Librarians Sing to the Internet
"When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep."Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929), U.S. author. The Left Hand of Darkness, ch. 3 (1969).
We librarians intermediate. Our traditional functions consist of collecting, organizing, and maintaining information. Information never grows unprofitable in the sense that the need we all have for information.
One can think of the Internet as a mechanism for gathering and collecting information. As a finding tool, the Internet is inadequate. As an access tool, it is unmatched. What many librarians are discovering is that the Internet can be a tool by which we can express ourselves. As our physical collections have been expressions of everything from love to expertise (well, budgets have a role to play as well!), so can the Internet be a forum by which we can actively practice our profession.
It is not unusual that the most useful sites on the Internet are usually affiliated with libraries. It's not unusual that more and more institutions are turning to librarians for their expertise in developing and maintaining online collections as they find out "it's not as easy as it looks." I love overhearing conversation amongst non-librarians faced with developing resources on the Internet, saying "Hey! Why don't we, like, you know, keep track of all the words we use and make sure everyone uses the same words? And we can, like, give everything some sort of unique number or something to keep track of it!"
It's pretty easy to find places like UCLA (my alma mater) which are tasking their libraries to maintain all campus wide information, in this case in the InfoUCLA system (http://www.ucla.edu/infoucla). At the University of Missouri-St. Louis, we have a campus wide World Wide Web Policy Committee of about eight individuals, with three of us being librarians. I've personally been tasked with setting up everything from department home pages to a university wide calendar system. Issues concerning restriction of content, access to information, intellectual property rights, and controlled vocabularies, just to name a few, crop up, we find our profession as the only one qualified to deal with these diverse issues. It was with only a touch of glee that I started pointing out that our "official online archive of icons" was violating copyright and infringing on trademarks by maintaining "The Simpsons" icons. I regularly stress the concept of "provenance" when I teach others how to bring up documents on the Internet. The foundations of our profession are sound, even in this shifting environment.
But when do we get to sing? I will not avoid admitting that a lot of this is pure drudgery. Don't mistake me for a lover of technology. But a lot of our profession IS drudgery. The harder and more labor-intensive an activity is, the more we recognize it as being essential. An example between "us" and "them": Our Government Documents Librarian, Frances Piesbergen, was tasked with shifting our entire Documents collection. Instead of saying "can't be done, that would take 6 months at about 8 hours/day" (which is typical for "them" to say) she spent 6 months at about 8 hours/day shifting the collection.
And sometimes, when it's quiet, we sneak in things of beauty.
The Internet is peculiarly susceptible to abetting the secret lives of librarians. Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" is on the Internet in full-text because of a bout of insomnia I had one Winters night.
17
Lizzie met her at the gate
Full of wise upbraidings:
"Dear, you should not stay so late,
Twilight is not good for maidens;
Should not loiter in the glen
In the haunts of goblin men.
Do you not remember Jeanie,
How she met them in the moonlight,
Took their gifts both choice and many,
Ate their fruits and wore their flowers
Plucked from bowers
Where summer ripens at all hours?
But ever in the noonlight
She pined and pined away;
Sought them by night and day,
Found them no more, but dwindled and
grew grey;
Then fell with the first snow,
Less romantic, more prosaic, but to me, as important and startling, is a project of bringing a series of WPA Writer's Project narratives from surviving slaves in the 1930's. Right now all we have up is a sample document (http://www.umsl.edu/~muns/21st.century.library/bell0.htm). The past, for me, speaks eloquently when uncluttered by the interpretation of others. And if I, a white boy (for I am) can get goosebumps reading Eliza Bell's stories of life with Master Joe Wiley, what of the African American grade school students in East St. Louis? It is for them that many of us will be singing. On one level we may be bringing source material to the Internet for the use of academic historians. On another level we are applying another of my endless, corn-pone librarian homilies (yet I believe it): Think locally, act globally. For what we do as little things on the Internet, these songs of librarians can be heard by millions.
"I seen many a trouble hour since I was born in them long gone days away back in March, 1851, just at the time of year when old Master Joe Wiley took the shoes off his slaves, sending the slaves to work barefoot and putting the shoes away in the storage waiting for winter to come again before they'd be give out to the feets that fit 'em easiest."Eliza Bell (age 87) as told to Ethel Wolfe Garrison, rewritten by Craig Vollmer March 8, 1938. From the George P. Rawick Collection at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
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Title: Joyful Noise: Present and Future Librarians Sing the Internet (Librarians Sing to the Internet) Author: R. Muns Date/Version: October 10, 1995 / 1.0 URL: http://www.umsl.edu/~muns/proddir/joynoise/joyful3.htm