Twilight Librarian--Jim Rettig's ruminations on libraries, librarianship, the infosphere, and more

 Jim Rettig's ruminations on libraries, librarianship, the infosphere, and more

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Twilight Librarian:

Jim Rettig's ruminations on libraries, librarianship, the infosphere, and more

e-mail: Jim Rettig

Why is this named Twilight Librarian?

Jim Rettig is University Librarian at the University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia, United States of America. Opinions expressed in Twilight Librarian are the author's and do not speak for the University of Richmond.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

"How to Organize a Public Library" [Permalink]

Wed Aug 08 21:12:34 EDT 2007

Yesterday I tracked down Umberto Eco's whimsical yet practical essay "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1." It was published in How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994). I had forgotten that this collection also includes his "How to Organize a Public Library." In just four pages and through 18 rules, he turns on its head best practices of library administration, few of which we would abandon as blithely and certainly not as ironically as Eco prescribes them. It is the antithesis of Ranganathan's Five Laws:
  • Books are for use.
  • Every reader, his book.
  • Every book, its reader.
  • Save the time of the reader.
  • A library is a growing organism.
    • Many librarary coffee shops currently, and sometimes lucratively, violate Eco's 14th rule:
    14. It must be impossible to find any refreshment inside the library, under any circumstances...

    Then there is Eco's first rule:

    1. The various catalogues must be housed as far apart as possible from one another. All care must be taken to separate the catalogue of books from that of periodicals...

    His first rule imposes other incomprehensible, maze-like inconveniences on information seekers. No librarian can read this without seeing glimmers of truth and reality beneath the thick irony. Today we are, of course, struggling to eliminate the need to consult multiple special purpose catalogs, indexes, databases, etc. We want to simplify the search and discovery process for our users. The rallying cry for this quest has been "The OPAC sucks!" We can't violate Eco's first rule soon enough to further the broad vision of the Five laws.

    I haven't yet reread "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1." My recollections of it from more than a decade ago lead me to believe that it might be a metaphor for certain aspects of the American Library Association. I'll find out soon how well my memory serves me on this.

    Attrition among librarians [Permalink]

    Sat Oct 14 00:01:38 EDT 2006

    On October 12 at the first Joint Conference of Librarians of Color the American Library Association released "Diversity Counts," the results of a demographic survey of the ALA membership. It looks at ALA's membership and the profession in terms of age, race, gender and compares changes in the composition of the members' characteristics to the characteristics of the U.S. population. There is much to consider in the 36-page report.

    Highlights from the press release:

    • About 25 percent of Americans were non-white, compared with 11 percent of credentialed librarians;
    • African Americans made up 5 percent of the profession but 12.3 percent of the population;
    • Latinos represented 2 percent of the profession and 12.5 percent of the population
    • Native Americans were less than 1 percent of the profession and .9 percent of the population; and
    • Asian Pacific Islanders were 3 percent of the profession and 3.7 percent of the population.

    Many of ALA's diversity recruitment efforts began to take hold in 2000; so the picture in 2006 may be better than these statements indicate.

    In a presentation at JCLC on October 12 Denise Davis of ALA's Office for Research and Statistics and Tracie Hall of ALA's Office for Diversity explained the survey's findings and analyzed them. A dramatic yet cryptic finding is that "That credentialed librarians under age 45 comprised almost a third, 30%, of the total for that category in 2000, yet accounted for 44% of credentialed librarians leaving the work force, speaks not so much to an inability to effectively recruit individuals to LIS education and practice as to an inability to effectively retain them." Davis and Hall could not explain this phenomenon. If it persists, it has chilling implications for the profession and for the long-term health of ALA. Tracie Hall was able to say only that there is "something" in the culture of libraries or librarianship that must explain this. But what?

    They did speculate that librarians in the under-45 cohort are leaving for careers in K-12 teaching, social work, and other helping and social services professions. Yet anecdote indicates that K-12 teaching and social work are suffering from similar retention problems. Data confirming, denying, or modifying this would be helpful, especially if that would allow for an explanation that is generational, trans-cultural, or some mix of those. This is a mystery to be solved. It has significant implications for our profession and our associations.

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