Gorman - Our enduring values revisited : librarianship in an ever-changing world

T here is no shortage of people prophesying the death of libraries, some with glee, some with sadness, and some just consumed by techno-lust and laissez-faire economics. One such is someone called Tim Worstall, who called, in Forbes, the magazine for greed-heads, for the closing of public libraries; those libraries to be replaced by free subscriptions to Kindle Unlimitedan transform citizens from consumers to makers and society from a culture of waste and landfills to a culture of recycling and conservation.

I wrote Our enduring values in the late 1990s. It was published by ALA in 2000, the last year of the twentieth century and of the second millennium of the Common Era. In the decade and a half since, the world has endured the savagery of September 11, 2001; the deaths of millions in wars and other conflicts, many waged in and over the cobbled-together countries that are the poisonous legacy of colonialism and imperialism; the almost complete collapse of the postWorld War II financial architecture and the Great Recession that cupidity-fueled collapse caused; the ideologically and economically driven sustained attack on the public services of which libraries are such an ornament; the economic rise of China, run by communists who are much better at capitalism than the capitalists of the West; the looming and multifaceted environmental challenges of anthropomorphic climate change; the promise of the Arab Spring and its repression; and a variety of other unsettling global and national societal happenings and trends. Since I wrote that book, we have been blessed (or otherwise?) with iPod and iTunes (2001); Facebook (2004); YouTube (2005); Twitter (2006); the mass adoption of smartphones and streaming video (2003); devices for downloading and reading e-books, such as the Amazon Kindle (2007) and Barnes & Noble Nook (2009); the enormous economic reach of the advertising-company-with-a-search-engine Google, which has contrived to hit brand gold by becoming a verb that is the near-universal substitute for use a search engine; Wikipedia (2001) and the whole social media, hive-mind, crowd-sourcing, wisdom of the crowds thing, felicitously summed up as digital Maoism by Jaron Lanier; a huge and lucrative videogame industry; giant flat-screen digital televisions foreshadowed by Ray Bradbury (and the Jetsons) decades before; three-dimensional printing (relatively inexpensive consumer devices available since 2010)all these, variations on them, and many more digital innovations great and small adding up to a complex world with endless opportunities for infotainment, commercial exploitation on a massive scale, andto put the case for positive resultsthe creation of giant, ever-connected communities and new dimensions of education and creativity.

No library is an island, and libraries and the practice of librarianship have been rocked, socked, shaken, and stirred by all these societal, economic, and technological changes. Very few libraries can say that they are better off than they were before the Great Recession eight years ago, and manyor even mostwill tell you they are much worse off. Many of our colleagues have lost their jobs; many have had to take jobs that pay substantially less than they and their contributions are worth; and many graduates of LIS programs cannot find jobs, have had to take part-time positions, or have had to move to places far from where they really want to live. For the first time in my more than fifty library years, I have hesitated when asked if I would recommend someone to enter an LIS masters program. All this when public libraries are increasingly societys only serious attempt to bridge the digital divide that threatens to deny the advantages of the brave new technological world to the poor, the rural, the armies of the unemployed, and all the others whose noses are pressed up against the windows of the glittering salons of the digerati. All this when academic libraries are under the unprecedented strain of trying to do more with shrunken budgets, aggravated by the pressure of managements and IT departments obsessed with shiny and new tools and lacking any idea of the ends to which their digital means are to be applied. All this when cuts in government spending and savage corporate retrenchments have attenuated or abolished many special libraries. So it goes, but libraries battle on, boats against the current, continuing to do good work and serve individuals and communities.

In the preface to Our enduring values, I wrote of the defeated British and German troops marching away after the surrender of Cornwallis in Yorktown in October 1781. They played an old British march called The world turned upside down. Fifteen years ago, I wondered if the world of libraries had been turned upside down and if the time had come for librarians to beat a retreat. I did not believe that then, and I do not believe that now. The ideas that the digital revolution has made libraries irrelevant, that libraries can no longer be afforded, or that libraries are no longer needed seem, at best, based on ignorance and the willful avoidance of realities and, at worst, the malign triumph of ignorance, materialism, and philistinism. I believe that librarians have a duty, now more than ever, to organize convincing rebuttals to those arguments and to revisit the values that inform our profession. That is why I have revisited and updated a book from the last years of the twentieth century.