Brandt: Literacy in American Lives

There's a pervasive and, I think, valid concern about our civilization: that the rate of change for everything is accelerating, and that there's less time for reflection on whether the changes are good ones. In a sense, Brandt helps us to see that concern in the context of literacy. We become literate for many reasons; the reasons are proliferating and changing; the rate of change is increasing, generally without conscious direction; and the consequence of undirected change can be greater social and economic stratification. While Brandt provided a few recommendations on how to respond to that concern, I wish there had been more. I also wish that I could offer more.

At first I wasn't convinced that it was valuable to view literacy through the lens of Sponsorship, but it really was. As I read, it struck me that some sponsors are sentient and benevolent while others are disembodied and dispassionate, and that the latter variety grew in number and influence through the 20th century. I wonder what that means for the direction -- or directed-ness -- of peoples' literacies.

Some of Brandt's observations that will stay with me (or I hope they will) are:

• that literacy is no longer simply a technical ability, but the ability to adapt as the reasons for literacy change;
• that new reasons for literacy can diminish and invalidate older ones;
• that the nature of literacy sponsors is changing, and that the rate of change is accelerating;
• that each generation gets more literacy-aiding resources than the last, but that the resources are valuable more briefly (literacy inflation);
• that the literate become more literate, which increases stratification along economic and racial lines; and
• that inequities in literacy can increasingly cause societal strife and disintegration.

Vaidhyanathan: Why Thomas Jefferson Would Love Napstrer

This one resonates with Kelly's "Scan This Book". Intellectual property law has clearly evolved contrary to its original intent, into something that favors corporations' interests over individuals' interests and the public good. Besides copyrights, over the years I've seen so-sad-they're-funny patent issues that don't meet any reasonable person's standards of fairness or common sense.

It's hard to imagine how Congress and the Executive branch will find the will to address the problem unless there's meaningful campaign finance reform. Elected officials are generally complying with their biggest sources of campaign funding.

Harris: Discourse and Censorship

This article was usefully divisive, and it really spoke to me. Any selection of materials represents an individual or cooperative value judgment. While the orthodox press and its editors provide a higher overall average "quality" of reading (understanding that "quality" is a very subjective idea), and while they have a greater claim to legitimacy, I don't believe they have a fundamentally greater access to truth than the rest of us do. I think libraries should embrace works outside of the traditional press, and librarians should take on the terrible responsibility of helping patrons to navigate the wonderful mess that we create.

Of course, economics and pragmatism put a nasty kink in that ideal. There are strong incentives for a library to spend its limited dollars on materials that its patrons will use, and that are most likely to have a high quality of ideas, and that won't alienate the Community (the library's source of funding).

Gorman: Human Values in a Technological Age

This struck me as a very enlightened view of technology's role in life and librarianship. It was illuminating and somewhat humbling to think about the people of 1901 and why they (justifiably!) considered themselves technologically advanced.

We're in a continuum of technological change, and our exuberance for recent developments can certainly lead to a myopic view of information tools. We may celebrate the latest tech trends to the diminishment of earlier techs (or should I say "texts"?). Print is a powerful information technology too, and we shouldn't let digital evolution blind us to that.

Molz and Dain: Consensus and Contradition

It was interesting to see the fundamental tension between elitism and populism play out through the library's history. Do libraries exist to give the people what they want, or to give them what we feel they ought to have? I'm most persuaded by the Library Faith argument: the printed word has a virtue in itself, and good things flow from reading, even if you're reading a paperback best-seller.

I almost thought the ALA's 1987 "Planning and Role Setting" had addressed the problem by defining the library in terms of a diverse set of roles; you can entertain the public and enlighten it, too. It's a valid to criticize that approach as being too broad, shallow, and diffuse, though.

I also enjoyed watching the library change from a collection-focused institution to one that's community focused, even if some argue that the community focus is often carried to an extreme.

Radford and Radford: Librarians and Party Girls

I enjoyed reading a scholarly paper that analyzed a less-than-profound popular movie. I also appreciate that, after providing a multidisciplinary analysis in response to "Tunnel Vision and Blind Spots", the Radfords present some positive ideas on challenging stereotypes.

Is this really what Wiegand hand in mind, though? I read Wiegend's call for multidisciplinary analysis as a call to understand the library's role in patrons' lives, and in its broader community context. Does studying Librarian stereotypes - what others think of us - quite meet the mark? It reminded me of a line from a different movie: "But enough about me, let's talk about you. What do you think of me?"

Harris: The De-Skilling of Librarians

Well... that was depressing. Harris certainly presented a strong basis for her warning, and I felt her concerns were generally quite valid. I was surprised when I realized that she sounded the warning call in 1992, preceded by others as much as decade before. The last fifteen years have borne out the arc of her warning in numerous ways, though not to the extreme that one might have expected based on this paper.

I was disappointed that the warning call wasn't followed by a call to action. Should library schools change their curricula in some way? Should professional groups focus on education, consciousness-raising, or political advocacy? Rather than lamenting the decline of traditional librarianship, we should do something positive to take the profession in new directions while preserving the core goal of universal, free access to information.

Musmann: The Ugly Side of Librarianship

There's obviously plenty of ground here for disappointment, shame, and anger. It's hard to read about a profession failing to stand up for its members' rights and basic dignity. It also makes me wonder what people will say about us 75 years from now. What are we doing today that people will consider shameful in the 2080s?

We've read about censorship in more than one form, and now about complicity in racial discrimination. Neutrality and the support of intellectual freedom are an important part of a library's mission. Do these lapses seem so much worse because they stand in such sharp contrast to stated the mission?

Occupational Outlook Handbook

I’ve read earlier editions of this entry, and similar occupation descriptions. It’s been interesting to see non-library employment getting increasing emphasis over time. In many of our readings this semester, authors are jittery about the future of libraries and librarians in the face of internet-based information sharing. I believe the library as a place will be around for a long, long time. I also believe that librarians will gradually integrate with the rest of the world in ways that are hard to predict. It seems likely that we’ll increasingly bring the library to the patron, as Wiegand suggested.

Levy: Scrolling Forward

i-ron-y [ahy-er-nee] (noun): realizing that you're skimming a paragraph about the decline of deep reading.

That chapter, "Reading and Attention", became Scrolling Forward's highlight for me. It discusses one of the book's central questions: what are documents for? It made me reconsider the role of libraries and librarians. So far I've focused too much on libraries as information repositories, and on librarians as intermediaries who connect seekers with information. But the library is also a sanctuary, and reading can also be its own goal: an experience rather than an information hunt.

I'll also remember the quote, "Attention is a finite and non-renewable resource." It made me wonder: in addition to being intermediaries who help people find information, should librarians increasingly act as throttles or filters, helping patrons survive an overabundance of information?

Throughout the book I found interesting connections to the arguments of Buckland's "Information as Thing". "Meditation on a Receipt" gave me the same take-away: that documents take many forms, so we should be prepared to manage and value them all. In "What Are Documents?" Levy asserts that not all artifacts are documents, even referencing the antelope-as-document question. (I agree: all artifacts are information-bearing vessels, but it's only a document if someone imbues it with the divine, "making it speak" as Levy would say.) Later he essentially refutes the idea of information-as-thing, writing that information is an idea, not the representation of the idea.

And, as with earlier readings, in "Libraries and the Anxiety of Order" we read about concern over the library's future in the digital age, though the fear's tempered by hope.