In the Library with the Lead Pipe welcomes Audrey Barbakoff, a librarian at the Milwaukee Public Library, and Ahniwa Ferrari, Virtual Experience Manager at the Pierce County Library System in Washington, for a point-counterpoint piece on filtering in libraries. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and are not endorsed by their employers.  We thank them for their time and energy in writing this piece!

Untitled by paul goyette, on Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Audrey Barbakoff

Banned books week sucked last year.

I felt pretty hypocritical about last year’s Banned Books Week. Don’t get me wrong; I love Banned Books Week. I adore it. Without the reminder provided by events like this, it’s too easy to get drawn into the day-to-day concerns of library work and forget about the essential issues of intellectual freedom, battling censorship, and embracing the sharing of ideas even when they are unpopular or unpleasant. It’s because I find it so critically important, so essential to who we are as librarians, that I’m upset.

Because libraries are complicit in one of the most extensive censorship campaigns in history.

Even right under the nose of Banned Books Week, we are censors. Every single day, we prevent people from accessing content that makes us uncomfortable – online. We take the single greatest advance in the open dissemination of ideas since the printing press and slap filters on it. I just don’t understand how librarians can allow and encourage patrons to read books full of graphic sex and violence while simultaneously denying them the opportunity to access the same content online. Think of a popular urban fiction author, like Keith Lee Johnson. We’ll buy a kajillion copies of Little Black Girl Lost, we’ll display them in a place of prominence, we’ll replace them when they’re stolen, we’ll recommend them to patrons, including minors, who like Wahida Clark. But would our own computer filters let you see that exact same text on the screen? No way.

So why do we let this happen? I think it’s because public librarians fail to talk about filtering in an ethically important way. Even articles that address the controversy around filtering and intellectual freedom fall into the trap of dickering about smaller issues, such as how restrictive filters should be, how well they work, or which product is best¹. It’s easy to do, and part of me wonders if we haven’t intentionally let the ethical issues slip into the shadows out of a little bit of shame over our print/digital double standard. Perhaps we just find it easy to write off digital content because we’re format-ists. Perhaps it’s because CIPA or COPA or whatever vowel they’re using these days has leveraged our funding to quash our resistance. Perhaps we’ve just had filters for so long we’ve accepted them as necessary, or at least “grudgingly come to terms.”²

Whatever the reason, we have to take our heads out of the e-sand if we’re going to offer our patrons the service and access that is their right. There are certainly serious concerns about the efficacy and cost of filtering which need to be addressed. However, these smaller decisions on how to filter must come out of a broader understanding of why we filter at all – and of what the higher-level effects and implications of that choice may be. Basically, we need to have a frank, moral conversation to remind us what exactly we’re doing. Only once we have a clear understanding of what it means to filter can we legitimately ask ourselves how we’re going to deal with them in the real world.

In case you haven’t picked up on my rather overbearing personal opinion on this topic, I’ll lay it out – mandatory filters are censorship, big time. I’m too passionate about this to feel comfortable making a logical argument without letting you know about my bias up front. This doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t understand why many libraries can’t go without filters. Some libraries need the funding; others have communities that demand them; some have bandwidth limitations; and some librarians believe filters protect children – and even adults³ – just as surely as I believe they don’t. So I’ll do my best to set my fervor aside and, rather than trying to justify the total eradication of all filters, I will challenge you to take a good, long look at the moral ramifications of filtering before making any decisions about how to do it at your library.  I will argue that mandatory filters (and by extension, filters that silently default to “on” and/or are difficult to turn off) are morally impermissible; however, there are ethically significant ways to avoid forcible filtering without violating the needs of your library and its patrons.

First, a little background.

For all of you who are not public librarians, or who are public librarians but are way too busy struggling to keep your library running with not enough budget, staff, or technology to waste time nitpicking over a bunch of obscure legal documents, here’s the quick and dirty background.

The current federal legislation affecting filtering in public libraries is the Children’s Internet Protection Act, or CIPA. Implemented in early 2001, CIPA does not actually require all public and school libraries to install filters. However, only libraries with mandatory filters are eligible for certain federal discounts on communications technology, including Internet access.⁴ Since few libraries can simply turn their collective noses up at funding, especially in the high-demand, high-expense area of technology, many smaller libraries have only the illusion of choice.

The ALA filed a lawsuit to overturn CIPA in 2002, alleging that it violated users’ first amendment rights. A series of similar laws meant to control the dissemination of pornography online had already been repeatedly declared unconstitutional on these grounds.⁵ The Eastern District of Pennsylvania unanimously agreed with the ALA, but the U.S. Supreme Court did not. On June 23, 2003, the court ruled 6-3 that CIPA was constitutional.⁶

CIPA was meant to apply only to children,⁷ but recently state legislation allowing constitutionally protected speech to be denied to adults has been gaining hold. In Bradburn v. North Central Regional Library, the Washington Supreme Court allowed the library to refuse to disable a filter for an adult patron.⁸ (That’s pretty scary to me. I became a librarian to be a guide to an overwhelming world of information, not a stony-faced gatekeeper, judge and jury of what is acceptable.) The state argued that filtering is not censorship but a form of collection development; just as a library can choose not to buy a book, it can choose not to offer access to a website.

However, that argument doesn’t get to the heart of the issue. It’s a spurious debate that gets us bickering over semantics rather than closely examining the impact of the action we are taking when we force filters on our patrons. After all, we’re doing the same thing no matter what we call it. A rose by any other name, and all that jazz. On that note, and with a sense of the increasing pressure on libraries to use filters to deny people of all ages access to constitutionally protected content, let’s drop the semantics and the politicking and take a look at just what exactly it means to our communities when we mandate filters.

Let’s get Logical: What are we really debating?

Filtering is generally cast as the uneasy equilibrium between Freedom and Protection. We want to give our patrons maximum freedom while still protecting children. It sounds logical, right? However, it’s quite frankly ridiculous. Consider what it really means, in practical terms, to “protect” somebody from information. It means systematic denial of access. It means that people from group X are barred from accessing information on topic Y. We would never, ever consider systematically denying printed material – even “dangerous” material – to entire groups of people. Would you designate whole categories of books on certain subjects unequivocally off-limits to Muslims? To a particular political group? To women? Of course not, and there’s no reason to start just because we’re dealing with e-content.

Now, you might argue that children are not like these other groups. After all, when it comes to children and even teens, most people will recognize that not everything is appropriate for every child of every age. That does not – I repeat, does not – make it ethically permissible for the library or the librarian to categorically deny all children access to any single subject, even a taboo one. Just as with books, the librarian’s job is to offer access and guidance; the decision of what to actually utilize belongs solely to the individual child and his or her family. That choice must always be individual, never imposed by systematic discrimination based on age or any other external characteristic.

This isn’t a radical position. In fact, it’s completely consistent with how we manage children’s intellectual freedom for printed materials. Many libraries have formalized in their policies that it is the prerogative of the child and his or her guardians to make the individual choices appropriate for that particular child.  Although a librarian might try to guide a child away from a resource that doesn’t seem developmentally appropriate, it’s still the choice of the child and his or her family whether or not to heed that advice.  In the absence of parental instructions, we won’t prevent children and teens from checking out pretty much any book in the library, regardless of where it’s shelved or what it’s about.  We recognize that this value is at the very core of our work, and I cannot believe that we would intentionally sacrifice this primary ethical mandate just because the information is on a screen.

If not Freedom v Protection, what is the debate really about? It’s Intellectual Freedom as opposed to Not Offending Anybody. Offending people is a hassle. Offended people stomp up to the desk and holler at some hapless librarian or clerk in the hearing range of every other patron in the room. They point brazenly at the poor sap who had the misfortune to be minding his own business (offensively!) in other people’s line of sight. They hang around for ten minutes filling out complaint forms and demanding to speak to whoever’s in charge. They leave a trail of paperwork and hastily-scheduled departmental meetings in their wake. Letting patrons look at whatever information they choose results in loudly offended other people.

Infringing on people’s intellectual freedom, on the other hand, is easy. It’s silent. Most things that get filtered are at least potentially embarrassing, so people will slink away rather than ask for the filter to be disabled. Think the rape victim who can’t access the rape and incest hotline number (true story) will ask the librarian to come turn off the filter? Will she file a formal complaint? Probably not, and neither will a hundred other people looking for information on sexuality, health, gun rights, domestic violence …. No, taking away someone’s most basic right at the library is simple and quiet.

Making tradeoffs.

Ok, we’ve traded the rights of just a few people in a few select circumstances for a whole lot of peace and quiet. I have to ask, although I don’t want to: is that really such a bad thing? We have limited resources, especially now, and they could be used much more effectively than having librarians deal with angry people’s paperwork all day. And it is an important aspect of intellectual freedom that all patrons feel comfortable and safe in the library; if they are so offended they feel they can’t walk in the doors, their access is surely hampered.  In all seriousness and objectivity, I have to ask myself: Is it so bad to
trade a little freedom for a lot of calm?

Yes. Yes, it is. Because intellectual freedom is a moral imperative for libraries; avoiding offense is decidedly not. In fact, our moral code often intentionally offends. Demonstrating to people that there is a worldview other than their own – and that it’s just as valid – is frequently offensive. And it’s darn important. Most libraries acknowledge the importance of representing all viewpoints, regardless of personal preference, by having a balanced collection development policy; we collect materials on all sides of controversial issues and all along the political spectrum, even if our communities have a strong proclivity one way or the other. We’ve got something to offend everybody. In fact, we recognize that some things are valuable precisely because they offend people. (Banned books week comes to mind again.) Of course, it’s extremely important that we don’t offend selectively – that we aren’t actually biasing our collection toward or against any particular group or viewpoint. No, libraries are and should be equal opportunity offenders.

So offending people now and then is OK, and probably proof that we’re doing our job right. But it’s still a hassle. Let’s look at the other affected party – the person who doesn’t get information we consider “legitimate” because of over-blocking. Let’s even assume the filter works pretty well (although many studies would disagree⁹), and that “most young patrons probably don’t care as much [about filtering] as we intellectual freedom advocates do; they are not there to access forbidden websites…mostly… they want to play games”¹⁰. In short, let’s even assume the relative rarity of a “legitimate” site being blocked. If just one person is denied the access promised to him the by Library Bill of Rights, but a hundred complaints are obviated, is it worth the tradeoff?

No. Librarians serve the community by serving individuals. By giving each and every patron my full attention and care, regardless of his or her background or views, I am also doing my best to help the community as a whole. I am creating a safe space where any and all members of the community can come to access any kind of information. I am creating community gatekeepers¹¹ who will go out into their social circles and teach others.

Although I don’t often hear library service discussed in exactly this way – serving the whole by serving the individual – I do think that the library profession generally agrees that this is effective. Look at the way we structure our everyday service. The meat and potatoes of our work is helping patrons at the reference desk one at a time or in small groups, essentially as individuals. We don’t make them wait while we weigh the merits of their individual needs against what might be best for the community – we just do our best to help. Furthermore, we embrace a Library Bill of Rights, and human rights by definition are meant to apply to each and every individual.

All of this means that when we allow a single individual to lose access, we are causing much, much greater harm than we realize. We negatively influence the entire community. Not only have we made that person uncomfortable in the library, we have also adversely affected anybody he or she  tells about the experience. We have contributed to creating a restrictive, oppressive space for the whole neighborhood. If we serve the community best by serving the individual best, we’re just plain lowering the quality of our service. Worst of all, we are violating somebody’s right. Yikes. The library is frequently upheld as a shining symbol of democracy, a “cornerstone of the American Dream,”¹² and we are seriously compromising our symbolic purpose if we can’t even uphold the most basic rights we promise to all people. And that means all people – even kids, even teens, even people who smell bad and carry their stuff around in garbage bags, even people who want to look at something controversial. Perhaps especially them, since the barriers they face to access are so high.

Is damaging the community, creating an unsafe space, and violating the public trust in our purpose worth a little (or even a lot) less hassle? No. No, it definitely is not.

Community values don’t exist.

I’ve demonstrated that it’s immoral to impose filters on our communities. But some might argue that this leaves one possible loophole: a community with strong traditional values might decide as a whole to embrace filters for itself. Could it be ethically permissible for the community to choose mandatory filters, for children or even for adults?  Dean Marney, director of the North Central Regional Library (the library which blocks online constitutionally-protected speech from adults; see “First, A Little Background” for a refresher), thinks so. He argues that “we must be responsible to the communities we serve.”¹³ “Community values” often seem to be the rallying cry for censorship, especially for children, and especially online.

However, what we call “community values” are really only “majority values,” or sometimes even “loudest minority values.” Making sweeping generalizations based on “community” values assumes that your community is perfectly homogenous. It’s not. No matter what the most vocal members of your community assert, no matter how small, how insular, or how traditional your area may be, it is full of sub-groups, dissenting opinions, and individual diversity. There will always be people who want to view the legal content you have blocked, even if they remain silent about it.  If a library believes in serving individuals, if it purports to value human rights, it cannot morally allow the preferences of the majority to trample on the rights of the minorities.

That’s not to say we can’t take into consideration the majority opinion, and craft policies that will best serve its members. In fact, I believe strongly that libraries should be responsive to their patrons’ needs, and that’s why I don’t offer a one-size-fits-all filtering solution. Within certain ethical boundaries, there are many ways to tailor your policies and services to your majority community. However, there is a moral line that must be drawn when majority-serving policies begin to infringe on the rights of other individuals. As we’ve long believed for print materials, which we collect even when they offend the political or social sensibilities of the majority, the tastes of 99% of your population do not override the rights of those remaining few.

Whether analog or digital, libraries have a moral obligation to represent the minority opinion as fairly as the majority one; we have a responsibility to serve the individual who disagrees as fervently as the one who conforms. If we make intellectual freedom a privilege for those who hold the predominant local viewpoints and values, we don’t really uphold intellectual freedom at all. As the great revolutionary and social philosopher Rosa Luxemburg wrote, “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”¹⁴

Oops, there’s real life again.

Hopefully I’ve convinced you that mandatory filtering in libraries is incompatible with our core values. Now what are we supposed to do about parents who want their kids on filtered computers? How are we supposed to deal with a community that by and large clamors loudly in favor of filtering? How will we afford to provide sufficient computer and Internet service when CIPA will cut our already-meager funding if we don’t filter?

In real life, some form of filtering is probably necessary in most cases. While I don’t personally agree with policies that restrict legal content, even pornography, I understand that in most communities patrons expect and want such restrictions. A filter may be a more practical solution than having librarians spend their entire day running around playing computer police.¹⁵ The option for a parent to enable a filter for his own child may make him feel that his child is safer on library computers. And most of us can’t afford to spit in the eye of federal funding. So how can we balance a practical need for some form of filtering with our moral responsibility to provide access?

In Filters and the Public Library: A Legal and Policy Analysis¹⁶, Mary Minow details the many options for mandatory, optional, or lack of filtering and their implications for patrons’ rights. Since I really can’t do a better or more succinct job, I’ll direct you to her for the nitty gritty details involved in selecting the right option for your library. Her overarching conclusions are similar to mine: mandatory filtering is morally impermissible, but there are a variety of acceptable ways to make filters optional or remove them altogether. (She calls possibilities in which individuals can choose for themselves to enable a filter or work at a filtered machine “pro-choice”, which I love.) I’d like to use my little soapbox here to offer what she does not – some suggestions to help you respect the more conservative values of your community while implementing one of these less stringent filtering policies.

There are some practical ways to make all patrons feel safe in the library, even with optional or no filters. These can be as simple as “turning computer screens away from foot traffic and installing privacy screens”¹⁷ so that no patron of any age will accidentally stumble upon what another is viewing. Children’s computers can feature prominent links to preselected sites “such as the ALA’s Great Web Sites for Kids … and search engines specially designed for children.”¹⁸ More important, however, is creating a use policy consistent with the library’s mission and its treatment of print materials. However liberal or restrictive your computer use policy (and the ethics of that is well beyond the scope of this piece), “viewing of inappropriate images [is] a behavioral issue… the best approach is to address the matter with the end user, rather than trying to make the material inaccessible.”¹⁹ Clear rules and consistent, enforceable punishments for breaking those rules are already our primary tools for governing acceptable behavior in the library’s meatspace. Done right, they should be just as effective (read: not perfect, but pretty good) in governing computer use.

However, these small, practical measures are clearly not sufficient on their own. The best way to make public computers more useful and safe for all patrons, including but not limited to children, is education. As the National Research Council so eloquently states in Youth, Pornography, and the Internet, “Swimming pools can be dangerous for children. To protect them, one can install locks, put up fences, and deploy pool alarms. All these measures are helpful, but by far the most important thing that one can do for one’s children is to teach them to swim.”²⁰ By relying on an automated system to block content, we are missing a critical and valuable opportunity to teach children (and adults) to “swim” in an online world. When we deprive them of this opportunity to learn, we do them a disservice both in the library and when they are outside the reach of our computerized safety net.

I recognize that trading an electronic band-aid for deep education is not easy. Education is expensive and difficult to implement. As far as I know, there are no studies that document how effective various forms of education may be in improving appropriate behavior and safety on public computers, which means we have no roadmap. And all pro-education, anti-mandatory-filter options mean no e-Rate funding. And yes, that stinks. I tried to think of an option that would be morally acceptable and let you keep the money. I really did. But, as happens so often, it’s your money or your soul. A good bargain is just not a morally weighty counterbalance to a violation of children’s rights and the core values of our profession. Sorry. If your library absolutely cannot maintain public Internet access at all without the discount … weeeelll, ok. While it’s difficult to embrace solutions with a high price tag, especially in a time of severe and widespread budget cuts, it is possible to take steps in the right direction. On the bright side, if we can free ourselves of dependence on strings-attached government funding, we can be a more objective and free institution in the long run.

Eliminating filters is possible, and some intrepid libraries are paving the way for the rest of us each day. The Sonoma County Library is an especially good example of a system that overcame the concerns of its community and even the objection of its own grand jury to implement a no-filter strategy that benefits all users. Their fantastic response to the jury is one of the best pragmatic defenses of the power of a filter-free library out there.²¹ The San Jose Public Library took an equally staunch, if somewhat less inspiringly documented, stance.²²

Of course, what works for them may not work for you. The best real-life solution for your library will be individual. Your community’s majority values, its size, the physical constraints of your space, the condition of your budget, and many other factors will influence what the elimination of mandatory filters would look like in your library. I hope the few suggestions and examples I’ve offered have at least convinced you that this is both worthwhile and possible in your community. We all deal daily with practical concerns that make honoring the big-picture issue difficult and that require compromise. What matters is that we address these realities through an ethical lens; that rather than blithely accepting the status quo, we recognize that our decisions have serious moral implications for library service.

And in Conclusion (i.e., you probably could have just skipped to this part)

The debate about filters is not really about two ethical issues, freedom and safety. It’s about the ethical issue of freedom pitted against the more practical issue of offending patrons. Mandatory filters create a double-standard for intellectual freedom by denying users digital materials we would happily give them in print; they unfairly bias against open access for children and those looking up sensitive or controversial information; and they reduce the quality and value of the service we provide to all. In the real world, sometimes we have to bend a bit on principles in favor of practicality; but we must always recognize that this is what we are doing, and consider the damage we may cause.

Ahniwa Ferrari

Audrey provides some excellent arguments against filtering, but if you ask me she’s a little gaga²³.

Also, she’s wrong.

Okay, so not wrong in the sense that she isn’t right. But she is wrong in the sense that there’s no simple solution for filtering and, more importantly, we can’t say that filtering is bad. We can’t say it’s good, either, because filtering isn’t bad or good on a broad scale, but it’s something that needs to be looked at in every individual case to determine if it is, or is not, the appropriate tool for the job.

And the job is a tough one.

My job is tough, too. I’m supposed to provide the PRO-filter argument in this little pro/con piece. I was asked to fill this role because I was vocally supportive of the decision to uphold filtering in the controversial superior court case here in Washington involving the North Central Regional Library. The problem is, though, I’m not pro-filter, and in that particular case, my argument was much less pro-filter and very much more pro-library.

You see, library filtering is a lot like abortion.

Okay, not really, but a similar approach to the two issues is useful. For instance, nobody is actually pro-abortion. Those people picketing outside the clinics are against abortion, and their opponents don’t fall on the opposite end of the spectrum – they hang out in the middle. Similarly, those who choose to picket outside the library (usually on the interwebs) are not pro-filtering, they’re against it, and again their opposition isn’t on the other side of the spectrum, but in the middle.

We’re not pro-abortion, and we’re not pro-filtering. We’re pro-choice.

Why are we pro-choice? Because libraries operate in vastly different communities and each one, dealing with its own particular set of circumstances, must make the choice that it feels is appropriate. That there are two libraries in California who decided to take a stand against filtering and, by extension (if you take their and Audrey’s word for it), censorship, is great. I’m glad that worked out for them, and I’m sure they did it because they felt it was in the best service to their communities. But every community is different, and what is right for one is not right for all.

Let’s take the North Central Regional Library case as an example.

Demographically, there are 28 libraries in the NCRL system; 14 of them serve as the de facto school libraries for their school districts. 16 of them only have one computer in the building. Most of them are very small libraries (the largest about 2000 sq ft), in very small communities. These libraries are essential to these small communities where people can’t afford broadband and where kids need a quiet place to study.

I’ll repeat part of that, since it seems fairly important. Half of the libraries in NCRL are also the de facto school library for their school district. Yeah, they’re public libraries, but they aren’t public libraries like they have in Sonoma County or in San José. In terms of being a de facto school library, in being completely understaffed, in having only one single computer for public use – how can we judge filtering in a library like this unless we’ve been there? Shouldn’t we trust that the librarian in charge of a particular library has the best knowledge of what is the right course of action for that library? I’m willing to do so when it comes to libraries making anti-filtering choices in California. I’m even willing to applaud them. But I think that the North Central Regional Library system deserves applause, too, because it’s taking a very unpopular stance to do what it thinks is appropriate in terms of serving its community.

Jan Walsh, Washington State Librarian at the time (now retired), stated her support of the decision²⁴in terms I couldn’t agree with more. She said:

I am pleased that our state Supreme Court  has handed down a strong, sensible ruling that gives our public libraries flexibility to reflect their community values as they adopt Internet policies and use of filters on certain content.

I know that the library community is divided over this issue and certainly as a veteran librarian I understand the points of view about unfettered access versus policies that protect our school children and others from pornography and other objectionable and potentially harmful material.  I believe this 6-3 Supreme Court ruling, and the federal ruling that we expect will follow, provides public libraries with permission to adopt a reasonable filter system if that fits the needs of their community. We support libraries listening to their patrons. If that value is to have no filter, then that’s fine.

This is not a free speech issue, in my mind. It is about what your community needs. It is about the use of our taxpayers’ limited resources and our libraries’ limited resources.

Dean Marney, Director of the North Central Regional Library, also provided a response²⁵ that I feel is worth repeating here in full:

NCRL is pleased with the Supreme Court’s decision validating our approach to Internet filtering. We embrace the Internet as a resource and encourage its use by all patrons. NCRL will continue to provide broad access to a wealth of rich and diverse online content consistent with our Collection Development policy and our mission to promote reading and lifelong learning.

More generally, we are heartened by the Court’s acknowledgement of the multi-faceted role many public libraries must perform today. In fulfilling its role, NCRL must balance many important interests, some borne of tradition and some arising as a consequence of an increasingly complex world. First and foremost, NCRL is a traditional, full service library serving Chelan, Douglas, Grant, Ferry, and Okanogan Counties. We must consider the diverse needs of all our patrons, adults and children alike, in shaping our print and online collections. We strive to offer resources of depth, breadth, and quality yet we must do so within ever-tightening budget constraints. We also provide vital support to public schools throughout the region, including services that in some instances children might go without were it not for NCRL. We also have important workplace and safety responsibilities to our staff and our patrons. We are gratified to know that the highest Court in our State understands the context in which NCRL operates and the discretion we must exercise to perform our essential functions.

It’s about choice. Libraries make choices every day about how to best serve their communities. The libraries who do this best are the ones who don’t take a standard approach, but think about their communities, in particular, and their particular needs, and creates a policy that responds to those needs. Sonoma County did this, and San José did this, and North Central did this too. All three libraries acted courageously and made tough decisions, but what is more courageous: acting in a way that draws accolade from your peers, or making the tough, unpopular decision because you feel it best serves your library’s community.

Filtering and Censorship and Collection Development

The Supreme Court decision was that filtering the internet is actually an application of collection development. This seems to me like a strange approach, one no doubt conceived by lawyers as well as (if not more so than) librarians, but let’s run with it.

Libraries have collection development policies that they use to determine which materials get added to their collections. These policies act as a filter, basically, through which our purchase of materials is made: Item one, book on the holocaust written in a fair manner showing both sides – Purchased; Item two, book on the holocaust written by a known anti-Semitic group which makes no attempt to be fair and distorts historical fact – Rejected. While libraries will do their best to represent both sides fairly in any controversial topic, they must use their discretion to determine what “fair” means and reject items that don’t meet that standard.

These decisions happen all the time, though they’re mostly invisible to the public, for whom items magically appear on the shelves. The fact is, librarians do their best at all times to provide the best information to their patrons while removing the information that they feel is of no value or harmful to the community. This is filtering, absolutely, but is it censorship? Is the argument really that different when we talk about filtering practices on the internet as opposed to the filtering practices we incorporate into our purchase of physical materials?

You may argue that buying books is opt-in while internet filtering is opt-out. In other words, in book purchasing we select items to buy, while with internet filtering we select items to keep out. There’s also a cost issue; we pay for each book we purchase, but we don’t pay for each website, they all come included as part of the great wide interwebs. These arguments have some merit, but they’re really just distractions when you remember the underlying purpose of collection development: to provide good content and filter out bad content. Whether you opt in, out, or sideways, the idea is to not only provide the best books, but also the better websites, so that people can find quality information and avoid being fooled by sophistry and scam.

Human Filtering Vs. Computer Filtering

More and more the filtering of physical materials is not a completely human process. Our lovely vendors offer to do a lot of the filtering for us²⁶, and it becomes very hard to tell what falls through the cracks. All the same, we’ll assume that there is much more human intervention in the selection of physical materials than there is in the filtering software that libraries use to select what internet sites are viewable. And we’ll even assume, as the Librarian in Black insists²⁷, that all filtering software available to libraries is pretty much ineffective, both by block “good” websites and not blocking “bad” websites.

At this point I should make a confession. I have a ten-year old at home, and I filter his web access. I’m not ashamed of this decision, being that it was born of a situation where he had searched for and found porn and had, at the end of the day, been so overwhelmed and ashamed at what he had seen that he literally burst into racking sobs when he told us about it a couple days later. It had obviously been eating away at him, and this in a house where we had never been anything less than honest and open in talking about sex and where everyone saw each other naked from time to time without it being a big deal. We talked to him about it, of course, to help him make sense of what he saw, to get over his shame, and to set his mind at ease. Then we decided to create an environment where he wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore.

The filter we use at home is a very simple Firefox add-on called ProCon Latte²⁸, and it just plain works. It has without exception blocked all objectionable sites, and while it has also blocked a handful of legitimate sites it was short work to make those sites accessible by adding them to a white list. Maybe the web searching patterns of a ten-year old are not indicative of those of the general public, but my experience with filtering has been positive and I find it hard to believe that my completely free add-on filter is so much better than every other commercial paid filter that libraries can utilize.

Filters In A Perfect World

Obviously, filters aren’t perfect, and most libraries’ filtering policies are probably not perfect either. In a perfect world, every library would have a filter that aligned perfectly with the needs of its community – for some that might mean only blocking the very worst of sites, for others it may mean blocking more. And in every case, should a user find their access blocked to a website that they feel should be accessible, there should be a way for them to access that site without the need for direct appeal to a librarian and without having to wait for the site to be reviewed by some committee. Access should be immediate, and review should come afterwards to determine ongoing accessibility, without impacting that user at that time, and without causing them embarrassment in having to ask to have the filters turned off.

Lacking a perfect world, we’ll continue to do the best we can. For some libraries that may mean removing filters entirely. For others, that may mean forging ahead with whatever filters they have because they don’t see a better alternative. Libraries serve their communities first, and one must assume that they’re doing so as effectively as they can. Whatever high-minded ideals are involved, and the ideals are important, we must allow libraries to choose how to interpret them. It is a balancing act, to be sure, between issues of free speech and appropriate service to a specific community. It’s a choice that we as spectators should not presume to make, but one that each library must grapple and come to terms with. Our job, as outsiders who claim to advocate for libraries, is to support those decisions, whatever they may be, within the communities in which they are made.

References for Audrey Barbaroff’s Post

ALA Office for Literacy & Outreach Services. (2010). The American Dream Starts @ Your Library. http://www.olos.ala.org/americandream/

American Library Association. (2010). CPPA, COPA, CIPA: Which Is Which? http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/oif/ifissues/issuesrelatedlinks/cppacopacipa.cfm

American Library Association. (2003). Libraries, the Internet and Filtering. http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=litoolkit&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=164201

American Library Association. (1996.) Library Bill of Rights. http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/index.cfm

Federal Communications Commission. (2009). Children’s Internet Protection Act. http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/cipa.html

Goldberg, Beverly. (2009). On the Line for the First Amendment. American Libraries. http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/features/05272009/line-first-amendment

Goldberg, Beverly. (2010) Ruling: Washington Libraries Can Deny Adults Unfiltered Internet. American Libraries. http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/05102010/ruling-washington-libraries-can-deny-adults-unfiltered-internet

Houghton-Jan, Sarah. (2008). Internet Filtering Software Tests: Barracuda, CyberPatrol, FilterGate, & WebSense. Report to the San Jose Public Library. http://www.sjlibrary.org/about/sjpl/commission/agen0208_report.pdf

Houghton-Jan, Sarah. (May 07, 2010). Why internet filters don’t work and why libraries who filter are wrong. Librarian in Black. http://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack/2010/05/filtering.html

Janes, Joe. (October 6, 2009). Censorship Gets Smart. The Internet Librarian. http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/columns/internet-librarian/censorship-gets-smart

Luxemburg, R. (1961). The Russian Revolution, and Leninism or Marxism?. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Marney, Dean. (November 1, 2010). The Internet Is Not All or Nothing. Library Journal. http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/communityopinion/887222-274/lj_backtalk_the_internet_is.html.csp

Metoyer-Duran, C. (January 01, 1993). Information Gatekeepers. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (arist), 28, 111-50.

Nichols, S. (January 22, 2009). COPA Child-Porn Law Killed. PC World. http://www.pcworld.com/article/158131/copa_childporn_law_killed.html

Oder, N. (2007.) Proposed state filter law would go beyond CIPA. Library Journal. http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/community/legislation/851065-270/story.csp

Oder, N. (2009.) After 18 Months, San Jose Council Says No to Internet Filters. Library Journal. http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/community/legislation/854791-270/after_18_months_san_jose.html.csp

Oder, N. (2010). ACLU still concerned about whether individual libraries overblock. http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/community/intellectualfreedom/869102-269/rhode_island_pls_fix_filtering.html.csp

Plumer, D. (2001). Literature Review and Analysis: Internet Filters and Intellectual Freedom. University of Texas at Austin Graduate School of Library and Information Science. http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~i380kdcp/SP04/Plumer-research.pdf

Sobel, D. (2003). Internet Filters and Public Libraries. First Amendment Center: Washington D.C. http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/PDF/Internetfilters.pdf

Sonoma County Library Commission. (2010). Sonoma County Library Commission Response to the 2009-2010 Grand Jury Report. http://www.sonomalibrary.org/agenda/Grand%20Jury%20Response/Grand%20Jury%20Response%202010_final.pdf

Walter, V.A. (September 23, 2009). The Children We Serve. American Libraries. http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/features/09232009/children-we-serve

References for Ahniwa Ferrari’s Post

“Librarians Do Gaga.” Youtube: Athenasbanquet. May 27, 2010. <http://bit.ly/gyYXd1>.

Oder, Norman. “Updated: Washington Supreme Court, 6-3, Backs Library System’s Full Filtering Policy.” Library Journal. May 6, 2010. <http://bit.ly/ef9GdJ>.

Marney, Dean. “Washington State Supreme Court Opinion.” North Central Regional Library. May 06, 2010. <http://bit.ly/i3QKxs>.

Houghton-Jan, Sarah. “Why Internet Filters Don’t Work and Why Libraries Who Filter Are Wrong.” Librarian in Black. May 07, 2010. <http://bit.ly/h4oDcN>.

“ProCon Latte.” Add-ons for Firefox: corvineum. July 17, 2009. <http://bit.ly/i0KFxC>.

___

Many thanks to Linda Johns, Ellie Collier and Eric Frierson for reading earlier drafts of this post and for all of their helpful comments and suggestions.

1. For an example, see Carr, 2010. Despite the title’s implication, nearly half the article focuses on how well particular filtering technologies work. Even Judith Krug, past director of ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, spent much of the interview re-posted in Goldberg, 2009 framing her discussion with the problems of a particular technology, SurfWatch, rather than the issue of filtering as a whole. Library Journal is particularly guilty of focusing heavily on logistics with little to no real discussion of the underlying ethical issues. The San Jose Council’s decision to remove filters was reported as one almost purely of cost (Oder, 2009). Some articles (Oder, 2007) highlight librarians’ resistance to filtering mandates or concerns, but fail to open discussion on why such struggle is warranted. Others (Oder, 2010) talk specifically about over or underblocked content, but never mention, much less debate, the impact on intellectual freedom as a whole. A search of LJ’s site yields many similar examples
2. Janes, 2009
3. Goldberg, 2010
4. FCC, 2009
5. For more information on the legality of CIPA and its predecessors, see ALA, 2010; Sobel, 2003; and Plumer, 2001
6. ALA, 2010
7. ibid
8. Goldberg, 2010
9. ALA, 2003; Houghton-Jan, 2010; Houghton-Jan, 2008
10. Walter, 2009
11. Metoyer, 1993
12. ALA Office for Literacy & Outreach Services, 2010
13. Marney, 2010
14. Luxemborg, 1961
15. Or it may not be. See Houghton-Jan, 2010.
16. Minow, 1997
17. Minow, 1997
18. ALA, 2003
19. Sonoma County Library Commission, 2010
20. ALA, 2003
21. ibid
22. Oder, 2009; Houghton-Jan, 2008.
23. “Librarians Do Gaga”, 2010. Audrey has an acting role in the video.
24. Her statement can be found in Oder, 2010.
25. Marney, 2010.
26. The most common way this happens is through the use of approval plans.
27. Houghton-Jan, 2010
28. “ProCon Latte”, 2009

Thanks to Flickr user litherland for use of this image!

A few weeks ago John Dupuis, of Confessions of a Science Librarian fame, posted his Stealth Librarianship Manifesto. He begins:

This particular edition of the manifesto applies to academic libraries. The principles of stealth librarianship apply to all branches of the profession, each in particular ways. Other manifestos could exist for, say, public or corporate librarians.

However the core is the same: to thrive and survive in a challenging environment, we must subtly and not-so-subtly insinuate ourselves into the lives of our patrons. We must concentrate on becoming part of their world, part of their landscape.

And he ends by calling upon others to add their manifesto points. We at In the Library with the Lead Pipe saw this as an opportunity to respond to his list and create our own.

Read on for our differing takes.

Emily

Scholarly Communication Librarian (Assistant Professor), Oregon Health & Science University
Reference & Instruction Librarian, Portland State University

There are many things that I appreciated about Dupuis’s manifesto. What particularly resonated with me is his take on publishing and professional literature.

We must stop reading the formal library literature. That’s what librar* blogs are for. We must familiarize ourselves with the literature and scholarly communications ecosystems of our patron communities.

We must stop writing the formal library literature. That’s what librar* blogs are for. We must make our case for the usefulness of what we do in the literature of our patron communities.

What Dupuis fails to mention here is that many academic librarians MUST publish in traditional, peer-reviewed library publications while striving to attain tenure. I am not personally in a tenure-track position, so I have the liberty of not fretting over where I publish. What I have found is that the online discourse via blogs is plentiful and satisfying for me to keep up with what’s happening in libraries.  Blogging here at In the Library with the Lead Pipe offers me the opportunity to write and think critically in an open peer-review and open publishing format; it is a rich experience that creates and advocates for open discourse among professionals. I’m not so sure what “stealth” has to do when it comes to creating open discourse. Dupuis is contradicting himself.

But Dupuis’s push toward understanding “scholarly communication ecosystems” resonates with me. Working as a Scholarly Communication Librarian, I see the work that needs to be done within academic communities in this regard. I see the education that needs to happen with faculty to understand even what is a “scholarly communication ecosystem.” To me that ecosystem is one stymied by the tenure system and traditional publishing paradigms. But without familiarizing ourselves regarding that discipline-specific system, how are we to educate our patrons regarding changes? Regarding open peer-review? Regarding peer-reviewed open access journals? Regarding using new measures like the Eigenfactor over Impact factors? And how are we going to make the case for changes in transparency and fairness of pricing from journal vendors if we don’t understand how a discipline-specific ecosystem works? Dupuis’s call for discipline-level understanding of scholarly communications is crucial for academic librarians.

Despite my agreement with Dupuis’s manifesto points regarding scholarly communication, there are some points that I contend. My Lead Pipe colleagues have done a much better job addressing those contentions so I’ll end my piece with an offering of my manifesto bullet points for my praxis of librarianship.

• I will not be stealth. I will proudly and loudly be a librarian.
• I will not teach library instruction sessions that do not incorporate critical thinking. (Down with database demos!)
• I will not bend over backwards for my subject faculty, but I will engage with them and educate them about my profession, and in turn, learn about theirs.
• I will be open to new ideas.
• I will think critically about ideas and opportunities presented to myself and to my institution.
• I will acknowledge what I don’t know.
• I will continue to learn what I don’t know.

Kim

Librarian/Assistant Professor at Boise State University

I don’t think “A stealth librarianship manifesto” is about stealth at all. At least, not at its core.

What Dupuis’s post really is about is much simpler and more nefarious: it’s about language. It’s about the way human beings — and in this case, scientists — perceive words based less on what they really mean and based more on their own various preconceived or culturally embedded ideas about them. Like “library.” What non-librarian doesn’t picture a quiet room full of overflowing bookshelves upon hearing the word “library”? There’s your problem, friends.

Don’t believe me? Take another look at the manifesto. Ignore all those sharp and provocative bullets and skip to the bottom section of the post that begins, “A couple of final points.” Here’s where we get to the meat of the issue:

And yes, I did really start thinking about this at Science Online 2011, with some ideas here and here. I also started germinating some of these thoughts after seeing how the library sessions at Science Online 2010 worked out, see here and here, noting how the session on Reference Managers was better attended and didn’t have “library” in the title. And looking further back, it’s a fairly common theme for my blogging, for example here and here.

That’s a lot of casually tossed out “here”s: six, in fact. All that thinking and germinating, yet we readers don’t even get an abbreviated link title? Let’s pull out our magnifying glass and take a closer look at what’s going on here, one sentence at a time. I’m adding link titles to the original text in brackets. First up:

And yes, I did really start thinking about this at Science Online 2011, with some ideas here [“ScienceOnline 2011 Debrief Part 1: ebooks, blogs and stealthy librarians”] and here [“ScienceOnline 2011 Debrief Part 3: Some session ideas for #scio12”].

These two links point to past blog posts by Dupuis, both in response to the Science Online 2011 conference. “Debrief Part 1” is your basic conference debrief post, in which he comments on the fact that “science types” at this conference don’t attend sessions that have the word “library” in the title. Apparently Science Online 2011 included a very successful library session on “data discoverability” that was well-attended thanks to its avoidance of the “L-Word.” Meanwhile, “Debrief Part 3” describes Dupuis’s ideas for a future conference session he might organize to convince those science types that libraries really are great collaborators in educating students and advancing open science. Of course they need convincing since they don’t already know that libraries actually care about these issues instead of just being busy dusting off our old books. Why don’t they know that yet? Because we’re libraries.

Onward:

I also started germinating some of these thoughts after seeing how the library sessions at Science Online 2010 worked out, see here [“Science Online 2010: Scientists and librarians”] and here [“Reclaiming ground”], noting how the session on Reference Managers was better attended and didn’t have “library” in the title.

These two links point to another blog, Book of Trogool, a Scientopia science blog written by what I’m guessing are three academic librarians (they don’t seem to have filled out their bios quite yet, alas). In “Science Online 2010: Scientists and librarians,” Dorothea Salo comes right out and starts battering away at the stereotype that forms the root of our language problem. “How,” she asks, “can science libraries persist when scientists haven’t the least notion that libraries or librarians are relevant to their work?” Salo then launches into her own sort of anti-manifesto listing all the activities that aren’t going to solve the problem, a cascade of angst that clearly inspired Dupuis to create his (more positive) manifesto.

“Reclaiming ground” addresses the same problem through the lens of Steve Koch, an Experimental Biophysicist at the University of New Mexico. Commenting on his past negative experiences at his undergraduate and graduate libraries, Koch describes how, as a faculty member, he has been happy to avoid his library. Essentially his advice comes down to two points: “educate current faculty” about what libraries really do, and be nicer to current students so they like us better.

Koch is getting at something behind the rhetorical theory I’m advancing, something at the very root of the library stereotype itself: libraries have a bad rap. Libraries have the reputation of being rulemongers, fine-collecting penny-pinchers, cranky about helping students, and all-around holier-than-thou. We know this is how (some) people see us, but is all of this negativity that weighs down the word “library” deserved? Koch’s experience would say “yes,” but I would contend that as a field librarianship largely attracts a different personality type these days that is less focused on institutional policy and more focused on customer service. Don’t you agree? (You can read more on librarian personality types here, though I’ll acknowledge that it doesn’t exactly back me up on this). So in that case, we’re back to the main part of the problem being the associations that go along with the “L-Word,” and not the libraries themselves.

And looking further back, it’s a fairly common theme for my blogging, for example here [“Science in the 21st Century conference recap”] and here [“From the Archives: My theory of conferences”].

As indicated, these two links go back to previous posts by Dupuis that reflect both the originating concern of the manifesto and more context on one of  its statements. In “Science in the 21st Century,” Depuis muses on another conference experience in which it was clear that science faculty did not have the library on their “radar.” This ties in cleanly with the other links described above. The second post, “From the Archives,” provides some background to his manifesto statement, “We must stop going to librarian conferences and instead attend conferences where our patrons will be present.” As one outreach (sorry, “stealth”) tactic, going to disciplinary conferences makes perfect sense. However, it’s not going to solve the problem.

If only we could surgically trim the eons of expectation and stereotype from the definition of “library” in the brains of our patrons and leave them with a refined, sharper sense of what a library means in 2011. But how? Is it just a matter of, as Dupuis suggests, dropping the use of the “L-Word” in our work with those outside our field? What if we were to all consciously redefine our buildings and our jobs and our conference presentation titles to reflect the new work most of us do already? What if instead of saying I’m a “Librarian” I could introduce myself as a “Research Consultant” or “Information Expert” or — who knows? I can already picture the very different response that would evoke from faculty in other disciplines, as well as students.

On the institutional level it’s already happening at campuses around the country, where libraries are being replaced with “Information Commons” and “Knowledge Centers” and a whole array of other non-L-word names. Perhaps it’s just time for us — as individuals and organizations — to completely redefine ourselves. That way, we can throw overboard the negative baggage our beloved libraries have been hauling around for all these years.

Ellie

Reference Librarian (Assistant Professor), Austin Community College

I think I may be anti-manifesto in general. Or rather, perpetually and knee-jerkingly defender of whatever is under attack. I want to make it clear that I did read where Dupuis states himself that the manifesto is “a series of provocative statements not a realistic plan of action” and I appreciate the overall sentiment. But since this is a reaction piece, I have to admit, there is much I disagree with.

A number of the statements start with “we must stop” and then follow with what we should be doing instead. I agree with most of the ‘start doing’ items, but I don’t see these as either/or choices. There may be some aspect of “what are you able to give up to add in these new important things,” but I don’t think most of the items should actually be fully stopped by all librarians. I also see many of them as comparing apples to oranges. The things gained from librarian/librarian interactions are what we then use in our librarian/constituent interactions. They serve different purposes and they’re not interchangeable. For example, we can learn from our constituents what programs or services most interest them, but we can’t learn survey methodology from them. And what about all the times their personal interests conflict with our mission? We are in a profession where we have to sometimes ask, do we give them what they want, or what they need? A friend posted a quote on Facebook from a student after an information literacy session, “you should just talk not ask so many questions.” It is our deeper interactions with fellow librarians through conferences, workshops and our literature that enrich our teaching pedagogy. Twitter and Facebook can supplement that, and can build wonderful connections, but they can’t substitute.

Much of the manifesto seemed to be based on an assumption of a large staff of librarian subject specialists, which is often the case at large research institutions, but may not be. If I’m in charge of all the purchasing for my small college, or only do instruction, or cataloging which single conference has my patrons? Which scholarly publishing ecosystem do I need to learn? I would argue it’s the librarian conferences where we bring together these jack-of-all-trades elements.

I do agree with the focus on faculty in academic institutions. Study after study shows that faculty are among the first people students contact for help and libraries and librarians are at the end. We can certainly do more to work with faculty to help students.

I also agree with a main sentiment, well phrased by Bonnie in the comments to the manifesto, “Our goal is to be where our patrons are (virtually and physically), using the language that they use, speaking to them on their terms…”

My manifesto addition is:

• We must do away with “musts.”

Every situation is unique and we each need to evaluate our own community and resources. Hopefully our decisions are informed by best practices (from the library community) and user studies, but ultimately there is no one right answer.

For example, there was a time I would have agreed with Emily’s statement “down with database demos.” But I will do an instruction session with no critical thinking component because at my institution the English as a second language professor wants to bring her developmental reading students in to show them how to find books in the library catalog and to introduce them to the expectations of an academic library. I will let them know they’re allowed to bring in drinks as long as they have a lid and that they can print 15 pages a day. We will search for books in the catalog and learn how to use an LC call number to find a book on the shelf. Then we’ll walk over to the shelves together and over half the class will check out a book, leaving with something that will help them improve their reading skills and feeling more confident about their ability to do so in the future or at least more confident in approaching the friendly lady at that big desk. They come in looking like deer in headlights and leave smiling. And that has every bit as much value as working on critical thinking skills with students who are at that developmental and affective stage.

Eric

Library Digital Services Manager – St. Edward’s University – Austin, Texas

Last week, I participated in Texas Library Association’s Legislative Day, a full day of visits with state legislators to talk about issues in libraries.  We visited the offices of every single state representative in the House and the Senate. This year there’s a lot to talk about when it comes to libraries and the draft 2012-2013 biennium budget.

Long story short, state library programs including TexShare (how we can afford databases like Academic Search Complete), Interlibrary Loan, the K-12 database program, and a variety of others are completely obliterated.  We’re not talking about steep cuts – we’re talking about zero’ing out entire program budgets.

The conversations we had with state legislators and their aides made it clear why programs that are so obviously vital to us are on the chopping block: legislators have no idea what libraries are or what we do. Academic, public, school or otherwise.

To illustrate how unclear legislators are about what a librarian is, take one of our talking points about school librarians:

School libraries and certified school librarians are critical in supporting education and digital literacy. School librarians are teachers and should be recognized as teaching staff… School librarians are frontline teachers who instruct students everyday on curriculum requirements, such as how to research, locate, evaluate, cite, and use information effectively and ethically… Certified school librarians must hold a master’s degree, pass a graduate level exam on library media functions and supporting school curricula, and have two full years of classroom teaching experience.

Time and time again, we ran into legislators who believed librarians were part of the non-instructional staff in K-12 schools, adding to the administrative bloat public schools carry.

It’s no wonder libraries and librarians have taken a beating in the draft budget. Our representatives don’t understand what we do. And here we are, at the eleventh hour, trying to plead for our interests and those of our patrons, with people who are far more interested in other state matters.

The outlook is bleak for Texas libraries. We did the best we could at legislative day, but it all seemed like it was too little, too late. As Dupuis would have put it, we are not part of a legislator’s landscape. We’re barely a part of our user’s landscape.

So – what can we do to find our way into the lives of our representatives?  The best suggestion came from Edna Butts, general counsel and senior policy advisor for state senator Kirk Watson.  She said that it was great that we showed up in such numbers to support libraries, but the important voices would be those of our users.  (I then pointed out the overflowing packet of letters from elementary school students supporting their library in Senator Watson’s information packet.)

To this end, I would add the following to the manifesto:

• We must be better at articulating our own value, especially in non-library settings (the faculty meeting, the town hall, the Capitol)
• We must inspire others to fight for us by aligning ourselves with our users, not each other

This speaks to the spirit of the manifesto in that we must be “on the same side” or “of the same group” with our users.  We can’t be the “other” if we want people to stand up for what we do.  We must develop an environment where a threat to the library feels very much like a threat to its users.

Run a “What My Library Means to Me” project. Make your library their library. Do it stealth. Do it in the open, purposefully. The most important part is to do it, and share your results with a senator, a provost, a principal, a superintendent or a mayor.

Note: A big thank you to Gloria Meraz, Director of Communications for the Texas Library Association, and all TLA staff and volunteers who put together legislative day this year.  The message Gloria composed for us to share was lucid, urgent, and timely. It gave us words for what we know to be important for our state. Thank you!

Brett

Director, Collingswood Public Library, and PhD student at Rutgers University

Is anyone trying to stealthily infiltrate the librarian community? I’m pretty sure the answer is no. Why? In part, because far too many librarians think we should ignore what we’re good at (whatever that is, right?) in order to pretend we’re something else entirely.

• Nursing isn’t what you turn to when you fail at getting into medical school.
• Social work isn’t what you turn to when you fail at getting into a psychology program.
• Education isn’t what you turn to when you drop out of a PhD program.
• Librarianship isn’t what you turn to when you want to stealthily sneak onto the faculty.

These are professions and academic disciplines with a history all their own, each with a fascinating, useful, unique body of knowledge. If we can keep this idea in mind, maybe it will help us muster enough self-esteem to start reading (and talking about) our professional literature and to continue the work of making our professional organizations truly relevant.

We have a lot of work to do, a lot of questions to answer, but that work can be made easier by paying attention to the librarians who have thought about these questions already and who have contributed their ideas and their research to our professional literature. Our work can also be made easier by working with others in the profession and by bringing in people from related professions to help us along.

I don’t work in an academic library, but I have in the past. In addition, as a part-time graduate student, I currently rely on academic libraries in order to get my work done. Here’s my manifesto for academic libraries:

1. Figure out what the students and faculty need in order to do their work.
2. Give it to them.
3. Measure the results.
4. Repeat.

This is just an educated guess on my part, but I’m pretty sure that figuring out what students and faculty want and giving it to them means putting every available resource into improving the library’s website. And by website, I don’t mean just the pages in www.library.yourinstitution.edu, I mean every resource and service students and faculty access through the library website or could conceivably access through the library website. Do you want to do something stealthily that I, as a student, would find really useful? Learn information architecture, learn to program, or figure out how to negotiate contracts with the content vendors that allow programmers and information architects to present information in a usable way. I don’t need to see you at my conferences or on my turf or collaborating with faculty members or in my “patron community” and I’d really rather you weren’t “in the social networking spaces where (we) live”: I just want the library website to work.

As far as I’m concerned, any effort to go stealth is wasted. The problem isn’t with our public relations. The problem is with our product.

Leigh Anne

Senior Staff Librarian, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

Did someone say “public library manifesto”?  Where to begin?

Dupuis is correct when he states that a manifesto for public library workers might look very different. Many of the problems with which he takes issue are not relevant to public library workers because of the nature of our institutions. Most public library workers, for example, do not gain any sort of professional favor for presenting at conferences or serving on committees. Participation in these activities does not net us better wages, promotions, or tenure, and is not work that is routinely valued in the public library sphere, unless one currently occupies a management position or has self-identified as “management material.” In fact, it is all too frequently seen as busywork that takes reference librarians away from the day-to-day operations of the library.

Whether or not this is an acceptable state of affairs is for wiser, more experienced heads than mine to determine. However, given the current state of public librarianship, here are the revisions I would make to Dupuis’s manifesto. May they initiate a spirited conversation about the professional work of the public librarian, and the best way to support it.

• Public library workers must be selective about which conferences they attend and which professional associations they join, supporting only those that specifically support our particular needs and concerns.
• That being said, public library workers must make an honest attempt to reform unsatisfactory professional associations before giving up on them.
• Public library workers must have an elevator speech for their job/institution and be willing not only to deliver it at the drop of a hat, but to tailor it on the fly based on the particular needs and interests of the audience.
• Whenever possible, public library workers must collaborate with academic and special library workers to create interdisciplinary services for the community they collectively serve.
• Public library workers must blog, using their real names, and with full support from their institutions. Our unique voices and experiences are still, sadly, underrepresented.
• Public library workers must re-imagine what professional literature could be, and actively seek out opportunities to write for publications, print and digital, that our patrons are reading.
• Public library workers must make an honest effort to explore leadership and management opportunities before rejecting them as unsuitable.
• By the same token, public library workers must firmly reject any such roles and opportunities they have tried and found wanting/inappropriate, for whatever reason.

While there are a great deal of factors over which we have no control, I reject out of hand any theory of public librarianship that smacks of self-pity or victim mentality.There is so much that we are already doing quite well. We routinely partner with non-library organizations in our communities to host programs, especially for children and seniors. We actively court teen clientele and try to understand their unique perspective. We use social media wisely, for the most part, and our reputation for defending the freedom to read is legendary. I refuse to believe we cannot apply the same spirit and fire to the cultivation and development of our collective professional identity.

Or, to put it another way, time to take the logs out of our own eyes before tackling the specks that trouble our patrons. At the very least, we should be conscious of those thoughts and behaviors that prevent us from constructing a solid professional identity, and initiate conversations on these matters, no matter how difficult that might seem in the context of our institutions as currently constructed.

Full disclosure, dear colleagues: I am writing my portion of this post on my own time, at an ungodly hour on the night before it is due. I do this not because I am a martyr, or because I hope someone influential will see the essay and be impressed by my dedication to our profession. I do it because I refuse to accept the tired old dichotomy that shunts scholars into one arena and practitioners into another. It is not enough to serve the public. We must have a theoretical-rhetorical model that serves our own best interests, and makes it easier to explain our value to a culture that delights in questioning it. We must have a body of professional literature that is meaningful and vibrant. And, above all, we must have library workers who actively and consciously explore their gifts and abilities, then select appropriate vehicles for expressing those abilities.

Public library workers of the world, unite and write! You have nothing to lose but your stereotypes.

In the Library with the Lead Pipe is pleased to welcome another guest author, Jean Costello! Jean is a technical project manager for a prominent STM publisher. She is a passionate supporter of public libraries and blogs regularly as The Radical Patron.

2009 may be an inflection point for public libraries. This year, the deepest recession in U.S. history accelerated their financial trajectory. Following nearly a decade of level or eroding budgets,¹ libraries across America were threatened with closure due to lack of funds. Some have closed and most are operating with dramatically reduced budgets. The recession has also increased usage, with citizens flocking to their local libraries to access computers for job search, participate in recreational activities and borrow popular books and DVDs. As the economy improves, the public may remember the value delivered by their public libraries and restore funding. Even if this happens, I believe funding will be insufficient to maintain the viability of our public libraries in the absence of new service offerings, service delivery methods and funding mechanisms.

The philosophical and material underpinnings of our public library system are solid, however its organizational structure of wholly independent entities funded primarily by local taxes, developed in the mid-nineteenth century,² is ill-equipped to compete with 21st century companies that provide more focused service offerings. Google, Amazon, and others will remain clear winners in terms of information findability and convenience for the general public. In the community realm, social media companies have disrupted our assumptions, understanding and behavior and their influence will grow without the availability of viable alternatives. And long term success in the entertainment or social service sectors seems tenuous given the array of commercial and government entities competing to support these needs.

So is there light at the end of this tunnel?

Circumstances are starting to favor change. The economic crisis has prompted many Americans to re-evaluate and modify their consumption habits.³ Perhaps for the first time, some may find value in sharing rather than owning resources. The Wall Street bailouts of 2008/2009, and this year’s debate over healthcare reform, have foregrounded a national dialogue about the role of private companies and government agencies in American life. For public libraries, a multi-year funding crisis, news of academic institutions replacing their libraries with other facilities⁴ and a growing interest in mixed-use libraries⁵ may make the pain of doing nothing greater than the pain of doing something. This is a prerequisite for most organizational change. More importantly, the maturation of key digital technologies enables libraries to deliver new and existing services more efficiently on a large scale.

The right change

America desperately needs an institution dedicated solely to the public good, that serves all its citizens equitably, promotes genuine community and fosters a healthy, integrated sense of recreation and self-improvement. Our libraries have done this magnificently for over a hundred years, through good times and bad, in the largest cities and the most rural communities. It’s one of the reasons library service offerings have remained constant for decades and funding secure for even longer.

I believe we do not need to remake our public libraries; we simply need to shore them up. As we envision change, it seems important to preserve the local autonomy and authenticity that have collectively made these institutions a national treasure. The right change would bolster libraries’ ability to leverage digital technology while increasing use of their physical facilities and surrounding amenities. It would also be advantageous to attract more users with high-end needs, for they would likely spur new service development and be able to deliver more financial and political support than traditional constituencies.

In my view, the public broadcasting model is a good way to meet these goals. Imagine a single, non-profit entity positioned to attract major funding and provide technology solutions far better than any municipal organization or system can do on its own. Imagine freeing countless public librarians and volunteers from rudimentary tasks to give them more time to collaborate on activities that inform, inspire, and entertain. Imagine libraries providing trusted information and facilitating meaningful dialogues across America. Imagine extending the work of passionate, outstanding librarians beyond their local libraries. A National Public Library (NPL) Corporation to augment the existing public library system would make this possible.

(Note: As a patron, I can speak to the public-facing aspects of this idea. I’d be interested in comments from library professionals about how the NPL might offer benefits for optimizing library operations, professional development, etc.)

NPL purpose and funding

Like its counterparts in radio and television, the NPL would syndicate high-quality programming to independent libraries across the country. Programming in this context would include content as well as digital technology for operations or direct patron services. The NPL would also provide consultation and coordination for fundraising activities.

Like the public broadcasters, NPL would derive funding from multiple sources including the federal government, charitable donations from corporate sponsors and fees from member libraries. Public libraries are nodes in a national system and it is appropriate that our federal tax dollars support it. Corporate and foundation funding, with appropriate governance to counter undue influence from large donors, is a valid funding source. Through their fees, member libraries would gain access to rich content and services and also secure a stakeholder position in the NPL.

Programming; digital technology

Through my work as a library volunteer and advocate, I observe the significant amount of time library staff and volunteers devote to functions that can be optimized through technology. While technological awareness is generally high, people appear thoroughly overwhelmed by the plethora of digital tools and techniques available to them. As a result, even basic tasks such as maintaining lists of supporters who serve on boards and committees, make financial contributions and volunteer can be challenging. Devising communication strategies amidst multiple, dynamic mediums including email, websites, blogs, and Facebook can also be daunting. Many of the library meetings I’ve attended have been as much about contact administration as about new programs or initiatives.

In terms of patron services, I use a few libraries in Massachusetts that seem to be on-par with their peers nationwide. Despite my esteem and strong support for them, my honest rating for convenience and ease-of-doing business would be about a B- or C. As someone who is employed full-time and needs access outside traditional business hours, is comfortable using internet services, and has other options for accessing information and entertainment, I find my public libraries are not keeping pace with service levels from other providers.

Within the libraries, information and service are readily available at the front desk. Outside the library, it is more difficult to come by, or impossible, due to limited hours of operation. Some libraries require that I phone or visit to seek staff assistance for straightforward transactions like renewing materials and reserving meeting rooms and museum passes. Each seems to use a different method of posting events on their websites and few let me search for programs or register online. It’s easy to overlook or miss out on some good library programming as a result. None has an integrated electronic newsletter to keep me updated on library news, programs, and new material acquisitions. Information about volunteering and making financial donations is also fragmented; giving to my library is not as convenient as it is with other organizations.

Here are a few online applications the NPL could rapidly make available to deliver better online services and save staff time as well:

• A calendar to enable the public to search for events, add events to their personal calendars, and receive email alerts about programs they have registered for or that meet their interests.
• A reservation system for meeting rooms, museum passes, etc.
• A volunteer management system to make it easy for people to browse and search for opportunities and sign up to work.
• A secure payment system so people could make one-time or recurring monetary donations to their library.
• A contact management system for libraries and friends groups to identify and contact members, donors, etc.
• An email marketing tool to craft rich, targeted electronic communications to libraries’ multiple constituencies.
• A survey tool to enable libraries to query users directly about satisfaction with existing services and interest in new services.
• Mobile applications for these services.

The benefits of a single entity that develops robust, integrated solutions for these common functions and makes them available to every library are significant. In addition to administrative efficiencies, a standard application suite would save time for library staff who must now evaluate the myriad options for delivering these services, figure out how to implement and support them, process purchase orders and maintain licenses for commercial applications, manage multiple admin accounts, and write training documentation. It is an enormous amount of work, particular for smaller libraries without dedicated technical staff.

Properly designed and implemented, patrons could receive more information from their libraries and securely process transactions online. One advantage of a uniform application suite is that users would likely promote the services in casual conversation or show others how to use them, as they do now when speaking of Netflix or other popular online services. My experience is that this does not happen today because services differ so widely from one municipal system to another.

Patron privacy protection is another advantage. Today, many libraries use free or low-cost commercial services on their websites because they do not have the resources to develop or host their own solutions. These services open patrons to unwanted advertising or require that they trade their digital privacy in order to use them. It would be a great public service if libraries uniformly deployed open, non-commercial products that deliver outstanding service and protect patron privacy.

It would also benefit the public and libraries if these solutions could be shared by other municipal agencies. The public would receive more convenient, consolidated access to their local governments and have their library to thank for it. Libraries might find agencies that currently compete with them for local funding becoming allies if they were using modules of the library’s information system to manage some of their administrative functions.

As a technology professional, I know solutions for the functionality listed above have matured to the point where integration and deployment by professional software developers would be reasonably straightforward. The NPL could make wise use of existing open source software and cloud computing to reduce cost and lead time for delivering web applications to its members. I am also confident that robust solutions for online access to patron accounts and library catalogs could be developed better through the efforts of an organization staffed and focused on the challenge than the tapestry of public and private organizations currently working to develop solutions.

Programming; content

Given the competition from commercial information and entertainment companies, I think a successful strategy for public libraries is to augment existing services with those that commercial firms cannot or will not deliver. NPL can provide enormous value in this area by syndicating the talent and contributions of public librarians throughout the country. A few ideas:

1. Online subject communities. The NPL could deploy an online community module to facilitate engagement around subject specialties. These communities would feature curated content (something like CurrentCites for the public) and moderated group discussions by an individual librarian or small team of librarians. For a given subject, curators could surface and contextualize the most high-quality, trusted material on a particular subject to people who joined the community. They could initiate and moderate interesting forum discussions by asking perceptive questions and referring participants to other user comments or relevant content. Part of the moderation would involve modeling organized thinking, clear and concise writing, and decorum—qualities that are sorely lacking in social media today. (Recent coverage and commentary on John Wilbank’s keynote at the Society of Scholarly Publishers conference is a fine example of the potential for quality online discussion.) The list of subjects is vast, as librarians know, and who better to help the public explore them?
2. Collaboration with public broadcasters. PBS and NPR collaborate to provide outstanding content. The Forum Network, which works with public stations and community partners to provide “a diverse range of perspectives on both local and global issues to audiences around the world” is one example. Adding the NPL to this collaboration would strengthen each organization.
3. Hidden Gems book and film reviews. It is increasingly difficult for good creative works to see the light of day. Consolidation in the publishing, television ,and film industries have diminished product quality; executives no longer feel confident or empowered to take chances on promising but unproven works. Instead, they promote formulaic and derivative works they believe will feed the bottom line.⁶ Additionally, the loss of independent booksellers and movie houses means that good works receive less exposure. Impartial reviewers with access to publisher catalogs, a mission to find “hidden gems,” and a large national audience might help stem the tide of mediocrity. Many library websites have links to recommended reading lists and reviews from publishers, personalities and ordinary book lovers. Publishing NPL content instead would have these advantages:
   • It would reinforce the library “brand” rather than providing free advertising for others.
   • It would reduce broken links and links to lists that haven’t been maintained. This may seem like a small thing, but in this day and age these really damage an organization’s credibility.
   • It would reinforce the library’s role of guiding users to trusted sources. The public trusts librarians and a well-organized reading list created by librarians would garner attention and respect. (Nancy Pearl hasn’t done too badly, after all). Most people understand that blurbs on book jackets and movie trailers are marketing pieces rather than genuine endorsements. Some may also realize that people manipulate the online ratings systems as a way to market their products.⁷ Librarians do not face pressure to push product and can offer thoughtful, unbiased opinions about good works of fiction and non-fiction. The reviews would be more valuable if reader comments and questions were moderated and engaged.
4. An online survival series. For this feature, librarians could research, curate, edit, and present information on up to five important topics, with one topic covered each day of the week. Here again, engagement with reader comments, questions, and content suggestions would enhance this series. Suggested topics include:
   • Information Overload—Digital technology has opened the info floodgates and everyone I know is overwhelmed by the flow. This column would be dedicated to strategies and tools for finding the information you want and filtering out the rest.
   • Commercial Search Services and Online Social Networks—Google, Facebook, and other services offer enormous benefits and can serve the public good, although we continually need reminders of their primary motivations to seek and maximize profit.⁸ Librarians are well-qualified to provide much-needed public education about the nuances and implications of information organization, storage, and retrieval.
   • Trusted Sources—In 2007, the New York Times reported on “self-interested Wikipedia edits” by corporations and government agencies.⁹ This Spring, Elsevier was exposed for publishing six fake medical journals.¹⁰ In late August, the Washington Post‘s ombudsman highlighted the paper’s penchant for covering the politics rather than the substance of healthcare reform.¹¹ A recent survey reports that 63% of Americans believe news stories are often inaccurate.¹² We’ve got a rough-and-tumble infosphere on our hands and the public needs help finding and vetting information sources. Librarians can help.
   • Digital Privacy—people are generally not aware of the vast amount of data collected and stored about them. Industry and our elected officials prefer to keep this topic opaque. Libraries can serve the public good by enhancing the ALA Privacy Revolution and regularly presenting information about it.
5. Public library spotlight. Public libraries have a rich collective history and most have equally compelling individual histories. Many are architecturally beautiful, interesting, and significant. All are reflections of their community. Given this richness and the sheer number of them, I’m surprised public libraries have not been the subject of more artistic and non-fiction works. Showcasing these fabulous institutions would be a great gift to present and future generations.

Fundraising consultation and coordination

Professionals at NPR and PBS have devised a range of techniques for garnering financial support from people who use their services. Public libraries would benefit from the expertise of professional fundraisers rather than relying on the part-time efforts of inexperienced librarians, staff, and volunteers. The public broadcasters have crafted campaigns that seamlessly promote the central organization and independent local affiliates. The same could be done for public libraries.

The NPL fundraising staff could craft messages that explain the need for funding over and above tax revenue. They could help public libraries articulate value beyond their existing user base. Fundraising consultants could also help establish best practices for involving and promoting local businesses in fundraising campaigns.

The NPL could also help transform corporate and foundation funding of public libraries. Having a central library organization to receive contributions would be good for donors and libraries. It would be a visible and efficient way for donors to demonstrate support for valued services to a significant number of people. It would also liberate librarians from chasing targeted small-dollar grants so they could focus on adding more direct value for the public. Small grants spread across multiple municipalities, that carry significant administration costs for donor and library, could be replaced with large grants to the NPL. The loss of the small grants would likely be offset by the fundraising consultation and coordination libraries would receive as part of their NPL membership fees. Large donations would support programming to provide more sustainable benefit to a greater number of libraries. The increased impact and efficiency would benefit all parties.

New local services

The services listed above will make local library websites more valuable to their communities. Better utilities for calendaring, reservations, volunteer management, etc. will drive some increase in visitation, however new programs and services will be required to maintain the high usage libraries are currently experiencing. The hope is that efficiencies achieved by implementing NPL developed systems and fundraising support would free time for other initiatives that benefit their local communities.

Library staff and volunteers are best suited to develop programs for their communities; however NPL content and services might provide program ideas or help drive participation. A tie-in with content from public broadcasters, for example, might drive visitation. Libraries could host regular “Hidden Gems” movie nights to provide access to films that don’t typically benefit from a wide release. Or they might host local subject-based clubs to personally discuss or collaboratively research topics from the online communities. Computer classes could be structured around the “Information Overload” series. Or the library might become the locus for civic action around public issues like digital privacy that libraries have brought to public attention.

Another area where libraries can add unique and outstanding value is by publishing quality information about local issues. This service was provided during a period in the early 20th century described by library historian Lowell Martin as the “Innovative Years.” He writes that “libraries would pull together the facts about an issue—an upcoming election, a public figure, a catastrophe—and reproduce the material for the convenience of curious citizens”.¹³ Interestingly, Martin credits new technology (the telephone) and the pressure of limited budgets with making library service more reactive. Nearly a hundred years later, these factors may have re-established the need for proactive library services. As with the online features, rich user engagement is a critical success factor. My town election/library/school dream provides further ideas for elements of this form of engagement.

In conclusion

Public broadcasting is but one example of how organizations provide information services to leverage efficiencies and strengthen the viability of local enterprises. Many private and public sector firms have adopted it. Visit most realtor websites, for example, and you’ll find content, databases, and utilities provided by a central organization. College alumni and other membership organizations use companies like Harris Connect for tools to “create bonds that increase participation, membership and support.”

An inflection point is a mathematical term to denote a point where a curve reverses direction. I believe a confluence of social, economic, political, and technological developments lays a foundation for a change in outlook for public libraries. A narrative of obsolescence can become one of rejuvenation and reaffirmation of their mission to provide a record of knowledge, support self-education, and provide wholesome recreation.¹⁴ A National Public Library Corporation could promote the ideal of equal access to information by helping ensure that the smallest and poorest communities have access to many of the same resources as the largest and most affluent. It can help make the Library 2.0 vision a reality. It could also add dimension to the concept of a “third place” by strengthening librarians’ role in the Commons through influence in the development of “a set of [information] resources or resource systems, the communities that use them, and the social practices and property regimes for managing the resources.”¹⁵

In their existing form, I believe public libraries supported by a National Public Library Corporation are uniquely positioned to help Americans live richer personal and public lives. Their mission is noble and broad. Their staffs are dedicated and highly educated. They are geographically interspersed, with a strong culture of resource sharing and collaboration already in place. During their early “Innovative Years,” public libraries were trusted institutions of culture and knowledge at a time when information was scarce. An overabundance of information may usher in a second wave of innovation. Let us hope the library community can take advantage of the opportunity.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Brett Bonfield for his support and guidance on this article. Thanks also to Kent Anderson for thought-provoking reflections in the Scholarly Kitchen blog as well as for sharing his thoughts on public libraries with me.

References

¹ OCLC. (2008). From Awareness to Funding: A study of library support in America. and Agosto, D.E. (2008). Alternative funding for public libraries: Trends, sources, and the heated arguments that surround it. In E. Abels & D.A. Nitecky (Eds.), Influence of Funding on Advances in Librarianship. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Group.

² Bostwick, A.E. (1910). The American Public Library. NY: D. Appleton & Co. 1910.

³Dewan, S. (2009, March 10).
One U.S. recession casualty: Conspicuous consumption. The New York Times.

⁴ Abel, D. (2009, September 4). Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the books. Boston Globe. and Kelly, J. (2009, July 28). Franklin High library undergoes transformation. Milford Daily News.

⁵ Carlson, S. (2009, September 14). Is It a Library? A Student Center? The Athenaeum Opens at Goucher College. Chronicle of Higher Education and Oder, N. (2009, August 4). Milwaukee Begins to “Rethink Libraries for the 21st Century”; Mixed-use facilities are part of the blueprint; community meetings are ongoing. Library Journal.

⁶ Fisher, M. (2009, July 9). Give Struggling Authors a Chance. The Atlantic. and (2009, January 3). Blockbuster or Bust: Why struggling publishers will keep placing outrageous bids on new books. Wall Street Journal.

⁷ Davis, P. (2009, August 5). Gaming the Rating System. The Scholarly Kitchen.

⁸ Waller, V. (2009, September 7). The relationship between public libraries and Google: Too much information. First Monday 14(9).

⁹ Hafner, K. (2007, August 19). Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits. The New York Times.

¹⁰ Grant, B. (2009, May 7). Elsevier published 6 fake journals. The Scientist.

¹¹ Alexander, A. (2009, August 30). A Missing Ingredient in Health-Care Coverage. The Washington Post.

¹² Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. (2009, September 13). Press Accuracy Rating Hits Two Decade Low.

¹³ Martin, L. (1998). Enrichment: A History of the Public Library in the United States in the Twentieth Century. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press: p 51.

¹⁴ Ibid, p13.

¹⁵ Helfrich, S. and Haas, J. (2009) The Commons: A New Narrative for Our Times. In Helfrich, S. (Ed.) Who Owns the World? The Rediscovery of the Commons. Berlin: oekom Verlag.

what to do with the waterfront by mulmatsherm / CC-BY

I am not much of a book reader.  I have a home computer.  It has a working internet connection.  Any interest I have in genealogy or local history could probably be exceeded serendipitously by talking to family or neighbors and by wandering around the city.  As a family, we do not watch many movies.  I cannot seem to pay attention to audiobooks.  Our taxes are complicated enough that I use software to figure them out.

What I am saying is that I am not the target market of public libraries.  Despite that, I am completely intrigued by them.

I worked for many years as a technologist in academic libraries.  They were all large research institutions with big collections, budgets and staff.  I was also not the target market for them either (at least not after I graduated), but I understood the principal demographics of their constituencies and their expectation of the library.  I witnessed the shift in the academic library from book depository to IT shop (whether or not all academic librarians agree on this assessment).  When the university library stopped being “the place where the books are” it began to lose some of its identity and many began trying to create “social spaces” within the library (presentation rooms, coffee shops, information commons, etc.).  The primary purpose of these endeavors, however, seemed to be mainly to help market the library as the information hub of the institution.  Since the information is available mainly via technology, and the technology makes the information fungible, it became necessary to reinforce the library’s importance to the community.

If this seems complicated, well, that is because it is.  The future of the academic library is in little jeopardy, really, because its role and utility within the larger organization is pretty well defined and not easily replicated by some other group or service.

This is not to say (by any stretch of the imagination) that academic libraries are satisfactorily meeting the needs of their “customers”.  Not by a long shot.  However, if the academic library is increasingly becoming a technology organization then many of the academic library’s problems are technological problems, theoretically with technological solutions.  The majority of these problems are at the intersection of “the way we have always done things” and “where do we go from here”.  That is, these are technology problems that are enveloped in a sticky skein of sociopolitical issues.  If the interminable committee meetings were ever to wear down that outer skin, it might just be possible to make some real progress.  The library technologist’s hope springs eternal.

The public library, on the other hand, appears to be roughly the inverse.  It is a primarily social service that has clumsily tacked technology designed for academic libraries to the top.  Any argument for the merits of library applications pretty much breaks down when applied to the public library.  The audience is different and their needs are different.  While, without a doubt, enabling research is within the scope of the public library, in reality the vast majority of transactions there are far more modest.  The public that the library serves, largely underwhelmed by our complicated bibliographic search tools, instead uses Amazon.com, a technology company that has quite cleverly tapped into social activities (lists, “people who bought x also bought y,” etc.) to pitch their products.  Most importantly, the packaging is slick and effortless.

It is a shame—especially considering how interesting, fun, and rewarding the projects would be —how little public libraries seem to be able to execute their technology.  Not that technology is ignored, indeed my local library employs a vast array of applications to try to aid its users.  But this comes across as a hodge-podge: many different interfaces, none of them terribly satisfying and not in sync with each other.  This is not exclusive to my library, of course, nor is it uncommon in an academic library setting.  It would also be fairly easily remedied by some technical expertise, cooperation, and a little bit of vision.

Whereas the academic library is likely not in jeopardy, the public library is subject to far more fickle decision makers.  If the primary benefactors of the service, middle class tax payers, see no benefits resulting from the library’s existence, it may find itself subject to political pressure.  This is a population that, on the whole, is pretty wowed by style and convenience which tend not to be libraries’ strong suit.

Know Your Audience

My wife, Selena, is a steadfast supporter of the public library.  She had an awakening about five years ago after shelling out tons of money to Amazon for books she read only once.

“Oh my God, they’ve got all these books.  For free!”

At this point, we had been married for about four years and I had been working in a library for about ten.  It is not like I hadn’t brought up the possibility of the public library before, but I had no defense for her complaints about the catalog’s interface (SirsiDynix’s iBistro).  It took her requiring her high school students to get a library card to see the merits of the library and ever since she has been a devoted advocate.

That does not mean that she still doesn’t have her complaints.  They are legitimate gripes and, thankfully, almost completely technical.  Her issues are:

1. There is no simple way for her to find the intersection of discovering new things that might be interesting to her and what the library has.
2. The library interfaces are crude, unforgiving and provide little that is useful for the casual reader.
3. Two-plus month waits for the most popular and current titles in the collection is counterproductive and fosters the notion that libraries are irrelevant or out of touch.

The third point is not exactly technical, I realize, but it has an effect on the library as a whole.  This will not stop me from offering a technical suggestion that might help.

Tell Me What I Want

There are several opportunities in the library for serendipitous discovery:  the children’s book room, the returned book cart, the new books shelf, maybe a staff picks list.   It has not, historically, been the forte of the library catalog.  One of Amazon’s many strengths lies in its recommendations and groupings.  Simply by being me and doing what I do, Amazon finds and presents me with things I might be interested in based on how other people with profiles like me shop.  While the recommendations are generally hit and miss, it made me aware of many things (especially music) that I would have had no way of discovering before.

There are various reasons that the library is reluctant to start creating profile based services for its borrowers:  USA PATRIOT act style privacy concerns, population sizes that are too small to produce meaningful recommendations, etc.  U.S. libraries should pay close attention to the UK’s MOSAIC project, however, a JISC-funded initiative to harvest and mine circulation data with the intention of providing recommendations based on borrower usage.  Assuming concerns surrounding the differences in privacy rights can be met, this could really begin to pave the way forward for such services.

In the meantime, there are tangible ways to provide less targeted, although still meaningful, recommendations:  best seller, award, and book club lists.  Best sellers’ lists are, of course, a very rough metric of what is currently popular across America and, in the case of some lists, targeted at particular demographics  (the New York Times, Essence Magazine, Evangelical Christian Publisher Association, Powell’s Bookstore, Independent Mystery Booksellers Association, etc.).  While best sellers lists give no context of the actual content (outside, possibly of fiction or non-fiction) and certainly are no barometer to the quality of the work, they do at least provide a list of books that are currently popular, which might be all the discovery some users need, especially the specialty lists.

When I checked my local public library for access to their collection based on best sellers lists, I was rather surprised to find that they did not have any.  This seemed so simple and such an easy win for them, that I thought I would mock something up so they could use it.  The New York Times has opened their best sellers lists and book and movie reviews through their API service making it very simple to create a set of interfaces based on their best sellers to the library catalog.  Unfortunately, this proved to be harder than I originally had hoped because the library catalog has no machine readable interface.  There is no easy way to provide mashups to my library.  This is not terribly surprising; the same was true for Atlanta-Fulton County Public Library’s catalog.  This is a terrible shame.  If the library is unable to provide the resources to create interesting and vibrant technological services, they really should do everything in their power to facilitate these services being created by members of their community.  This is exactly how Ann Arbor District Library cultivated its “Super Patron”, Ed Vielmetti.  Ironically, the AADL already had a strong technological base and probably needed to depend less on their constituents than other libraries.  I suppose this stands to reason, though, what with the rich getting richer and whatnot.

Quasi-tangential Rant

The issue of completely closed systems resonates with me especially hard.  For the last two years, I have been working on a project to build a specification to provide access to library data, via the Atom Publishing Protocol, called Jangle.  I was my employer’s representative to work on the Digital Library Federation’s Integrated Library System and Discovery Interface API.  This year, my work has primarily been split between trying to herd Jangle along and trying to find opportunities to expose library data and services as Linked Data.  I also wrote a book chapter on possible ways to make your library data more accessible for mashing up.  Sadly, all of this is an exercise in futility if libraries have no machine readable accessible means to provide their data.  This lack of openness is a major setback to libraries and the potential services they can offer their users.

The Worst of the Best Sellers

While I was trying to figure out a new plan of attack for implementing something like this, I did find that best sellers lists are not uncommon in public libraries; a cursory scan found them at Atlanta-Fulton Public Library, Knox County (TN) Public Library and the Nashville Public Library among several others.  The AFPL and Knox County PL both had them integrated directly into their OPACs.  Both use SirsiDynix powered OPACs:  the AFPL uses iBistro and Knox County uses Rooms.  Nashville Public Library uses BookSite.com, a third-party service that compiles lists and tries to emulate the look and feel of the original library website.

They all suck.

The problem with BookSite.com is that it, apparently, has no way to check the host library to see if the selection is even in the collection, much less if it is available or when it will be.  This requires the user to click on the link, initiate a catalog session, see if the item exists, check the availability, click the back button, find the next item of interest, click on the link, enter the catalog, etc.  While this may not seem terrible, every time they follow a link for an item that does not exist or is not available diminishes their confidence that they will ever find something available.  Let us not forget, also, that our OPACs tend to be horribly slow at initiating or reallocating sessions.  All of this just adds to a frustrating user experience.  This is another example of where a lack of APIs hamstrings third-party developers:  despite the intentions of the library to provide a better experience by purchasing subscriptions to products like BookSite, the end result is still awkward.

One would then think that incorporating these lists directly into the OPAC would be an improvement. Unfortunately, this is not really the case.  While item availability is shown (assuming the item is even held), the display is just an ugly, OPAC title list view.  Understandably, practically any title that appears on a best sellers list is more than likely going to be checked out (and will probably have a wait).  From a user’s perspective, though, this offers very little as a “discovery interface.”

“Gee, thanks for showing me a list of books that I cannot get access to for at least a month.”

Quite a few of the the entries were fairly misleading as well.  They provided hope for the user that the title might actually be available, but required going to the full title screen (similar to BookSite.com), only to see that all of the copies are, in fact, unavailable; they just have some status set that the OPAC cannot recognize as “available” or “unavailable.”

What is unacceptable here is that the poor user is presented with a list of 15 dead ends.  If the library is unable to provide any of these particular titles, what can it offer the borrower that might be related or relevant?  Each of these books represents a possible avenue of interest into the collection.  They also define a particular point of interest in the collective national consciousness that can be utilized to present other works held by the library that may not be new, but could be just as much of interest to the user.  The “traditional” library avenues of providing similarity tend to be fairly weak substitutes when it comes to this.  Dewey Decimal Classification (common to the majority of public libraries), which provides the “shelf browse,” is completely ineffective in the case of fiction works for anything other than finding other titles by the same author or another writer with the same last name.  Browsing on subject headings is also a rather blunt tool.  “”, “Female friendship Fiction.”, “African American women Fiction.”.  None of these, individually, captures the essence of why a particular book is on a particular best sellers list.  The MARC 65x field is unable to capture timbre.  And this is huge area where the public library is failing the public.

An Obvious Market Opportunity

There are products and projects that begin to address this disparity between what the casual user wants and expects and how the library catalog has evolved (or not) for the web.  BiblioCommons’ business model is to provide this social context layer over the collection by facilitating and aggregating circulation data, reviews, lists, and other means to allow library users to directly influence the relationships between works.  SOPAC could be considered an open source alternative to BiblioCommons; it is a suite of components featuring a public interface built atop the popular FLOSS content management system Drupal.  One of the pieces, Insurge, is intended to provide a means to share this social data between the various implementations:  reviews, ratings, and recommendations.  The design of Insurge theoretically allows it to work independently of SOPAC, the Drupal module, although, in practice, this has yet to happen.  Both of these are complete OPAC replacements, relegating the integrated library management system to its rightful place as an inventory control system.

At the other end of the spectrum is LibraryThing for Libraries, which takes the incredibly pragmatic approach of integrating into the existing vendor-supplied OPAC interface.  Like the other two, it leverages the much broader LibraryThing community to help enhance the local collection.  Of the three currently available options, it, by far, provides the richest and most comprehensive social enrichment because the community already exists.  The others have to build this community and the content from scratch.  One has to wonder, really, how Syndetics has sold a single subscription since LTfL was released:  LibraryThing gives everything a Syndetics subscription could, plus gives the user relevant alternatives from their own library’s collection.

That being said, LTfL also shares the same limitation as Syndetics (or any other “shoehorned in the OPAC” enrichment package):  the OPAC is still there.  This content, these tags, the ratings:  none of these are available to the searcher until she has already found something.  Queries do not include this community supplied content, there is no spellcheck, results cannot be sorted by rating.  If public libraries are to stay relevant, these interfaces have to be dropped.  The future of the ILMS itself is a different matter entirely, though its usefulness as an inventory control system is out of scope here.  This is just about the OPAC.

It’s the relationships, stupid

I strongly believe that the future of the public library collection interface has to be tied into some kind of content management system.  I am unable to find any hard statistics to back this up, but I do not think it is much of a stretch of the imagination to say that a vast amount of library circulation is casual, popular reading.  Just walk into any branch and browse the collection; the overwhelming majority is not research material.  While certainly there are lots of archival, local history, reference, and research items at any public library, can any one of them, honestly, say that these types of activity make up the majority of what cardholders want, need, or expect to do there?  Why, then, are the interfaces optimized to perform these tasks, arguably, at the expense of the majority?  Of course, sophisticated information retrieval still needs to be supported—the line between “hobby” and “research” can be blurry—but perhaps it does not need to be the primary function of the public interface.  The social nature of the library as place and collection need to be merged.

The concept of CMS as OPAC is not new or original (or exclusively useful to public libraries):  as previously mentioned, SOPAC is a Drupal module, as is the Mellon Foundation-funded eXtensibleCatalog (XC) project.  Scriblio is a plugin for the WordPress blogging platform.  Several years ago, I was working on a project to build a catalog using the Daisy CMS as a back end.  Even SirsiDynix’s Rooms was an attempt to merge the content and collection, albeit with the aesthetic of a traditional web OPAC, the speed of federated search engine and the general user experience of a root canal.  At a certain point, a library collection grows to a size that it cannot feasibly be dynamic and fresh using only the catalogers as the sole editors of the content.  There is a growing need for “marginalia,” independent of the MARC record, to tie the individual items within the library to each other, to events, to groups, to anything.  The separation between the “catalog” and the general information about the library makes no sense.

In the Absence of Suggestion, There is Always Search…

Besides the integration of general content, collection, and public contribution, the single most important improvement needed for the public interface is search.  It is amazing and somewhat appalling how, despite our claims that our systems are designed as being highly advanced information retrieval tools, they fail utterly at retrieving information.  My local public library recently deployed the federated search product WebFeat, undoubtedly in a well intentioned attempt to help their users navigate the various silos of information that inconveniently require searching individually:  the catalog, the audiobooks, the photograph collection, and the various databases they subscribe to.  It is also, by the gentlest assessment possible, a complete train wreck of a user experience.  Besides being slower than the stock catalog interface, it does a terrible job at searching.  It is understandable that the library would want to highlight and improve access to their database collection (as well as have a unified search interface for their “general collection”), but it does not seem likely that a borrower looking for something by Nora Roberts to take with them to the beach cares much about results from InfoTrac OneFile.  Requiring said borrower to enter their library card number before they can search just lessens the experience even more.

Another requirement the library places on the searcher, that they must be an excellent or informed speller, is also unfortunate.  As I try out these interfaces, there are two searches I try so I can see how effective they are in aiding the hapless searcher.  The searches are “Olive Kitteredge” and “Jody Picoult.”  It is depressing how unhelpful our search interfaces are.

For “Olive Kitteredge,” an understandable misspelling of Olive Kitteridge, the Pulitzer Prize winning best selling book, I got:

• Knox County’s SirsiDynix Rooms gave me a did you mean “Olive skittered”.  Olive skittered also produced zero results.
• Atlanta-Fulton County’s SirsiDynix iBistro gave me no recommendations, just zero hits and placed me in a browse index.  “Olive Kitteridge” did not appear within ten pages forward or back.
• Nashville Public Library’s III Millennium catalog gave no recommendation, just zero hits and returned me to the search form.
• Darien Public Library’s SOPAC gave me no recommendations, no results.
• Chattanooga-Hamilton County’s WebFeat search gave the recommendation “olive kittredge” and no results.  “Olive kittredge” also produced zero results.
• Seattle Public Library’s Horizon OPAC displayed “Did you mean: olive kitteridge?”  Success, at last.  This is not a stock Horizon feature, howeve. Other Horizon libraries just gave zero results, zero recommendations.
• Oakville Public Library’s BiblioCommons presented: “Did you mean olive kitteridge (1 result)?”.  Another satisfied customer.
• Collingswood Public Library’s Scriblio catalog not only tried to autosuggest the proper spelling as I was typing in the search box, despite submitting my search with the misspelled title, Olive Kitteridge was still the fourth result.

Seattle Public Library getting it right

Scriblio's autosuggest to the rescue

“Jody Picoult” seems a perfectly reasonable misspelling of the multiple best selling novelist and author of My Sister’s Keeper, which was recently adapted to film.  In the same order:

• Knox County’s Rooms gave no spelling recommendations and placed me in a browse search.  “Jodi Picoult” did not appear anywhere forwards or backward.
• AFPL’s iBistro timed out my session, gave me no results and placed me a browse index.  “Jodi Picoult” did not appear forwards or back.
• Nashville PL’s catalog:  “No entries found”.  Return to search form.
• SOPAC:  no results, no recommendation.
• WebFeat:  “Did you mean: Jody picounit”.  Jody picounit, unsurprisingly, returned zero results.  WebFeat did not give a recommendation for alternatives to “Jody picounit”.
• Seattle Public Library, despite passing the Olive Kitteridge test, returned one result:  Super searcher, author, scribe:  successful authors share their Internet research secrets by Loraine Page.  A content note includes the string “Jody Picoult” (presumably a misspelling of the author in the MARC record?).  No suggestions or recommendations are given.
• BiblioCommons, again, aced this:  “Did you mean jodi picoult (29 results)?”
• Collingswood’s Scriblio did not provide a correction in the autosuggest, but a Jodi Picoult book appeared as the second result, averting user frustration (and also providing a teachable moment on the author’s name).

Complete! Don't you feel completely satisfied?

My library still has no Jody Picounit

These are not edge cases.  These are searches for current best sellers and a Pulitzer Prize winner and both of them are only off by one letter.  Of the sixteen searches, eleven of them ended in failure.  While not comprehensive, these were eight libraries chosen mostly at random.  For all of the current fixation in faceted and graphical search results (and to be fair, Queens Borough Public Library’s AquaBrowser implementation passed the Picoult test and provided “kitteridge” in its similarity graph), none of these bells and whistles matter one whit if the search interface cannot even help the user past the search screen.  Amazon not only presented the correct “did you mean” suggestions, it also provided relevant search results with these bad searches.

Ebb, Meet Flow

Of course, correcting a search for “Jennifer Wiener” to Jennifer Weiner is irrelevant if the book the borrower is interested in will not be available for 89 days, as the Knox County Public Library was displaying last week for Best Friends Forever (as of this writing, the New York Times #1 Best Seller for Hardcover Fiction).  That is nearly three months.  Forget summer reading, you will be lucky to get this book before the winter solstice.  While I am normally extremely supportive of large, cooperative borrowing consortiums, such as Georgia’s PINES, the advantages of such a system, regardless of the size and scale, still completely break down when it comes to such enormous spikes of popularity.  It does not matter how many copies are in the system if everywhere from metropolises to backwaters has a run on the same title.  This is not exclusive to best sellers, of course, consider titles on school curricula or summer reading lists.  Backlogs are bad for credibility.

Popularity, however, is fleeting.  It is unreasonable for an underfunded library system to exhaust its limited collection development budget purchasing dozens of copies of the new hot thing which tomorrow may not circulate again ever (consider James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces).  For cases such as this, rather than borrowing from other libraries that have nothing to give, it makes more sense to borrow from the public.  Many of these most popular titles are best sellers, after all, and “best seller” by its very meaning implies that a lot of people own that book.  Once read and passed around to your circle of friends, what do you do with this book?  For these very popular, highly circulating titles, it makes sense to create a system that allows book owners in the community to donate their copy.  Once a particular title passes some predefined threshold (two holds for every copy, as an arbitrary example), provide a link in the best sellers list to encourage people to give the library their copy.  Links to this page would need to be present elsewhere, too:  after all, the person that owns the book wouldn’t be looking for it on the library website since they already own it.  Advertise on the library website.  Have an announcement on the local NPR affiliate.  Post the list of books the library wants to have donated near drop boxes. 

The donor would be given a tax write off based on the value of their book on the open market.  When the popularity spike diminishes, the library could either return the book to the original owner or, perhaps, register itself as an Amazon affiliate (as an example, I am not sure of the legalities or practicalities of this, nor is this an endorsement for Amazon.com) and sell the used copies with the proceeds going back to the library like any friends of the library book sale.  The tax write off (as well as satisfaction of performing a public good) would probably be more desirable to many potential donors than going through the process of selling the book themselves.

The Medium is the Message

What all of this points to is that public libraries need to place as high of an importance on the technology that they do on the social and physical aspects of their organization.  A lot of effort goes into speaker series, story time, game nights, and movie nights.  A lot of planning.  A lot of investment.  If that investment is not given, nobody will come to them.  The web presence is no different.  If the web tools are an afterthought, a haphazard, sloppy collection of off-the-shelf tools that neither help the user achieve their goals nor captures their interest, the public will write the library off.  Just as a speakers series is a combination public service and library marketing tool, the web site must be more so, as it is more public than any event.

At the same time, the library should not have to break the bank investing in the most cutting edge and expensive technology (or worse, break the bank with the run of the mill, dreadful applications currently pitched to them).  Many of these issues could quite easily be addressed simply by hiring a competent and creative developer.  By pooling these development resources, even more ambitious accomplishments can be achieved.  Georgia PINES (despite OCLC’s marketing department’s claims) built the first truly “web scale” ILMS simply because they had a need and were willing to devote the resources towards building it.  Joe Lucia, the University Librarian at Villanova made an intriguing and provocative statement on the NGC4LIB mailing list two years ago with this:

“What if, in the U.S., 50 ARL libraries, 20 large public libraries, 20 medium-sized academic libraries, and 20 Oberlin group libraries anted up one full-time technology position for collaborative open source development. That’s 110 developers working on library applications with robust, quickly-implemented current Web technology…. Instead of being technology followers, I venture to say that libraries might once again become leaders….”

He was speaking in this case of academic libraries (he mentions 20 public libraries, but I remain unconvinced that the average public library has all that much in common with its academic counterpart), but it is not too difficult imagine this in the context of public libraries.  There are, after all, nearly three times as many public library systems in the United States as there are academic libraries.  Surely, collectively, they could figure out how to fund such an endeavor to provide a truly powerful development team committed solely to the technology needs of public libraries.

If added to this was an infrastructure and environment that cultivated an opportunity to harvest the contributions of “super patrons” and “citizen developers,” as well as graphic designers, usability and accessibility experts, entire services could be provided by the constituency just as BiblioCommons, LibraryThing, or SOPAC solicits content.  One of the many distractions I had while writing this article came from a desire that I had to not just complain about my public library, but actually build some alternatives that could be contributed back to them.  However, as I mentioned previously, there is no machine readable access to their collection for me to build upon.  In order to write something interesting and, hopefully, useful, I first had to write a crawler to harvest their catalog.  I have yet to gain the nerve to actually run it; there is no robots.txt file, but it still seems rude and underhanded.  It is also ridiculous that I have to resort to such tactics just to sketch out some proofs-of-concept.

If all three tiers of this ecosystem were to become a reality (cooperative development team, local developer resources, and a public contribution network), the library would be well-placed to remain relevant for many years in the community’s consciousness.  It is difficult to see if the initiative or vision is available to establish such an environment, however.  Significant improvement would be rather easy to accomplish.  All it would take is a little imagination and some commitment.

Maybe I should just start my crawler and see what happens.

Thanks to:  Brett Bonfield for not only convincing me to write this article, but also tirelessly reviewing it and for guiding this along even when I was getting flaky.  Also thanks to Dan Chudnov for reviewing it and helping me find a better focus, even if he agreed with only about half of what I wrote.  Lastly, I’d like to thank my wife, Selena, without whom I would have had no inspiration, ideas, or “research subjects.”