American Libraries Magazine: Will's World

The Coolness Factor

Beverly Goldberg — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:35:50 +0000

March/April 2012

By Will Manley

Hipness rarely ages gracefully

Age among librarians used to be fairly easy to determine, but no longer in our era of nips, tucks, Botox, and hair coloring. You can’t just come out and ask someone his or her age. We all know that in today’s world such a question is not only impolite but possibly even discriminatory.

My suggestion is that if you’re really curious, for whatever reason, about how old a librarian is, the safest and most effective approach is to start talking about obsolete library resources. A good icebreaker might be something like this: “Weren’t phonograph records the biggest pain to process and maintain? No patron ever scratched an LP; it was always the patron who borrowed it immediately before who did the damage.”

If the answer comes back “What’s an LP?” the librarian you’re talking to is not nearly as old as you surmised.

I’ll admit it. I’ve been around the block a few times and my track record proves it; as a librarian I have dealt with an embarrassingly high number and wide diversity of obsolete resources. No, I never had to catalog a clay tablet, scroll, illuminated manuscript, or wax cylinder, but I have cataloged, processed, and lent out LPs, reel-to-reel tapes, eight-tracks, audiocassettes, 16 millimeter films, 8 mm films, Super 8 mm film loops, Betamax tapes, and VHS tapes.

That’s a lot of obsolescence. Why did all these things become obsolete? Basically there were six factors involved: usability, quality of presentation, durability, ease of storage, cost, and coolness.

Reel-to-reel tapes delivered a wonderful sound and were the audio medium of choice by cool people, but they were a pain to thread, splice, and play. LPs had cool album covers, sounded okay, and were easy to play—but they scratched easily. Sixteen millimeter films projected sharply on a big screen but they were a pain to thread, the lamps would fizz out at the film’s climax, they broke easily, and they were very expensive. Eight-tracks were okay to boogie to in the car, but the tapes stretched, the sound was good only at high decibels, and they became very uncool in a very short time. Cassette tapes were compact, easy to use but had an annoying background hiss and a zero coolness factor. VHS tapes were easy to use, gave a good picture, and were reasonably priced, but were superseded in quality and compactness by DVDs and then Blu-ray.

Some obsolete resources made brief comebacks because of the coolness factor. For instance, LPs were popular for a while because of the movie High Fidelity, and vintage 1950s jazz music on reel-to-reel tapes is still coveted by bebop fans. But of the six factors listed above, coolness is also the most fleeting. It never lasts. Remember the Palm pilot?

Which brings us to the old curmudgeon itself, the glue-and-paper book. How does the traditional book hold up against the six endurance factors? No, it’s not nearly as cool as the new and improved e-readers, but it is still easier to use. Cost? It depends on the title, the publisher, and the e-reader. Storability? The e-reader wins hands down. Quality? That depends on one’s taste. The e-reader has the advantage of backlit pages and scalable print. Durability? Glue and paper lasts longer than electrons, especially when they are programmed to dissipate after 26 circulations.

I notice that the ALA Annual Conference is being held in Las Vegas in two years. As a gambling man I’ll bet you right now that you’d be better off staking glue and paper as the reading medium of choice in 2014 than by taking a long shot on the e-reader.

Beyond that, who knows?

WILL MANLEY has furnished provocative commentary on librarianship for over 30 years and in nine books on the lighter side of library science. He blogs at Will Unwound.

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Taking Care of Business

Beverly Goldberg — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 17:12:34 +0000

January/February 2012

By Will Manley

Entrepreneurship is a two-way street

Public librarians have come up with all kinds of reasons why their communities should support them. Some of these reasons are even realistic:

Many people enjoy reading or listening to a good book;
Free Wi-Fi and electricity are attractive perks;
Preschoolers love story hours and puppet shows;
Students need a place to do homework assignments;
Public access computers are very useful for digital have-nots;
Meeting rooms are popular because America is totally committed to committees;
Every self-respecting city, town, village, and hamlet has a public library (i.e., peer pressure).

Unrealistic reasons include:

Libraries are the foundation of democracy;
Libraries are the university of the people;
Libraries are an important catalyst for economic development.

During my 35-year career, I had high hopes for the role public libraries could play in creating a business-friendly community. As a result, I spent a lot of time developing and publicizing business collections and services.

Then I got promoted from library director to city manager, and I suddenly became responsible for luring new businesses to town. Community development is the lifeblood of any municipality, and I worked hard at it and had a number of successes—IKEA, Costco Home, the annual college football Insight Bowl, and the training camp for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim baseball team were established in Tempe, Arizona—but in no case did the library play a part, even though I always promoted it as a community asset. What I discovered, quite frankly, was that companies were interested in any number of local resources, especially tax incentives, land prices, and the quality of the local work force. But the library never entered into the equation at all.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to appeal to our business clientele. One of the quirks I discovered from working in public libraries for so long is that we are vitally important to a certain type of business owner—those who can’t afford an office. Even in the pre-digital days I noticed that a certain kind of entrepreneur would proudly set up shop in the library.

And why not? We had everything a business owner needed: fax machine, photocopier, pay phone, and study rooms for conferences. Throw in an impressive business reference collection and a supportive reference staff and who needs an office, a secretary, and a monthly utility bill?

Over the years, I got to know a number of these resourceful businesspeople who “officed” in the library. Some were in insurance, many were in sales, and a few were consultants. Others were financial advisors, and one was even a political lobbyist. The really effective ones made it a point to get to know and befriend the library staff—even to the point of asking circ clerks to take phone messages and reference librarians to act as receptionists for their clients.

Was this kind of service excessive or even inappropriate? Before you answer that, think of all the little perks library regulars often get, including: bathroom shaving and bathing privileges, sleeping accommodations in the periodicals room, and Dumpster-diving dining opportunities.

I became so fascinated with the phenomenon of small businesspeople setting up shop in the library that at one point I even considered creating a “small business incubator” wing in the adult section. I envisioned it as consisting of a series of cubicles that entrepreneurs could rent for a nominal sum.

But the idea turned sour when I overheard our in-house political lobbyist, a man who had officed at the library for years, tell a client on the phone that he was on a campaign to eliminate welfare cheaters who “freeload” on the government.

WILL MANLEY has furnished provocative commentary on librarianship for over 30 years and in nine books on the lighter side of library science. He blogs at Will Unwound.

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No More Kidding Around

Beverly Goldberg — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:09:18 +0000

November / December 2011

By Will Manley

Childish behavior is no match for the mighty youth librarian

How often have you heard people complain in the last few months that our president, senators, and congressional reps are all acting like little children—especially during the shameful national debt ceiling crisis? There we were, on the brink of an unprecedented double-dip recession, and our federal elected officials persisted in pointing fingers at each other, making funny faces for the camera, attacking each other petulantly, and playing a nasty game of nah-nah nah-nah boo-boo.

This is precisely why I believe that children’s librarians are our profession’s best hope for strong leaders. By understanding how to handle children, they are gaining an understanding of how to handle politicians.

Then there is also the obvious point that at least in the public library, the children’s services department is the catalyst that gets the entire extended family involved in the library. If you want to go where the action is, don’t head for the largest section of the library—the adult book collection—because that has become a ghost town. Patrons are basically congregating in two places: the computer room and the children’s department.

Unfortunately, computers get most of the attention in library literature, library conferences, and the network of librarian bloggers—and funding when it comes to local library budgets. Are you as tired as I am of reading articles about whether this new shiny gadget or that cool new app holds any relevance for libraries?

The reality is that computers are only half of our future. Children are the other half, the half that we don’t like to talk about so much. Why? Children are loud and cantankerous, and much higher maintenance than computers. I always laugh when I recall what happened many years ago when our very serious IT director walked into the children’s room to personally check out a computer malfunction. A 2-year-old boy ran up to him and said, “Hi!” Flattered at the sudden affectionate attention, the IT guy picked up the child and gave him a hug—and then put the child down as quickly as he had lifted him up. The boy had peed all over him. All we heard as the IT guy headed for the exit was some grumbling about how toilet training should be a requirement for admittance to the library.

Then there was the time I got together with a group of parents in the library conference room to announce some changes in the schedule for preschool story hour. In the middle of my talk, one mother got up abruptly and hurried toward the door with a wailing baby in her arms. I said to her, “Please don’t leave. Your child is not bothering me.” In reply, she grimaced at me and said, “She may not be bothering you, but you are evidently bothering her!”

Into this chaos enter the mighty children’s librarian—that much-overlooked miracle worker of the library profession. With her eternal smile, her pockets bulging with sock puppets, and glitter sprinkled all over her clothes, the children’s librarian gets little respect. Everyone just assumes she is having a grand old time in the library’s “toy department,” where she always seems to be dancing happily to “Rubber Duckie.”

The irony, of course, is that if children’s librarianship is such a barrel of laughs, why are children’s librarians becoming as endangered as the polar bear? The truth is that the real library toy department is IT, a place devoid of hovering helicopter parents, nagging nannies, meddlesome moms, grouchy grannies, and childish children.

Which brings us back to petulant politicians. Is there a group in the library profession better prepared to fight for libraries in the political arena than children’s librarians?

WILL MANLEY has furnished provocative commentary on librarianship for over 30 years and in nine books on the lighter side of library science. He blogs at Will Unwound.

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Networking without Pity

Beverly Goldberg — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:31:02 +0000

September/October 2011

Will Manley

Let’s face it: Your reputation still precedes you

I’m working on a new house project. It’s one of the most complicated projects that I’ve ever taken on. There are a million details from the size of the window jambs to the energy rating of the glass in the windows.

The construction universe is filled with a diversity of people. There are designers, architects, decorators, framers, electricians, plumbers, plasterers, carpenters, door hangers, window hangers, cabinetmakers, and on and on and on. For a novice like me, it’s all very confusing and requires a great deal of research. Never have I needed a library so much. But a library only gets you so far. You might be able to figure out the details in hanging a door, but how do you find a reliable professional to hang your doors? It’s a jungle out there, right?

Well, right and wrong. The construction industry is filled with excellent craftspeople as well as bad. How can you be sure that you are going to get quality workmanship and not a shoddy job? Actually, it’s not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. There is a network out there, and if you connect into it, will make life a lot easier.

This network is informal and unwritten, but very reliable. Everybody knows somebody. The trick is to connect at the very beginning with someone who is good. You start, say, with a carpenter who has a sterling reputation. Then you ask her for the name of a good plumber. You get the plumber and then you ask him for an electrician. Everyone who does good wants to be associated with other good people. That’s the way it works. In construction, reputation is everything. I met one contractor with his own business who has never done a dime’s worth of marketing or advertising—but he has had a thriving business for 30 years nonetheless. His secret is word of mouth, and if his quality were to sink, his reputation—and his business—would sink with it.

All of this came as a revelation to me because I spent 30 years of my professional life in public library administration. This meant the most cumbersome hiring process imaginable. It required studying résumés, checking references, designing interviews and assessment centers, organizing staff “meet and greets,” creating short lists, and finally making a hiring decision.

To make matters worse, every hiring move above the level of a high school page involved a committee, which easily added 20 or 30 hours to the process and plenty of extra stress and tension. I’m always amused at newly minted library school graduates who wonder why they never seem to hear back about their applications.

Does this thorough and comprehensive process ensure a successful hire? No. Every hiring authority or committee enjoys some hits and misses. A lot of references won’t tell you a thing about a candidate because they all fear lawsuits. So in the end, your hiring decision is often a dice roll. But what the process does ensure is that you have done everything by the book, and in the bureaucratic world of the public sector, “by the book” is what really counts.

After a few years of deciding to do things by the book, I decided to write my own book. I decided to focus on hiring from within. That way, I would be hiring a known quantity and not someone else’s mistake. There was, however, one big problem: My best paraprofessionals had to make a 90-minute drive to the nearest library school to qualify for their professional union card.

Now, of course, everything has changed and anyone can get an MLS from a laptop. Hiring and promoting from within has never been easier. I recommend it.

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Dead Trees We Have Known

Beverly Goldberg — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 13:10:42 +0000

July/August 2011

by Will Manley

For some, our bark was better than our bytes

One of my biggest mistakes as a library administrator was getting rid of the card catalog. No, I’m not talking about replacing it with a digital version. Everyone did that back in the ’80s. That was a no-brainer. What I mean is that after we installed the OPAC, I sent the physical card catalog into the oblivion of Waste Management instead of sending representative parts of it to the local history museum. What landfill it resides in now only future archeologists will know.

It strikes me that for a whole generation of digital natives, the term “card catalog” is as obscure as the term “8-track tape.” For those of us who grew up learning to master all the idiosyncrasies of the card catalog in order to do our dreaded high school and college term papers, that time period seems a bit like ancient history.

Ancient or modern, it’s instructive to look back 25 years and reflect. First off, we librarians all had to take cataloging in library school because, at the heart of librarianship was bibliographic control, and at the heart of bibliographic control was the card catalog. Whether you wanted to be in technical services, public services, or administration, the first step to becoming a librarian was mastering our professional Book of Deuteronomy—The Anglo American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition. Once that was accomplished, you were free to follow your heart and explore the idiosyncrasies of Granger’s, Poole’s, and the redoubtable inventor of modern management science, Peter Drucker. But AACR2 was foundational. Now, of course, the metadata anarchists are in the driver’s seat and bibliographic control is a fading mirage in the rearview window.

Quite possibly, the fact that AACR2 was forced upon us at the very beginning of my generation’s professional initiation rites explains why there weren’t many warm and fuzzy eulogies at the card catalog’s funeral. It was as if a complicated, difficult, and ill-tempered uncle had finally died. Yes, he meant well…but what a pain.

It’s also probably why I jettisoned my library’s old card catalog without a thought of preserving its eccentricities for the edification of emerging generations of digital natives. Not only was it an “out of sight, out of mind” impulse, but assigning it to some smelly landfill prevented any possibility of a horror movie–like scenario…say, The Midnight Return of the Card Catalog.

True, there were those who mourned the card catalog’s passing and would have done anything to save it. Their mantra was, “Can’t we have a card catalog and a computer catalog?” Some of these Luddites were catalogers, but most were sentimentalists (history professors were a prime group) who missed the card catalog’s “tactile” pleasures. They loved tracking the historicity of the various cards, which had evolved from handwritten (something called the library “hand” was actually a course taught in fin de siècle library schools) to manually typed to electrically typed to commercially printed to computer generated.

Then there was the smudge factor. You could tell which were the really popular subject areas by the smudges on a grouping of cards. In public libraries, the most smudged cards were under the Subject Heading “Automobiles—Maintainence and Repair.” Duh.

Finally, tears were shed over losing a warm and handsome piece of oaken furniture that gave the library a unique touch of character. Never mind that the final generation of card catalogs was made from a really repulsive faux-wood plastic.

Why do I bring this up? Well, more and more I hear people talk about the tactile pleasures of the printed book. The more e-books that are sold, the more you hear the term “tactile.”

My advice: Enjoy those tactile pleasures while you can. It won’t be long now.

WILL MANLEY has furnished provocative commentary on librarianship for over 30 years and in nine books on the lighter side of library science. He blogs at Will Unwound.

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My Professional Heroes

Beverly Goldberg — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 15:00:55 +0000

May/June 2011

Will Manley

Let’s hear it for the front-line grunts who make service happen

When I hear the term “movers and shakers,” I think of Donald Trump, Steve Jobs, Sarah Palin, and Hillary Clinton. These are the innovators, power brokers, and pioneers that move us to places where we haven’t been and don’t necessarily want to go. They are the catalysts who wake us from our slumbers and give us a good push out of our comfort zones. They are more than just leaders: They are agitators and change agents.

Ten years ago, when Library Journal unveiled a new set of annual awards for librarians called “Movers and Shakers,” I was delighted. While our professional image is anything but “moving and shaking,” the little-known reality is that librarians have not only endured but actually embraced each new wave of communications technology. Libraries are barely recognizable from their rubber-stamp and card-catalog days. Clearly there’s been a lot of movin’ and shakin’ going on. So why not celebrate those who push us out of our professional comfort zones?

That does not mean that I think the M&Sers are the most important people in the profession. Absolutely not. That honor would go to the “plodders and toilers,” or if you prefer, the worker bees. There’s a lot of grunt work to be done in libraries and someone has to do it. There are books to be shelved, shelves to be read, books to be mended, catalogs to be maintained, storytimes to present, reference questions to deal with, and phones to be answered. These tasks may not “edgy,” but like it or not, these services are what keep us in business.

Of even greater value are the worker bees who work nights and weekends with smiles on their faces. The absolutely worst part of management is motivating library employees to work odd hours. The irony, of course, is that nights and weekends are libraries’ busiest times.

Given all of that, I shouldn’t have been surprised to receive a number of negative comments and e-mails following my blog post about the Movers and Shakers Award. To be pointed about the matter, it seems that many working librarians resent the award. I suppose that’s the case with any award. The winner wins, and everyone else goes home feeling, well, like a loser.

But the comments I received seem to go beyond mere disappointment. Basically they can be paraphrased in six ways:

The Movers and Shakers Award proves nothing more than the importance of networking.
A mover and shaker showed up at our library and put on his desk a name plaque that said “Change Agent.”
I resent that while they are moving and shaking, we are serving the patron.
We have a mover and shaker on our staff who was fine before winning the award. Now she is a diva.
Thanks to this annual award extravaganza, the library world has its own little elite clique. Well, I suppose they need the recognition since there are no longer any promotional opportunities.
If I see the Mover and Shaker Award on a résumé, that application ends up in the circular file. I want workhorses, not show horses.

My guess is that much of the negativity toward the Movers and Shakers has to do with cutbacks in staffing. The line of reasoning here is probably: If you’re not pulling your weight with the public, you’re a slacker.

On the other hand, you’re not a real mover and shaker if you don’t irritate and annoy people in order to bring about change. Every bona fide mover and shaker I have known was an expert at ruffling feathers and stepping on toes, and these are not exactly traits of endearment.

WILL MANLEY has furnished provocative commentary on librarianship for over 30 years and in nine books on the lighter side of library science. He blogs at Will Unwound.

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Approachable You

Beverly Goldberg — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 22:49:33 +0000

March/April 2011

By Will Manley

Aren’t you looking at me?

I am not a behavioral psychologist but it seems to me the most basic element of establishing a connection with someone is making eye contact. Take my granddaughter, Sophia. She’s 3 years old and is always the most popular person wherever she goes because she loves to go right up to people, look them in the eye, and with unbridled enthusiasm blurt out, “Hi, my name is Sophie!”

Unfortunately in today’s world, even our most extroverted librarians are not making eye contact with the people in their libraries. Walk into any library at any time and you will see the same sorry syndrome. Librarians at public services desks are not looking at the public, but at their computer screens. Nothing makes me angrier. And everybody wonders how best to frame library advocacy in a time of dwindling resources and Tea Party politics. How’s this for advocacy? Look like you give a darn! Keep your eyes on the prize—the patrons!

You librarians, what are you doing? A patron has to wonder. You’re not laughing while you’re looking at your screens so you’re probably not watching YouTube clips of great moments in comedy. You don’t look terribly absorbed so you’re probably not reading a Stephen King novel. You don’t look particularly serious so you’re probably not doing anything very important for your actual job. You also don’t look half asleep so you’re not reading library literature.

To be precise, you have that bored, listless look about you, as though you are engaging in that great America at Work time waster: surfing the internet. At least that’s what it looks like to me and everyone else trying to get your attention. What a great way to reinforce one of the library profession’s most odious stereotypes: “Oh, you’re a librarian? You must get to do a lot of reading on the job.”

This is not fair. Back in the Dark Ages, when I worked the reference desk (and yes there were no “snow days” then so you walked three miles through a blizzard to get to work) we were not allowed to read at the reference desk because of that very stereotype; it made us look unapproachable. So why is it okay now to move your eyes over a computer screen? How is that different from a book or a magazine?

I suppose the theory today is that if you are staring at a computer, you are doing something serious, like research. Serious research, my foot! We all know where internet surfing takes you: into the most inane sites imaginable. I mean this really bugs me.

So, today I’m shopping out of town and pass a library I’d never been in before. Like any nosy librarian, to the great frustration of the family members I am with, I just have to go in for a look/see. What do I see? I see a reference librarian staring at a computer screen. This makes me really flippin’ mad.

Since no one knows me at this library, I decide to sneak up behind the reference desk and see what inane, inconsequential, and idiotic site this librarian is staring at. It’s my daily blog Will Unwound. I’m not kidding.

Did I say I have a problem with reference librarians looking at computer screens? You must have misunderstood me. I actually think it’s very important for librarians to keep up with their library blogs, especially those that tell them to keep their eyes on the customers.

WILL MANLEY has furnished provocative commentary on librarianship for over 30 years and in nine books on the lighter side of library science. He blogs at Will Unwound.

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Your Morning Metaphor

Beverly Goldberg — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 15:02:08 +0000

January/February 2011

Will Manley

Start every day with food for thought

I have just entered the seventh decade of my journey through life and I have yet to encounter a true “morning person.” Maybe they exist. Maybe they are those people you see jogging at 5:30 a.m. on those atypical days when you have to rise extra early to catch an early morning flight. My guess is that those joggers are not morning people. My guess is that they are full of angst and are running to get rid of the kinks in their bodies and their minds so they will be halfway civilized when their work day starts at 8.

Everybody has a wake-up routine. It typically involves coffee or some other stimulant for the body and a television show, newspaper, radio program, or some other stimulant for the mind. Most morning routines do not involve other people. Relating to other people takes time.

Me, I like to start the day with various breakfast cereals. If there are other people around, I arrange the boxes in a fort-like rectangle that shuts them politely out. Newspapers and laptops are other good people shields.

Here’s a thought: Why don’t the cereal companies print short but dense poems, maybe something by Elizabeth Barrett Browning or William Wordsworth, on the backs of their boxes? Poetry is best read in that transitional state between dreamland and reality. Get the poem in your brain at the beginning of the day and let your subconscious gnaw away at it. Eventually the meaning of the poem will begin to take shape. It takes me a week or two to eat my way through a box of Cheerios. That’s probably the right amount of time to digest the density of a short poem by Emily Dickinson or Wallace Stevens.

To me poetry is the very big afterthought in our texting-obsessed world. You would think that in our age of Twitter, an 8- or 10-line poem would be all the rage. What other literary format packs as big a punch in so small a package?

Why don’t people engage more in the self-immersion of poetry? Is it because poetry asks us to loosen up on our grip on reality and let our minds wander in directions that scare the reality out of us?

Perhaps. But I really don’t think that’s it.

Poetry is too internal. It’s too inaccessible. My dark night of the soul may not mean anything to you.

A few lines of poetry may be just too much out of reach for you to make the effort to understand it. It requires an immersion into the land of feelings and emotions that perhaps in the final analysis you feel won’t make any sense. Is it too much mental pain for too little gain? A Twitter message it is not, which is precisely why this is an important issue.

As librarians we know that our literary tradition is rooted in poetry. Homer, who started everything, was a poet, but the modern trend is to translate him into narrative prose. The same with Chaucer, Virgil, and even Dante. Why?

It’s because the structure of poetry has become too unfamiliar to us. Today, unfortunately, it even seems a bit elitist to make the statement, “I love to read poetry” in public. That’s why I think putting poems on the cheery backs of cereal boxes makes so much sense. What packaging format is simpler and less pretentious than a Cheerios package? What could be more accessible? What could be less threatening?

You can fight the e-book wars all you want. I want to explore new apps for cereal boxes.

WILL MANLEY has furnished provocative commentary on librarianship for over 30 years and in nine books on the lighter side of library science. He blogs at Will Unwound.

My Own Private Bookmobile

Beverly Goldberg — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 15:00:00 +0000

November / December 2010

Wills World

How I went mobile without going wireless

My car, a Subaru Outback, doubles as a library. There are always a lot of books in there. I never go anywhere without a copy of the Bible, the Qur’an, Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, assorted editions of Mother Goose, a complete collection of the Peter Rabbit series, and a vast and diverse array of brain-candy books.

Why? Four reasons:

I never know when I’m going to be in an accident (these California freeways are nothing more than NASCAR race tracks), and if I end up in critical condition, it would be nice to have the word of God at my side. Hence the Bible and the Qur’an.
My cars have a way of breaking down, which often means hours of downtime at the repair shop, where you need books that will occupy your mind for awhile. Hence Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow.
For much of the day I run a taxi service—ferrying my grandchildren, Connor and Sophia, to the park, preschool, and library storyhour. Hence the Beatrix Potter and Mother Goose collections.
I live in a little town (Livermore, California) that has more stop lights per street corner than any other place I’ve ever lived. Hence the diverse array of brain-candy books.

Brain-candy books are perfect for red-light reading. You can open them up and peruse little random chunks of text without feeling as though you are wasting half of your life waiting for the traffic light to turn green. My favorite brain-candy books are The Book of Proverbs; Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen Koans; 1,001 Jokes for Every Occasion; The Big Book of Humorous Quotations; and The Epigrams of Martial.

The other day I got a flat tire, and for the repair shop I chose Ulysses. There I am in the waiting area, which consists of four nondescript chairs in a semi-circle around a 1980s vintage television. I’m well into chapter three when another customer comes over and sits down. He’s from my favorite demographic cohort—pants to the ground, baseball hat turned sideways, tattoos on the neck. He goes over to the dusty old TV and hits the on/off switch. Nothing but very loud static comes on. “Hey,” he shouts out to the man at the service desk, “does the TV work?”

“No,” the service man replies. “Guys use it to put their coffee cups on.”

The young man is not happy. He pulls out his cell phone, and begins to call one friend after another to rage at being stranded at a freaking tire store that has an old TV that doesn’t work. You’d think he had been sentenced to two hours of waterboarding at Gitmo. After he makes his fifth phone call I decide to talk to him. “I’ve got a bunch of books in my car,” I say. “Want to try one?”

“You’ve got a bunch of books in your vehicle?” he responds with amusement. “What do you drive … a flippin’ bookmobile or something?”

“Sort of,” I say. I go to my car in the garage, fetch a bunch of brain-candy books, and place them on the top of the inert TV. “Take your pick,” I offer gingerly.

He looks them over and makes his selection: 1,001 Jokes for Every Occasion. Apparently one of those occasions is being stuck at a tire store because five minutes into the book, he chuckles.

With a big smile on my face, I think, “Wow, it’s nice to be back in the readers’ advisory business.”

We librarians never really retire because our work is never completely done. The baggy-pants kids need us. They really do.

Will Manley has furnished provocative commentary on librarianship for over 30 years and in nine books on the lighter side of library science. He blogs at Will Unwound.

The Conservatives Among Us

Beverly Goldberg — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 05:00:00 +0000

October 2010

Healthy dialogue opens minds—and wallets

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that politically the library profession is quite liberal. There may be a lot more conservatives in the profession than I know about but if they exist, they are for the most part quiet and under cover.

My experience is that the library profession is not just overwhelmingly liberal but vocally so in supporting various political issues. Despite our core value of intellectual freedom, librarians are not very tolerant of listening to points of view that stray from the basic liberal agenda. That is why conservative librarians are afraid to speak out: They fear professional ostracism.

I’m certainly not asking librarians who are liberal to shed their views. We are all entitled to our own political opinions. But if we don’t reach out and start a good-faith dialogue with the growing number of conservative politicians in our cities, counties, and states, we will fall farther and farther behind in the budget war, which we are currently losing very badly.

Politic polemics

When was the last time that a big name conservative thinker or politician was invited to speak at a high-profile library conference? Why is it that the Al Gores of the world are always invited to ALA conferences but not the Rush Limbaughs or Sarah Palins? Is it because librarians would rather be validated in their viewpoints than challenged?

Many liberal librarians will tell you that they equate the conservative movement with censorship and stringent fiscal policies. But these are two reasons why, instead of shunning the growing conservative movement in this country, we should engage it in a vigorous dialogue. 1) Is it really in our profession’s best interest to oppose all attempts to filter pornography in the children’s room computers? 2) As for funding, we should be reaching out to conservatives in a vigorous and confident way. If we would stop condemning conservatives and begin talking to them, I am confident that we can convince them that libraries fit very nicely into their political agenda:

Conservatives say they are into self improvement—the great American pastime of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps. The library is probably the number one self-help institution in America. It’s where immigrants go to learn how to assimilate and succeed.
Conservatives say they believe strongly in family values. What institution in America does more to serve families than libraries? We cater to the needs of everyone in the extended family from infants to great-grandparents. Go to any (open) public library on a Saturday morning, and you will see that it is filled with families.
Conservatives say that they believe in fiscal responsibility. What American institution does more with less than the library? What government agency serves more people? What city department gives you more bang for the buck?
Conservatives say they believe in the Bill of Rights and in particular the protection of their religious liberties afforded by the First Amendment. What profession does more to protect First Amendment rights than the library profession? Our profession’s First Amendment emphasis may differ from the conservative movement’s emphasis, but here at least is a place to start a constructive give and take of views.
Conservatives say they believe strongly in the importance of religion. What institution does more to provide a wide range of information about all the world’s religions than the library?

Finally, conservatives say they represent the will of middle-class Americans. Let’s take them into our libraries and show them how much their middle-class constituents use our services.

The reality is that libraries have much to offer conservatives, and conservatives have much to offer libraries.