Idaho Librarian
Contents


 

OPINIONS:

This page is intended to serve as a forum for opinions on library-related issues and reactions to pieces which have appeared in issues of the Idaho Librarian.   For the two-week period following the publication of each issue, submissions will be published on this page.  When two weeks has elapsed, those submissions will become a permanent part of the issue.  After that period, submissions will be considered for inclusion in the next issue.
Send submissions to hitcleon@isu.edu.

                                        

Giving Them What They Deserve

Grove Koger 

Some years ago I got to know a Spanish couple who had arranged to spend two years teaching in the United States.  As luck would have it, their assignments took them to a small town in southwestern Idaho near where I lived, and I spent quite a bit of time with them.  Among the many puzzling aspects of life in their temporary home that they mentioned to me, two in particular stand out in memory.

 The first concerned a calendar that their landlady had given them to decorate the rather bare house they were renting.  It featured watercolor after watercolor of collapsing barns, and was two years old.

 The other puzzling aspect of life in the United States was the ubiquity of Reader’s Digest.  In Spain, they told me (and this was the dreary, repressive Spain of dictator Francisco Franco), the government published such things to keep the people docile.  Here—HERE—they said in disbelief, the people produce their own propaganda!  And, I might have added, public libraries help disseminate it!

 These thoughts are prompted by Michael Baldwin’s fiery opinion piece—“Can Libraries Save Democracy?”—in Library Journal for October 15, 2002.  The article suggests that yes, libraries can, but that first they must want to.  Baldwin is concerned with the “concept of passively providing information and the errant ‘give them what they want’ philosophy.’”  He goes on to add, “Americans, immersed in confusion by junk media, are distracted by junk entertainment into political apathy.”  Baldwin doesn’t mention Baltimore County Public Library, but it was that institution that pioneered what it calls (with cunning use of the old “just folks” con) the “Give ‘Em What They Want” approach.  Aw shucks, Baltimore, maybe I’ll have mine with grits.

 Baldwin has it right, and my friends Teodoro and Ernestina had it right too.  Yet I think they’re wrong to limit their fears to politics alone.  Democracy may be in danger, but private life, that sphere we share with our friends and spouses, with our own thoughts and dreams, is also degraded by junk media and junk entertainment.     

 We librarians are in a position to enrich the public and private lives of our patrons.  But first we must want to.  We have years of experience and a vast accumulation of knowledge to draw upon.  But first we must learn to value our profession and ourselves.  Not so long ago, our debilitating inferiority complex led us into trading “librarianship” for “library science. ”  The Baltimore “philosophy” plays upon that same complex, turning libraries into arms of the entertainment industry and librarians into marketing consultants.  Publishers must have broken out the bubbly when they heard about it, knowing full well that whatever they chose to package attractively and advertise incessantly, people would “want.”

 Our patrons deserve more than pop psychology, plagiarized history, and hack fiction, more than best sellers and biggest hits.  Perhaps if we pause a moment to remember the idealism and sense of purpose that made us librarians in the first place, we can figure out a way to give it to them.