The Vanishing Librarians
 
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:13:34 -0600 (CST)


If you're fed up with the poor-quality of service and materials 
you encounter in your public library, read this and weep. It's 
not a new phenomenon, rather one that has been infiltrating 
the field (from library schools to library boards to the libraries
charged with delivering the "product" to the "customer"*)
over many years.  I've witnessed and experienced all that
Berry describes, along with the slow decimation of the 
system in which I worked - one of the largest in the U.S. The 
consequences are a catastrophic corporate-driven dumbing 
down of a vitally important institution.  Perhaps those mute 
"library leaders" Berry refers to are the business-friendly 
hacks who have been hired by business-friendly trustees to 
accomplish the job. I've known plenty of them, too.  

(*Even earlier, some of us saw this train coming down the 
tracks when library users were suddenly transformed into 
"customers" and personnel departments were renamed 
"human resources.") 

Compare this to similar developments in the arts:
 
"Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s," 
by Chin-tao Wu. 2002. Verso (www.versobooks.com)

and in education:
"Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden" (New Society Publishers, 2002) 
and "The Underground History of American Education," (Oxford 
Village Press Oxford, NY 2000/2001) by John Taylor Gatto
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/index.htm

And on the subject of self-service, listen to this interview
broadcast on KPFA's Against the Grain (at least Gimenez' 
segment):

Mon 1.28.08  Onward Corporate Servants: Neoliberalism's Soul; 
Corporate "Self-Sourcing"

http://kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=24528
Neoliberal capitalism immiserates millions of people, so you 
might envision its practitioners as soulless profiteers. But 
Bethany Moreton argues that neoliberalism has a robust 
emotional dimension rooted in Protestant evangelism. And 
Martha Gimenez calls attention to what she calls "self-sourcing": 
corporations getting consumers to do unpaid work.

--Carol
=============================================

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6529375.html?q=vanishing

Blatant Berry: The Vanishing Librarians
The library becomes a dehumanized supermarket or a 
chaotic bookstore
By John N. Berry III, Editor-at-Large, 
jberry@reedbusiness.com -- Library Journal, 2/15/2008

It looks like the btransformationb we seek for libraries and 
librarianship may turn out to be more of a bdeskillingb of 
library jobs than an enhancement of the profession. More 
and more working librarians are bmanagedb by a new breed 
of library leader. Their model for the new public library is that 
dehumanized supermarket or the chaotic disorganization of 
the largest Barnes & Noble.

As this process unfolds, the once professional responsibilities 
of librarians are being dumbed down into the duties of retail 
clerks or the robotic responses of machines. Our circulation 
desks are disappearing. The humans who once greeted and 
discussed with patrons our wares and services as they 
dispensed them are being replaced by self-service. Those 
circulation clerks are either being terminated or sent to work 
elsewhere in the library.

Our reference services and the desk from which they were 
delivered are gone, too, replaced by wandering blibrarians,b 
with or without an MLS. They are supposed to be proactive 
in searching out patrons in need but are too often summoned 
on walkie-talkies or terminals to come to the aid of only those 
who ask or to respond to the few inquiries that arrive online. 
Of course, we need fewer and fewer of these librarians, 
because patrons are urged to do it all for themselves, via 
Google, PACs, or whatever they discover through our terminals 
or their own laptops and PCs.

Our catalogers began to disappear with the takeover of that 
function by OCLC, the nonprofit that aspires to be a corporation 
in this brave new retail library world. The standardized result of 
the effort is bypassed by patron and librarian alike, as they 
turn to the more friendly Amazons, Googles, et al., for the less 
precise, more watered-down bmetadatab that has replaced what 
used to be cataloging. Apparently, users donbt miss the old 
catalog, except as a familiar artifact, which is testimony to 
how low this dumbing down has taken us.

In the new model, that most sacred of our professional duties, 
the selection of materials to build services and collections, is 
turned over to either small centralized teams of two or three 
librarians and clerks, or in extreme cases to an external vendor, 
usually a library book distributor.

The resulting bdestinationb libraries resemble the cookie-cutter 
design of the grocery store, aimed at making sure everyone 
who comes in goes out with bproductb (books, CDs, DVDs, or 
downloads). What the patron takes is of as little concern to the 
storekeeper librarian as it is to the supermarket manager. The 
success of the enterprise is measured in the number of products 
collected by patrons, now called bcustomers.b It is no longer 
measured in the usefulness or impact of the service on the 
quality of life in the community served.

Many of the American Library Association-accredited LIS programs 
that once claimed to beducateb the professional librarians who 
run these libraries have been invaded by faculty from other 
disciplines, a great many of whom are far more adept at the 
politics and pedagogy of academic survival than they are at the 
principled professional practice of librarianship.

Now the progress of this deskilling has come full circle. Having 
discovered that the manager librarians of these supermarket 
libraries need fewer and fewer professional librarians to staff 
their simplified operations, the governing authorities are 
beginning to decide they donbt need a professional librarian to 
manage them. Some have been turned over to successful business 
types from industry, some to lawyers, some to academic 
administrators or fundraisers, and some to professional 
financial managers.

The most surprising part is that so few library leaders have 
raised their voices in alarm or outrage at this erosion of the 
standards to which libraries once aspired. It is frightening to 
think that we will stand quietly by and watch as professional 
librarians disappear from libraries and with them the quality of 
the services and collections in which we once took such 
professional pride.

=========================
See also 

"Librarians demoted: Move dictated by budget, customers' 
needs, director says"
Posted February 22, 2008
By Brian Reisinger
Wausau Daily Herald 
http://www.wausaudailyherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/
20080222/WDH0101/802220558/1981

 http://www.lisnews.org/node/29261
"WI Librarians Demoted: 'Librarians today do less complex work."
Posted February 22nd, 2008 by Blake