and roll off at the nearest tundra. Because the digital natives did not learn by being lectured to. They learned by collaborating, networking, sharing. They were not just consumers of information, literature, wisdom, history, all that good stuff—they saw themselves as creators, too.

  In one of those sweet stories that transcend the divide, panelist Kathy Burnett remembered the class of library students she taught at Rutgers way back in 1990. It was a course in introductory programming called “Internet Interfaces,” and as part of their exploration, the students—all of them women over thirty-five—posted a notice on one of the early shared spaces on the Web, asking for help. They found it in the form of a knowledgeable guide who coached them online for ten weeks. He turned out to be fourteen.

  You never know what shape your information guru will take.

  I would not have pegged the fresh-faced young woman on the panel as a guru, and I doubt she’d describe herself as such; too modest. Neat, straight brown hair, and glasses, a black suit over white blouse, she looked like part of an army of young, smart preppies, her mouth often tilted with humor or in a dry aside. Kathryn Shaughnessy of St. John’s University in Queens (New York) was jetting off to Rome in three days, she said, to teach a class of twenty international students in the university’s new master’s program in Global Development and Social Justice. The students would be coming from India, Palestine, Thailand, Africa, and the Caribbean, and speaking English, their second or third language. Most of them would be on scholarship; at least one of these students would walk through the door and say, “Is that a computer? I’ve heard of these computers.” It was Shaughnessy’s job as an instructional librarian to give them enough information tools that they could return to their (certainly poor, possibly war-torn or disaster-trashed) home countries prepared to spend two years completing graduate school online. They weren’t just learning for the sake of their own educational ambitions; the students would be researching conditions in their country, experimenting with activist solutions, and posting the results to the bank of world knowledge. They needed to know how to use these tools to help their communities. Shaughnessy had conducted this immersion training the year before, for the first class of master’s candidates, and trying to keep the students all on track and online through the past year had been harrowing. But she and the program had survived, and now she was about to repeat the experience and double her responsibilities.

  I’d never imagined a librarian missionary, or considered the concept of intellectual charity. And yet now, listening to Shaughnessy zip through a condensed version of her course for the benefit of the gathered librarians, my brain was doing cartwheels. The most important tool for the far-flung students was the RSS feed, the real simple syndication that brings to a single page all the sites you want to monitor. Why was that such a helpful tool? Because the computer didn’t need to be turned on for an RSS page to be updated; the most current news was always waiting there, a plus when their access to power was limited. And this was no joke: one of her students had had to use his motorcycle battery for backup when the town generator blew.

  If Shaughnessy could get someone who’d never seen a computer before up and running, capable of using Skype’s free Internet telephone to talk with teachers and fellow students, monitoring world events through RSS feeds, posting statistics and photos on blogs and Flickr, making podcasts—in mere weeks—then wasn’t there hope for us all?

  3.

  ON THE GROUND

  This is the greatest and most fraught romance of modern society, the marriage between the IT staff and those who depend on them.

  Martha Alcott, head of reference services at the Chappaqua Library in Westchester County, New York, called the information desk at the beginning of the migration, to see how things were going. What’s a migration, you might wonder? It’s an interesting word choice that summons up hordes of human refugees, or flocks of geese; but in this case it meant 4 million digital catalog entries were being transferred from one application to another, a move as fraught and risky in its own way as a dash across a six-lane highway. The Chappaqua Library was one of thirty-seven in the Westchester Library System, a consortium just north of New York City, all sharing the same software. It had been in use for eight years—an eternity in the world of computing. The consortium had been told that the catalog software was so old its vendor would no longer offer technical support. Ready or not, all thirty-seven of these networked libraries had to suffer this improvement.

  The migration was happening even as I looked around the library, but such are the mysteries of progress that all seemed placid on a particularly sleepy Saturday in April 2007. A few people surfed the Internet, but the catalog-only computers sat blankly on desktops, corralled between the stacks and the sun-flooded reading room with its periodical displays, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Review of Books. Throughout the building, in patches of natural light, printed warning signs in stand-up Plexiglas frames declared: “Please be patient while we change our software! April 6th–April 16th. No more than five items checked out at a time! Patrons must have their library card to check out items—no exceptions!”

  We were in the land of rules and exhortations. The rules weren’t odious, but still—“no exceptions!”

  Carolyn Reznick and Maryanne Eaton had been on the job since the place opened at nine a.m. The signs had had an effect: the usual crush of Saturday-morning traffic in this literate community had slowed to a trickle. This was a town of mothers with law degrees stashed in drawers, of people whose foreheads throbbed during the three-second wait at the cash machine. The idea of limits and delays, the prospect of librarians writing down titles, product codes, and library-card numbers by hand, had dampened enthusiasm for free DVD rentals. The only question being asked at the information desk was: “What’s wrong with the catalog?” No matter how many times Reznick and Eaton repeated the sentence, “Our system is being upgraded,” the librarians never rolled their eyes or got irritable, but instead smiled in welcome. “Can I help you? Our system is being upgraded. Thank you for your patience. Yes, the catalog will be down until the sixteenth. Thank you for your patience.”

  Reznick liked to call libraries “the new village green,” but not today. She was prepared to help with Internet searches, government documents, reading suggestions, term papers, résumés—any of their information needs—but few were asking. “It’s dead in here,” she told Alcott, one reference librarian to another. “It’s a tomb—which is good, because nothing is worki
ng.”

  Somewhere, the digital catalog was chugging and churning through a server, perhaps in Huntsville, Alabama, where the SirsiDynix Corporation has its headquarters, its numerous software engineers, and its computer troubleshooters.

  And until the upgraded catalog was ready, library patrons who needed to find an item in this 450-square-mile county—whether they lived in one of the affluent suburbs like Chappaqua, a mixed economic neighborhood along the Hudson River like Tarrytown, or a rural stretch to the north like Somers—had to rely on their reference librarians, who had access only to their old internal databases, which “unfortunately during this time period…may not be accurate,” according to the flyers. Westchester’s towns had grown increasingly interdependent by way of this solid and useful library system, but for ten days the county would have to drop back to the olden days of, say, the late 1980s, when every town was an island and you had to use the old-fashioned telephone to borrow another library’s book.

  A Chappaqua mother, petite, fashionable, and grim, approached Reznick with her awkward teenage daughter. The daughter hung back while her mother explained that the girl had lost a book she borrowed from the library. The mother waved her hand at this annoyance—“That’s not a problem, we’ll pay for it”—but the girl needed another copy of the book for a paper due Monday. In fact, she needed the book right now. The mother would drive her daughter anywhere to get it. But where?