The Internet Sings to Librarians
You can teach someone how to write, but that doesn't mean they can create. You can teach someone how to read music, but that doesn't make them a musician. You can teach someone how to seek information, but that doesn't mean they can find anything. It doesn't make them a librarian. When it comes to information, we librarians are the ones who are not tone deaf.
A good musician not only knows how to play specific instruments, but knows how to readily learn new instruments. I'm not a musician. Friends of mine who are musicians used to amaze me with how easily they could pick up different instruments, oboe, hurdy-gurdy, clarinet, etc. and start playing immediately. We do the same with our instruments. The underlying processes and structures of our profession are absolutely unchanged. When a librarian approaches a database, be it electronic or in print form, we are able to use it with almost no training. Where are the directions? What is the scope of the database? Who produced it? What time period does it cover? Is there a controlled vocabulary?
Unfortunately, the new technologies make us dependent on others. Also, unfortunately, these faceless and nameless others are not sensitive to the needs of human beings. Theirs is not a public service profession. It is for this reason that I consistently state that we librarians are becoming technicians, because the technicians are incapable of becoming librarians. Now we don't like being technicians because, frankly, we're not very good at it. The altruistic ethic of our profession has us solving problems, not worrying over turf.
It is almost trivial to mine the internet, to listen to its songs, and demonstrate to others how fascinating, interesting, rich, and diverse are its offerings. What we can bring to the world is simply the core of our profession, we intermediaries between the chaos and human wants and needs, and that is: the value of information within a context. We see foreground, background, font, and picture, intent and use.
Information can be beautiful, persuasive, frustrating, moronic, intense, puerile, false, true, hot, cold, cogent, chaotic or nonexistent (and note that the nonexistence of information is information). We listen to the notes of the music of the Internet, where others seem to just see the instruments.
This is the key and always has been the key: The Internet is but another conduit for information, and the information running through its pipes are with what we deal, have always been with what we deal, and always will be with what we deal.
Finally, don't think that this speaks of a coldhearted, analytical, utilitarian approach to the new information universe. We have all come into this profession because of a love of the ultimate information artifact of human civilization to date: the book. It is just as much a part of our profession to gasp with joy at a rare, or beautiful, or devastatingly brilliant artifact/book, as it is to find the same intrinsic beauty on the Internet. It seems to me that we are, as a profession, suffering depression as we mourn the loss of our beloved books. The new technologies appear to be destroying that which we love. We are being seduced into the conventional wisdom that says technology is cold, heartless, bad, and ugly. Things are cold, heartless, bad, and ugly. Processes are the mechanisms by which such things are delivered. Don't confuse message with medium.
Here are some of what the Internet is singing to us:
The Library of Congress:
Uniform Resource Locator: http://www.loc.gov/
And why is it no surprise that an institution at the pinnacle of our profession is delivering vast amounts of wonderful information? I hold in my hand a page from the lost notebooks of Walt Whitman (URL: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/wwhome.html). Each page has been (or will be) scanned and is available on the Internet at the Library of Congress. If I read the page I'm holding correctly it says:
Uncage in my heart a thousand new strengths and unknown ardours and terrible extremes ... making me enter intrinsically into all passions - dilating me beyond time and space ...I am not a Whitman scholar and do not know if this is an early variation of a famous poem or not. I'll depend upon those of you who are true Whitman scholars to educate me on this. It does anticipate the joyful noise of the Internet, though, doesn't it? It is also a song directly from the mind of the man who said "I sing the body electric."Walt Whitman, Notebook LC #86,"Perceptions or Senses" Notebook (Holloway #3), page 015
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/086.html
The Gulf War:
Uniform Resource Locator: Not Available
The following is an excerpt from online diaries posted by several Israeli's during the Gulf War, approximately February, 1991. I read these avidly during the war, relying on them for my information more and more - the human aspect outweighed the chest thumping which seemed to be all the "real" media was capable of doing.
Judith Koren was a librarian in Haifa, Israel during the Gulf War. This is a brief excerpt from her online diary posted February 5, 1991, on CRTNET (February 8, 1991, Number 325 COMMUNICATION RESEARCH AND THEORY NETWORK, Edited by Tom Benson, Penn State University).
"At work ... the war has been as evident as ever. The rooms we sealed, after much protest, a week ago have been unsealed by people clamouring for a breath of fresh air. On Monday (yesterday) my high-strung colleagues in the library's Department of War Hysteria (there are now 3 of them in that department, for fear is contagious) insisted on re-doing their set of rooms. They received another supply of plastic and masking tape and spent half the day sealing themselves in. Nonetheless they still aren't satisfied and complain that someone professional should be doing the sealing. Someone with experience (in what? Chemical wars?). The library director, having suffered accusations of consigning Jews to the gas-cells just like Hitler when she tried to reason with them last time, shrugs her shoulders and lets them get on with it. Fear is irrational, you cannot reason with it. These colleagues, few though they be compared to the total number of library staff, remind me that not everyone is taking this in their stride. The chance of a missile hitting any one particular building, out of all the buildings in the city, is slight; but for these poor souls it looms larger than the whole horizon."
(At this point, the speaker turns on a portable stereo and inserts a tape which speaks one of the two voices from the poem "Book Lice" from Paul Fleischman's 1989 Newberry Award winning Joyful Noise. The other voice is spoken by the presenter.)
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Title: Joyful Noise: Present and Future Librarians Sing the Internet (Internet Sings to Librarians) Author: R. Muns Date/Version: October 10, 1995 / 1.0 URL: http://www.umsl.edu/~muns/proddir/joynoise/joyful2.htm
