Women in American librarianship and valuing women’s work

I recently finished reading the updated edition of THE STORY OF LIBRARIES: FROM THE INVENTION OF WRITING TO THE COMPUTER AGE (Continuum, 2009) by Fred Lerner. It exists in this weird intersection between scholarly and recreational reading (the text is more dense than I was expecting and that I think a casual reader would want, but Lerner isn’t as rigorous in citing his sources as I’d expect for an academic work), but as I read, I was enjoying little historical tidbits. For example:

• Ashurbanipal (668-627 BCE) had a library of 1500 tablets organized by subject and edited and revised them himself. Libraries go way back!
• Libraries in Asia that existed before the Middle Ages or so were light years ahead of Western civilization at the time.
• Prior to World War II, scientists worked hard to share widely their research and publications, but the war created a division in which both sides were trying to share widely within their own boundaries to encourage innovation that might win the war but were increasingly cautious about letting that scientific progress be known to the other side. So in 1944 these two German agents get off a submarine on the coast of Maine. They have a microfilm camera with them and they’re planning to head to the New York Public Library and photograph scientific journals–but they’re apprehended by the FBI before they can do so. Libraries in the middle of a Nazi plot to steal American science!

But as Lerner’s narrative moved into more modern times and he started reflecting on the mission of libraries and their place in society, I started feeling angrier and angrier. Little things seemed to indicate that he was valuing academic libraries over public libraries, that he thought women had warped the purpose of libraries, and that certain kinds of library use were more important or worthy than others. And then near the end there was one particular chapter–one particular page, even–that just drove me nuts. I’d like to share that page and why I felt so angry and why I think he’s wrong.

Lerner writes:

Libraries and librarians have always existed at the margins of the society they served. (p. 181)

The ‘feminization of librarianship’ is often adduced as the essential reason for the marginalization of the field in America. In 1852, the Boston Public Library hired its first female clerk; by 1878 two-thirds of American library workers were women; and by the 1920s that figure had reached nearly 90 percent. During those years the leaders of the most important libraries–like the top people in every field–were men; but most of the staff that a library user would encounter were female.

[...]

In one sense, the lack of respect that libraries and librarians have endured can rightly be traced to the feminization of librarianship. The first women to become librarians in England and America were imbued with the middle-class notion that women were a civilizing force in society with special feminine abilities to work with the young, the sick, and the poor. Under their leadership, libraries became identified with underprivileged and marginal elements of society. (p. 182)

First of all, it’s contradictory that librarians have always been marginalized, but it’s somehow still women’s faults, even though they apparently weren’t part of the profession until the 1800s.

Now, the leaders of libraries were men (of course!) but somehow “under [women's] leadership, libraries became identified with underprivileged and marginal elements of society.” But if women were always subservient to men, how could they have been at the helm changing the library’s mission and image?

The answer is that there were women leaders and that their values (not some sort of womanly deficiency they all had) shaped American librarianship. I also just finished WOMEN AND THE VALUES OF AMERICAN LIBRARIANSHIP (Ide House, 1994) by Sydney Chambers and Carolynne Myall and they provide tons of examples. Here are just a very few:

• Public libraries were formed out of community libraries that were originally started by women in most cases. In 1933 the ALA “credited women’s clubs with the repsonsibility for initiating 75 percent of the public libraries in existence at that time” (p. 17).
• Isadore Gilbert Mudge built Columbia University’s reference collection and taught library school students her methods of conducting a reference interview. (p. 29)
• Adelaide Hasse was a founder of special librarianship, developed a classification scheme, and helped form the US Government Documents service. (p. 31)
• “[O]f the four insitutions established before 1900 which later became charter members of the Association of American Library Schools, the founding directors of three were women,” Katherine Sharp, Mary Wright Plummer, and Alice Kroeger. (p. 36)
• Mary Wright Plummer was the head of the library school at the Pratt Institute Free Library from 1895 to 1911, the Principal of the library school at NYPL from 1911 to 1916, and was President of ALA from 1915 to 1916–years before women were even allowed to vote! (p. 35)
• The director of the LA Public Library from 1889 to 1895 was Tessa Kelso–and this was decades before women got the vote. (p. 43)

While women who held leadership positions often did so at local or state or regional levels, women were also library founders, innovators in their fields, library directors, library school founders, and even served as the president of ALA before their country trusted them to vote.

Lerner goes on to describe how libraries being shaped by women’s values ruined the reputation of librarianship:

To many of those who controlled the country’s purse strings and set its priorities, that made the library into a societal luxury–inexpensive enough to maintain at a limited level, but irrelevant to the real needs of those who mattered. The low repute that has been the constant companion of the pedagogue has also had its impact. Despite librarians’ attempts to be viewed as educators, it is the prestige of the schoolteacher rather than that of the professor that has become attached to them. (p. 182)

I hope he’s being hyperbolic here and that he doesn’t actually mean this because it privileges helping academics meet their information needs over helping working-class people meet their information needs. I reject that ranking of human beings as more important or less important just because of their socioeconomic class. Taking care of the neediest in a community shouldn’t be a “societal luxury.” It should be our top priority.

The “problem” with librarianship isn’t that women were allowed in the field and that somehow ruined it. It’s that women themselves aren’t valued, that women’s work isn’t valued, and that women’s values aren’t respected as valid.

Chambers and Myall write about how early research in ethics was done by men on male subjects. Rather than interview both men and women and develop a view of human ethics that way, their theories of ethical development were entirely based on what boys and men valued and how their values changed as they grew; women who held different values were seen as ethically immature or deviant. That’s subsequently changed: research has broadened to include women, and we now have more research and a better understanding of women’s ethics and values. (As a note, it’s not that all women hold these values or that no men do; rather, the majority of women studied have ethical systems that are more like this model than the traditional model, and the majority of men have another set of values. There’s blending, of course, and women who hold “male” values and men who hold “female” values, but in general we can model women’s vales differently than men’s.)

Chambers and Myall paraphrase the list of women’s values that Sally Helgesen outlines in THE FEMALE ADVANTAGE thusly:

• responsibility to community and sense of responsibility for maintaining community;
• cooperation rather than competition;
• concern for children and weaker members of the community;
• objectivity, a nonjudgmental appreciation for multiple points of view, which we regard as an important aspect of what some would call ‘selflessness’;
• concern for consequences of actions;
• holistic view of human beings;
• local scope of action (sometimes expressed as ‘think globally, act locally’);
• connectedness as both fact of life and value to encourage.

(p. 6)

They then link library services (like reference, collection development, bibliographic instruction, and interlibrary loan) to these values.

Anyway, Lerner goes on:

Especially in the United States, the social-work impulse has continued to be pervasive among librarians. Most are imbued with a missionary confidence in the importance of reading, but have little interest in assessing or dealing with the economic importance of information. (p. 182)

It’s not “missionary confidence.” That makes it sound like librarians have some sort of blind faith in why reading is important, but there is a lot of research that backs up the good reading to kids does for their futures, and illiteracy among adults is an incredible barrier to their being able to participate in life at a very basic level. And again here Lerner prioritizes male values (economics, competition, ability to exploit something to make money) over feminine values (community, helping others, improving the world). Healso talks a lot in the chapter after this one about “information science” and being able to come up with new ways to access and shape information and how this new research should be used to make money and deliver information differently to people with money than to people without. He gets all excited about technology and I think Thomas Mann would have a bone to pick with him about Lerner’s dismissal of traditional library ideas and practices. Lerner also seems to have no concept of the digital divide within our own country (although he does talk a little about the problems libraries in developing countries face).

Anyway, in this passage about women and American librarianship, Lerner continues:

Much of the leadership in developing new ways of access to information has come from chemists, computer scientists, economists, linguists, philosophers–from people whose professional interest in information science has not been shaped by the library schools and library literature.

But this is nothing new. The librarians at Alexandria never went to library school, and nobody at Urbino ever read a library journal. The craft of librarianship is not so narrowly defined. For many centuries a love of literature and a respect for learning have been the essential qualifications of the effective librarian. (p. 182-183)

So basically it seems like Lerner’s understanding of American librarianship goes something like this:

1. Librarianship was great until women showed up.

2. Men managed to maintain leadership positions after the ladies arrived, but since women had the majority of positions under them, they somehow took control of the library and changed its values and ruined everything.

3. The change women brought about was caring about stupid poor people and children instead of taking care of Very Serious Research Business for important rich people.

4. Now that no one respects librarians anymore and librarianship is full of stupid ladies, no one in the field is doing Important Information Science Research and all of the innovations are coming from people outside of the field.

5. All of those outsiders are making truckloads of money on their information science innovations and lady librarians are so dumb that they’re content to continue helping those stupid poor people and children instead of exploiting technology to exclude some people and make money off of everyone else.

6. It doesn’t matter anyway, though, you stupid lady librarians, because library science isn’t a real thing and hasn’t been a real thing since the beginning, so you can keep your stupid books and your stupid poor people and your stupid children and your stupid lady-filled profession.

Librarianship is a fantastic example of one of the very first fields in which women could exercise their intellects and their leadership skills outside of the home. Because women participated in the field in such huge numbers–and did hold leadership roles both as practitioners and as educators–it was shaped according to women’s values. Librarianship’s emphasis of those values persists today and despite the good public libraries and public librarians do in the world, the profession is still undervalued because of its association with women and their values. Librarians are told that if they’d only be more like men, more competitive, more interested in making money and less interested in helping people, that they’d be more respected.

And that’s bogus.

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7 Comments June 26, 2010

Privacy follow-up: what you should do, what companies should do

In a discussion on my recent post on Facebook and privacy, Erin linked me to “Privacy Is Dead… And It Could Be Great,” which claims that part of the reason we are more willing to give up our personal information is that for the first time, we’re getting value back. When we give our personal information to Facebook, it improves our Internet experience.

My first response was that that perception of exchanged value is what makes handing over our privacy so alluring and why it’s become harder to convince people that they might want to resist giving up that information. I also linked this to the increasing commercialization of society and the transformation of people into consumers.

Erin responded–rightly–that there are people who want this, that being able to go to Yelp and have Facebook automatically fill in your location is a great feature. And while I would rather live more privately and have fewer integrated tools like this, I need to respect that other people will make different choices.

And really, it’s the ability to make an informed choice that is really important to me. I will continue to advocate for caution and reservation when it comes to sharing your personal information, but what is more important to me is that you know what information you’re giving out, who will have access to it, and what it will be used for, and that you will have the ability to control what happens to your personal information.

Earlier this month, David Lee King asked if privacy is really that big a deal. He concludes that the information you share on Facebook isn’t important enough to bother hiding and that a lot of it is already available elsewhere on the web.

But there are multiple facets to privacy: you should think about which people will have access to your information (which maybe isn’t such a huge deal with Facebook), but you should also think about what Facebook will do with that information. While having integration between different websites makes doing things on the Internet easier, companies don’t exist to make your life cooler. They exist to make money, and when you give them your personal information, they’re going to try to figure out how to make money off of it. Will Facebook sell your information to spammers and junk mailers? Probably not–but they could if they wanted to, and they will use their massive store of incredibly detailed information about each user to sell ad space to organizations that want to target a very specific group.

I can’t remember where I heard about it, but Aza Raskin has a great blog post on what should matter in privacy. After a workshop on online privacy, he and Lauren Gelman and Julie Martin came up with seven attributes they’d like to see represented with icons that give users an indication about how the information they give to websites will be used:

• Is you data used for secondary use? And is it shared with 3rd parties?
• Is your data bartered?
• Under what terms is your data shared with the government and with law enforcement?
• Does the company take reasonable measures to protect your data in all phases of collection and storage?
• Does the service give you control of your data?
• Does the service use your data to build and save a profile for non-primary use?
• Are ad networks being used and under what terms?

With privacy online, my major concerns are two-fold: do users know what’s happening to their information? And can companies be trusted with it?

In 2009, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

In libraries, we offer people a place to seek information without fear of having what they’re doing revealed because only then can you seek information freely. Just because you want to do something privately doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be doing it. If a patron wants to get information on STIs, he or she doesn’t want to do that in a forum where other people might find out–and that doesn’t make the patron a criminal.

In the case of Google and Facebook, when leaders within the company speak so derisively about privacy, you need to be concerned. They don’t care if your privacy is protected because protecting it isn’t profitable, so it’s up to you. Know what you are agreeing to when you accept the Terms of Use. Know what might be done with your information. Demand more transparency and accountability from the corporations to which you give your information.

While I hope people will be cautious about their personal information online, what is more important is that peple be informed and that peple be able to put their privacy settings at a level that is comfortable to them.

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1 Comment May 21, 2010

“You need a master’s degree for that?” In defense of the MLS.

We had our final meeting for my Youth Services class tonight; it’s definitely bittersweet (more bitter than sweet, if I’m going to be honest) to be finishing the program. So since it was our last class, the material we covered was a grab bag of library fun: we started with the recent challenge of Toni Morrison’s SONG OF SOLOMON in one of my classmate’s school districts (the unusual twist here is that rather than the objection coming from a parent, it’s coming instead from a school board member–and the kids were halfway through the book when the challenge arose! The book had been taught for years before anyone challenged it! This has even caught the attention of Anna North at Jezebel.) and then talked about knowing your community and what kinds of programs will and won’t fly (like tarot cart readings, anti-Valentine’s Day programs, or even Banned Book Week events), interviewing and salary negotiation, being advocates for young people, and professional tools and resources.

We also had a discussion about the value of the MLS. Since I started the program almost two years ago I’ve repeatedly found myself called to defend the need for the degree, usually to people incredulously asking, “You need a master’s degree for that?” Initially I didn’t really know what to say because I’d just started the program myself and was a newcomer to the field and didn’t really know what I’d be learning in classes or on the job. But after working in three different kinds of libraries, taking classes, doing projects and internships, discussing this with other librarians and library students, and getting within six days of graduation (!), I feel better equipped to answer that incredulity.

Theoretical foundation
In my earlier post on the need for more rigor in the profession, I mentioned the exclusive body of knowledge that we lay claim to as part of being professionals. While I think we need to work harder to expand and deepen and refine what appears in the library science literature, it’s through a professional degree that we confer that knowledge to the next generation of librarians. You can be taught how to catalog a book on the job, but you’re very unlikely to receive along with that training a lecture on controlled vocabularies or bibliographic access. You may be really good at finding things online or at doing research with print materials, but it’s through a professional degree that you will learn about information-seeking behavior. Librarianship requires specialized skills and knowledge and while some of that can be learned on the job, the theoretical background comes from the studies you do for a degree.

Instilling professional ethics
While you may have considered the ethical implications of library work on your own or be put through ethics training on the job, it is through a master’s degree that you examine library ethics in detail and develop a comprehensive view of what libraries are all about. A day-long ethics seminar at work doesn’t give you the depth of understanding that you get in a semester-long course on intellectual freedom. You not only need to balance access and privacy, intellectual freedom and community responsiveness–you also need to be able to understand and defend why you do what you do.

Connection to our history
Sure, you know who Melvil Dewey was and have probably heard of Nancy Pearl. But do you know Justin Winsor, Charles Cutter, Samuel Swett Green, Jesse Shera, S. R. Ranganathan, Margaret A. Edwards, Augusta Baker, Anne Carroll Moore, Pura Belpré, Helen Thornton Geer, Kathleen de la Peña McCook, Michael Gorman, or Judith Krug? Do you know their contributions to librarianship and how they changed the profession? Do you know how librarianship and libraries have evolved? Do you know how young adult literature emerged from children’s literature and how children’s literature developed in the first place? Do you know how technology has changed the profession? Do you know what the philosophy of libraries used to be and what it is now? Do you know how the field became a “woman’s profession”? You could read books about the history of librarianship, but you’re not going to learn about these things in the day-to-day work you do in a library. And this isn’t just trivia you want to know to impress your friends and neighbors: it is by knowing where we’ve come from and what it is that makes a library a library that we can chart where we are going to go.

Signaling your valuing of your work
Librarians are undervalued. Public librarians are especially undervalued. Youth Services librarians are criminally undervalued. Having a professional degree and defending it to skeptics signals that you value your work, your knowledge, and your profession–and that the profession is a profession and not just a job that anyone off the street can do. An MLS is an investment of your time and your money and you’d better be able to explain why you had to get that piece of paper to be a librarian and how what you learned during the course of your degree makes you a better librarian than someone who just has work experience.

There are undoubtably genius autodidacts who rock the library world without an MLS and who are curious and driven enough to acquire some of this specialized knowledge on their own–after all, a library is a place where you can research and learn and improve yourself and your skills. I’m not trying to claim that one must have an MLS to be a good librarian or that what you learn during the course of your MLS studies will be useful to you every minute of every day you spend at work. But I do think that MLS programs that give us a theoretical foundation, an understanding of ethical issues in the field, and a sense of the profession’s history and future make us much, much better equipped to be excellent librarians than those who rely on work experience alone. And being able to understand the value of that degree and defend it to those who think librarianship is just sitting around reading all day is essential.

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3 Comments May 3, 2010

Rigor in reviews, in writing, and in librarianship generally

In February author Zetta Elliott wrote a guest post for Justine Larbalestier’s blog in which she discusses the challenges writers of color face in a field that is largely white. She discusses problems of authenticity and white privilege (there are more books about African-Americans than there are books by African-Americans) and the difficulties in breaking into the field. I don’t see a lot of discussions about race or privilege in the library world (the literary world, sure, or the culture studies world, yes, but not nearly as often from librarians), so you should give Elliott’s post a read.

Elliott’s discussion of race and privilege in young adult writing is bookended by a consideration of the reluctance people show in writing critical book reviews, which Sarah McCarry picks up on in her Huffington Post article, “Faking Nice in the Blogosphere: Women and Book Reviews.” She examines this reluctance through the lens of gender, arguing that to shy away from criticism in a field dominated by female writers and readers does women and girls a disservice, because although we should be promoting good books and negative reviews can be very hurtful (see David Lubar’s post about the startlingly harsh Kirkus review of one of his books), a critic’s job is to have expectations, to evaluate a book, and to create discussion.

McCarry also contrasts the reception of works by male authors and the “cult of niceness”:

It goes without saying that male writers are accorded no such coddling, and that entry into this misty realm of sisterly solidarity requires acquiescence to a strict set of codes of behavior. Nice lady writers don’t rock the boat, they don’t hurt people’s feelings, and they sure as hell don’t write about topics that make other lady writers uncomfortable. But instead of promoting community, this obsession with niceness wields a potent silencing force. If nice ladies don’t say critical things about other ladies’ books, they also don’t talk about racism and sexism within the publishing industry, the enormous barriers facing writers of color and women whose work doesn’t fall into tidy and palatable genre categories, and the refusal of mainstream critics to acknowledge young adult fiction in particular as anything other than the realm of hack (read: female) writers incapable of producing “real” literature.

I’m still relatively new to the library world (I did my undergrad in math with the intent to become a math professor before realizing I needed a career with more room to have lots of interests and hobbies and with more of a human element), but I was really struck in my first semester by what seems to me to be a lack of rigor in the field–at least in public librarianship. We read an article in my collection development class that was published in a regional library journal that was just a description of a very narrow weeding project. There was no theory, no analysis, no critique–just a summary of events. The writing was poor and riddled with grammatical mistakes. It seemed shocking to me that an article of that quality was published in a peer-reviewed journal (not a magazine or a newsletter–a journal).

While it turns out that most of the library science literature dealing with public libraries isn’t as bad as that one article, it still seems like actual research and critical analysis can be difficult to find. Has this always been the case? Is it happening because of the emergence of information science from library science? Is it just public libraries that find themselves in a poverty of research? It seems to me that this ties in with librarianship’s struggle to be recognized as a profession.

I read a fantastic book last year by Roma Harris, LIBRARIANSHIP: THE EROSION OF A WOMAN’S PROFESSION (it’s out of print but can be found used or ordered through interlibrary loan) in which she discusses librarianship’s struggle to be regarded as a profession and the challenges librarians have faced because their field is traditionally viewed as a woman’s field. She draws on examples from social work and nursing, too, to show how librarianship is unique in its labeling as women’s work (in some ways we’re actually better off). Anyway, it’s a fascinating read and a lot of the following is informed by her analysis.

One way librarians have tried to achieve recognition as professionals is by adopting the traits of other professions (think doctors, lawyers, and clergy members). We institute educational standards (the required MLS), we have a professional association that adopts standards for ethical behavior, and we point to an exclusive body of knowledge in which active research is being done, all in the hopes that possessing these traits will make us a profession.

But librarianship is still often seen as women’s work, and public librarianship especially, and youth services librarianship doubly so. And so librarians aren’t afforded the prestige of other professions. I don’t mean to say that there is something inherently wrong with librarians or library research and that until those flaws are mended we will never been seen as professionals, but I do think that public library research lacks rigor. We need more library science doctoral candidates who are interested in public librarianship and youth services, whether that means encouraging current candidates to find research subjects in those areas or for people who are currently working in the field to return to school.

Many things that are regarded as “women’s work” are seen as such because they draw on traditionally feminine values like nurturing and caring and working with children. My call for rigor and criticism and research isn’t a call to discard these feminine traits and adopt more competitive masculine values and basically become men to effectively transform our profession into a more masculine one–our society devalues “women’s” values enough already. (Notice, for example, that more prestige and higher salaries are given to academic librarians, who are more likely to be men than public librarians and children’s librarians in particular–even within a “woman’s field,” being at the masculine end is preferred.)

Nurture and compassion and care for children is essential in our society and in our work as librarians to young people. But we do need to have that exclusive body of knowledge both to fit the traditional mold of a profession (if that’s the way to professionalizing librarianship) and to justify our master’s degrees being master’s degrees and not just bachelor’s degrees, but also to make us better librarians. It is through this research that we will find the best ways to serve our patrons, the best ways to understand them, the best ways to nurture them into successful adults and to create a better society.

Although she writes from the perspective of an author rather than a librarian, I agree with McCarry that we need to not be afraid to be critical in our reviews. I am not advocating nastiness or the destruction of a supportive community for writers, just higher standards and a willingness to hold authors to them. Young adult literature has improved in leaps and bounds since its emergence in the 1960s from children’s literature, but we should always be asking more. We should look for quality writing and plot construction and character development and recognize when it isn’t there. We should examine books from frameworks of race and gender. We should not be afraid to rock the boat. We should not be cruel, but we should analyze and evaluate and spark discussion and in doing so, push for more for our patrons.

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5 Comments April 28, 2010

Is there a “parent problem” in YA lit?

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while! At the beginning of the month, Julie Just wrote an essay for the New York Times Sunday Book review called “The Parent Problem in Young Adult Lit.” In it, she argues that while literary parents of the past were often absent or dead to give the young protagonists the space and autonomy for their adventures, present-day parents in young adult lit are downright bad:

[...] what’s striking is that some of the most sharply written and critically praised works reliably feature a mopey, inept, distracted or ready-for-rehab parent, suggesting that this has become a particularly resonant figure.

She cites a dad acting as a single parent who has no idea how to cook (Sara Zarr’s ONCE WAS LOST), a dangerously accident-prone mother and a father who works late nights (Natalie Standiford’s HOW TO SAY GOODBYE IN ROBOT), an overworked and absent mother who works as a surgeon and doesn’t see the signs of her daughter’s anorexia (Laurie Halse Anderson’s WINTERGIRLS), and the parents of characters in popular series such as the Hunger Games trilogy and the Twilight saga.

Just then presents a historical look at parents in young adult literature from its emergence in the 1960s to present day. In the ’60s parents in novels were generally absent entirely and “the teenager’s problem [was], overwhelmingly, other teenagers,” with the focus of the story on survival. But as the prevalence of the “problem novel” grew in the ’70s and ’80s, conflict centered within the family as parents divorced one another or abandoned their children entirely. But still this wasn’t a realistic portrayal:

One study from the 1970s compared mothers in young adult fiction with the ones in real life, based on statistics from the Census Bureau and the Department of Labor, and concluded that less than 3 percent of the depictions were “realistic”: in the novels, mothers were disproportionately seen as being paralyzed at home, while in real life they were beginning to go out and get jobs.

Today’s literary parents, Just says, are toned-down versions of the self-absorbed monsters of the ’70s and ’80s, but still don’t accurately represent parents today. She does see our present ambivalence about what parenting is present in these books: is it just keeping kids fed and safe? Is it being helicopter parents, always attentive to a child’s every need and ready to swoop in and rescue them at any minute? Reflecting on her own experience growing up in the ’60s, she concludes, “Back then parents knew how to get out of the way and let the orphan’s rise begin.”

Rebecca at Crete Teens (the teen services blog of the Crete (IL) Public Library District) reflected on Just’s essay, providing further examples of bad parents in books but countering that with suggestions of good parents, too (which members of the listserv also did, offering Joan Bauer’s books, INTO THE WILD NERD YONDER, FLASH BURNOUT, TWENTY BOY SUMMER, WHALE TALK, IF I STAY, ROCK STAR SUPERSTAR, and KISSING THE BEE as examples).

On the listservs, some people attributed the bad parents in books on the notion that people’s problems are never their own fault but that instead poor parenting is to blame. Others pointed out that when they were teens, they thought their parents were clueless–and that the teens they serve in libraries now feel the same way about their parents, so what we see as a “parent problem” is just the teenager’s emotion-filled take on what parents are like. Many agreed that parenting was more hands-off in earlier decades, which translates to absent parents in older YA lit, whereas today’s parents are more involved and more conflicted themselves–and that we’re seeing that in what teens read.

I think my favorite response to this article, though, has come from the insightful, incisive Liz B. of A Chair, A Fireplace, & A Tea Cozy. She takes a different perspective, asking why adults need to minutely examine the adults in literature for teens–do we see children and teens bemoaning the behavior of characters their age in adult books? She then further picks apart the notion of a “bad” parent: how do we define “bad”? Who defines “bad”? Parents? Their children? How much of a role should parents play in their kids’ lives? Should we be trying to make parents feel bad about being “bad” parents? Liz finally asserts

Let’s get out of the way. Just as parents need to get out of the way for their teenagers to mature into adults, so should we adults who read and review young adult books get out of the way of the intended audience — the teens. Yes, we can read and enjoy those books; but let’s not ask for those books to be written to reflect our reality of adults and parents.

There isn’t some universal notion of a “good parent.” Teens deserve books with involved parents whose involvement is both good and bad for the protagonist. Teens deserve books with absent parents whose absence is both good and bad for the protagonist. Their worlds are much more diverse and conflicted than they were decades ago and the rise of the “parent problem” might not be commentary on parents themselves, but on the increasing complexity of teen readers’ lives.

Over the last year or so my philosophy on youth media has developed into this: young people deserve literature (and movies and music and television and…) that reflects their world. They deserve to be treated like people and to be taken seriously. To age up characters when books are adapted into movies because a movie about teenagers won’t sell as many tickets tells teens that they aren’t interesting. To only give teens wholesome reading that won’t expand their view of the world is to declare them too stupid to think critically or to develop their own values systems. To push only books that hold up some particular standard of parenting or that look for “the return of the admirable parent” when so many teens don’t see their parents as admirable but–sometimes within the same day–as absent or conflicted or too busy or too overbearing or even downright malevolent is to tell them that they are not normal or that their stories aren’t worth telling. And that is the worst disservice we can do to them.

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1 Comment April 20, 2010

Preservation: not just letters and photographs, but digital content, too

ALA sent out an email today announcing the addition to the ALA Store of posters and bookmarks for Preservation Week, which is 9-15 May this year. I was disappointed to see that except for the short acknowledgment that “Digital copies allow treasures to be easily shared, but remember digital items need preservation, too,” Preservation Week seems to be mostly focused on preserving physical artifacts like books, maps, family heirlooms, and clothing.

To be sure, saving these physical objects is important and libraries can take this opportunity to teach library users about preserving items they care about. And ALA does provide links to digital preservation resources. But so much information created today only ever exists in digital formats, so it’s critical that libraries also heavily promote digital preservation.

I’d love to see a bookmark and poster that address digital preservation specifically. It might include the following tips:

1. Choose open file formats. Digital items such as emails, photographs, and documents require software to read and display them. If the company that makes a particular piece of software stops supporting that software, you may lose the ability to read your data.
2. Make backups across multiple storage devices. If your hard drive crashes or you misplace your flash drive, will you lose your family photographs? You can also create hard copies of certain kinds of content as a means of backing up that data.
3. Create good metadata. Metadata tells you about the digital objects you have. Who is in the photo? When was the photo taken?
4. Be selective. While digital photography allows you to keep every photograph you take with no concern for filling up your home with physical photo albums, will you really still want all of those pictures a year from now? Five years from now? Fifty years from now? How long will you keep that online boarding pass confirmation? Not all digital content is equally important and our cognitive associations fade over time and file formats change, so it’s important to be able to identify what’s important so it can be documented, organized, and preserved.

The “how” of digital preservation can be tricky: new file formats and the sheer overwhelming amount of data can be daunting. But librarians continue in their quest to organize and preserve the world’s information. Earlier this month, Andrew K. Pace, the Executive Director for Networked Library Services at OCLC and the President of LITA, wrote an entry at Hectic Pace called “Librarians Give Permanence to Twitter.” He outlined how Twitter posts could be cataloged using MARC records. And today, the Library of Congress announced (via Twitter!) that they’re acquiring all public tweets since March 2006. (There’s a privacy/content ownership side of things here, too, but that’s another post for another time.) Also, from the Library of Congress’s Facebook announcement, check out their stance on digital information:

So if you think the Library of Congress is “just books,” think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.

The organization and preservation of digital content is still a developing field with interesting new projects, and it’s not some inaccessible academic issue or for tech nerds only. It’s something that librarians need to learn about themselves and then educate library users about.

For more on metadata, see my earlier post and Erin’s earlier post at her own blog on our digital preservation project this semester. And for more on preserving your own digital content, check out the Library of Congress’s guide to personal archiving.

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5 Comments April 14, 2010

Links: book spine poetry, Hilary Duff as author, and a defense of gaming

Some of this is sort of old (in Internet time, at least), but I’ve been trying hard to get all of my work for the next week and a half done before I leave for PLA and neglecting my RSS feeds, so it’s all new to me!

100 Scope Notes had a great post earlier this month with book spine poetry. I love these!

Just Ask Marlene announces that Hilary Duff has signed a book deal with Simon & Schuster beginning with ELIXIR. “Hillary tells her fans that she loves reading great adventure books, especially ones like Elixir that feature a strong, inspiring female character.” Look for ELIXIR this October or preorder at Amazon now.

And finally, Amanda Gardner at BusinessWeek writes that “boys who own a video game system don’t do as well academically as their non-playing peers,” but the study author, Robert Weis, clarifies:

“we can never say with 100 percent certainty that it’s playing video games that causes kids to have delays or deficits in reading and writing performance, but … we can be pretty confident that it’s the game ownership and the amount of time they spend playing that causes these academic delays.”

I feel the need to rise to video games’ defense. Lots of things from chess to rock music has been branded the downfall of our youth and video games are just the latest form of entertainment to add to the list. Any hobby–sports or gaming or even reading–will take away from academic study time. Should kids give up all of their hobbies just because it’d give them more time to spend on school? Hobbies are beneficial for so many reasons (they help us develop socially, they help us develop other skills, and they give us something to do to get a break from our work at the very least) and in fact, the Department of Defense published a news item earlier this year about the benefits of video gaming.

Furthermore, the study population was boys whose families didn’t own video game systems, so it’s possible that the time the boys spent on gaming would level off as they played for a while and having video games in their own homes wasn’t an exciting new thing anymore. The study also found that reading and writing scores dropped, but that math scores remained consistent, so it’s not just a matter of time spent on video games that could be spent on studying.

I’m not saying that playing video games is always good or that there are only benefits and no drawbacks, but knee-jerk “gaming is bad” reactions and headlines to studies with more nuance drive me crazy. The truth, as usual, is probably not in one extreme or the other, but rather somewhere in the middle.

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Leave a Comment March 23, 2010

From the listservs: movies based on books

Last week someone posted an announcement to YALSA-bk that Asa Butterfield and Chloe Moretz would be playing Hugo and Isabelle in the movie adaptation of THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET. This sparked a long discussion about movies that were based on children’s and YA books, with most people falling into the “movies ruin books” camp.

While the cynic in me tends to agree, I think we have to recognize that a book and a movie are different narrative forms and that because of their own characteristics, each have unique limitations and strengths. While books are capable of telling much more sophisticated stories with subplots and a lot of interior thoughts and development, the visual aspect of movies mean that they can convey emotions that might not be so easily crammed into specific words. And movies are better at juxtaposing different images without commentary, which is more difficult to do in a verbal narrative. While some pointed out that there are kids who see a movie based on a book, don’t like it, and then are reluctant to read the book, I think that there’s still room to enjoy a book after it’s been turned into a movie we don’t like–it doesn’t have to “ruin” the book for us.

Members of the listserv mentioned the seeming increase of children’s and teen’s books being adapted into movies. One librarian said that her sister was in the film business and that it wasn’t that writers and directors and producers were out of ideas, but that they were being conservative and wanted something with a “built in audience.” That is, since so many kids have read the Percy Jackson books, they know they’ll have butts in seats if they make a Percy Jackson movie. One librarian did point out, though, that movie studios have been drastically changing stories from the start, pointing in particular to Mary Poppins and animated Disney movies. This isn’t a new trend–it’s just something we notice more because more books are being adapted.

I finally went to see Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief with my husband this weekend. I’d heard some pretty terrible things about it, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. I was especially pleased that it wasn’t as video game-like as I was expecting: they do receive a map with three different locations that are revealed only when their quest at the previous one is finished, but there was no mine cart/runaway boat/flying-through-the-air-avoiding-objects sequence like it seems a lot of movies for kids contain. I also thought that Percy’s introduction to his true nature and to Camp Half-Blood was much quicker and more natural than it was in the book; the characters in the novel seemed like they were going awfully far out of their way to keep him in the dark for as long as possible. What did bother me about the adaptation, though, was the way Percy’s relationship with his father was much closer and warmer than it was in the book. It seems like that really changes the spirit of the story. I don’t mind the events of the story being a lot different or even certain characters not being present, but I want the spirit of the story to feel the same.

The discussion on YALSA-bk benefitted from an email from Alex Flinn, author of BEASTLY, which has been adapted into a movie that will be in theaters this summer. I actually got to hear Alex Flinn speak at the Hussey-Mayfield Memorial Public Library in Zionsville on Wednesday. She mostly talked about her youth and becoming a writer and what goes into writing a novel and getting it published, but she also touched briefly on having her book adapted into a movie. Her email to the listserv, though, was more specific. She said that at first she was scared exactly because so many movie adaptations haven’t been faithful to their subject material, but that she was lucky to read the screenplay before they started and found that “they pretty much left the plot alone.” She pointed out that there are different levels of changes, saying that she’s not bothered that the main character’s hair color is different (as some fans are), but that “[a]t one point, they’d been talking to an actor who wanted a fairly major change made to the main character’s relationship with his father. That would have bothered me more than hair color.” During her visit in Zionsville, she’d explained that BEASTLY initially came from thinking about what crappy parents both the beauty and the beast from the fairy tale must have had for them to get into their situation, so the beast’s relationship with his father is really important to Flinn–and to the spirit of the story.

I thought the movie adaptation of CORALINE is a good example of where the book and the movie tell similar (but not identical) stories with each being strengthened by the format. While the film changed some of what happened, the intricate stop-motion style was really beautiful and very well-suited to the strange and creepy other world in the story. But the book explores in a way that a film can’t Coraline’s internal state during her adventure. They’re different, but one isn’t necessarily better than the other. And really, we don’t have to pick one over the other, do we? We can enjoy both–if they both deserve it.

Late last year, Walter Kirn, the author of UP IN THE AIR, was interviewed by NPR about the movie adaptation of his book. He talked about how the film version was necessarily different from the book:

There are two different forms of storytelling: Novels tend to come from the inside of a character and movies tend to look at them from the outside in relation to others in their world. And so, I fully understood that for this book to make it onto film it had to be sort of opened up, unfolded. [...] And the finished product, though it bears the distinct genetic imprint of the book, is quite different in some details and yet I am entirely pleased with it. [...] [T]he novel is a sort of a piece of paper and the movie has made it into a paper airplane. That suggested the movie is more complex than the book, which I don’t think it is, actually. I mean, you’re able to do things in novels: introduce subplots, other characters, thematic layers and so on, in a way that you simply can’t in a movie. A movie really has to choose its battles. And most adaptations end up having to really edit out a lot of the book and bring forward those elements that they think play dramatically. In this case, a whole new character had to be introduced. A sort of sidekick had to be given to a lonely hero who spends most of the time in the novel observing and thinking about his world. But now we had to give him a chance to talk about his world.

The addition of a completely new character is a huge change to be made when adapting a book into a movie, but Kirn recognized that because so much of the “action” in the book actually went on in the main character’s mind and reflected his internal, personal changes, a film version would have to externalize a lot of that. And despite this huge change, he thinks that the addition of that character and the interactions she has with the protagonist are the source of a lot of humor in the movie.

I really liked his metaphors for the way a book and its movie adaptation are related:

You know, here’s how adaptation works – almost everything in the movie is in the book in some form. But it’s as though the deck has been completely reshuffled and some of the cards have been assigned different values, some of the fours have been made into jacks and some of the jacks have been made into twos. And it’s as though, you know, a new poker hand has been made out of these cards that were dealt in the book. And yet the book and the movie to me are both obviously members of the same family. They’re like non-identical twins. You see the nose. You see the ears. You see the stature and the voice in the way of moving, and you go, yes, these are the same creature in some respect, but they are two different versions of the creature.

I still feel ambivalent about movie adaptations. I don’t hate them as much as a lot of librarians seem to (I do understand that it must be hard to see something you love changed a lot!) because I think that a movie can and often must tell a different story, and that movies can do things that a book can’t. And honestly, sometimes a story just needs tightening, and the time limitations of a movie can do that. But it does seem like things are often unnecessarily changed or that the spirit of the story is lost. I want to remain hopeful about future adaptations, though, because some have turned out to be so good (for example, Premiere.com has a list of ten movies that are better than the books on which they’re based–in their opinion, at least). I also hope that we can take even the bad film adaptations and use them as an opportunity to get more kids reading–or at least discussing the media they do consume.

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Leave a Comment March 21, 2010

Blogging as professional development? Sure. Peer-reviewed discourse? No way.

Nancy Bertolotti wrote earlier this month for the YALSA blog about blogging as a professional development tool. She suggests that blogging gives the writer the opportunity to network with authors (a review she wrote of one author’s book led to an interview with that author) and colleagues, as a way to practice writing, as a demonstration of knowledge or skill, and as a way of gaining experience with social networking tools. I agree with all of this and on a personal level, I’ve enjoyed blogging because it’s gotten me thinking about library stuff more often and in a more structured sort of way. Bertolotti also mentioned that she’s a recent grad and that she feels like her blog addresses a lot of different sorts of topics but that once she finds a job, her focus will narrow–another feeling I share with her.

She also asserted that blogging was a form of peer-reviewed writing:

Blogging on a professional site like the YALSA Blog might even be considered a peer reviewed form of writing. You know you will be corrected or asked for clarification if you post something that is not clearly articulated and accurate. You will also receive comments if you post something controversial like, blogging as a peer reviewed publication!

I’m afraid I can’t agree with her here, though. While it’s true that writing in a public forum allows people to critique your ideas and presentation (if anyone’s listening to what you’re saying in the first place), people read blogs differently than editors read papers. And part of why peer-reviewed papers are given such authority is because the review and vetting has happened before publication. Furthermore, reviewers and editors for peer-reviewed journals are (usually) considered experts in their fields, whereas any sort of review that happens in a blog is more crowdsourcing than expert opinion.

Bertolotti also doesn’t explicitly mention the more internal benefits of blogging. She does say that blogging allows you to demonstrate expertise in a particular area and to practice your writing, but even in the short time I’ve been working on this blog, I’ve found myself thinking about library issues I want to talk about in a much more organized fashion, deciding what relates to the topic, what examples and counter-examples I might use, and what isn’t related enough to be included in one post but might be the start of a new one. I’ve also been reading a lot more to find connections between ideas and am doing a better job of pulling in examples from sources that aren’t necessarily library-specific. Blogging has external benefits like the ones Bertolotti identifies, but it’s also something that has more internal benefits as well.

And just for fun, some tips from other library bloggers: last month, Creative Literacy offered five tips for better blogging. And earlier this week, GreenBeanTeenQueen celebrated its second anniversary; Sarah has five lessons on blogging and reviewing. She’s also running a contest with ARCs as prizes, so make sure you enter by the end of April.

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2 Comments March 19, 2010

From the listservs: ARCs

About a week and a half ago a member of the YALSA-bk mailing list said that she was new to receiving ARCs and asked what listserv members did with their copies. A discussion erupted that pulled in librarians, authors, and publishers alike and is still going on today.

For the uninitiated, ARCs are Advanced Reading Copies (or Advance Review Copies)–paperback copies of a book that a publisher distributes before a book is published to allow people to review them, to solicit feedback, and to create buzz around the book. Sometimes these books are uncorrected proofs with a plain cover, and the content of the story may change between the distribution of the ARC and the publication of the actual book. Publishers or authors will occasionally post to the listserv offering ARCs of an upcoming book, they’re sometimes sent to librarians, magazines or other reviewers, and booksellers, and they’re available from publishers at conferences.

(Not every book is distributed as an ARC beforehand: I was disappointed to learn from the dean of IUPUI’s SLIS program that Scholastic isn’t planning to give out ARCs of MOCKINGJAY, the third book in the Hunger Games trilogy (read my post about the announcement of the cover of the book) at ALA’s Annual Conference this July because the series is so popular and well-known that they don’t think they need to build any buzz–or let the secrets out early.)

So once you’ve received an ARC, what do you do with it? The publisher would like you to read it and either publish or send in a review and, if you like it, spread the word about the upcoming book. But what do you do with the book afterward? Many librarians said that they distributed the ARCs to their teens to read and review and then they sent the reviews into the publisher and used them to decide whether or not to purchase the book when it comes out for the library’s collection. A few said they gave away ARCs as incentives for summer reading programs or other programs with teens. One librarian reported that the library’s Friends group was selling the books in their booksales, though, and a few librarians warned against adding the book to the collection.

While many copies of ARCs are marked on the cover with the instructions “NOT FOR SALE,” completionists and collectors seek them out and will pay not as much as they used to, but still a good price for the copies since they’re not widely available–and despite the printed instructions, selling ARCs isn’t illegal. Books may change between being given out as ARCs and being published based on feedback the publisher receives from ARC readers. If a library added an ARC to the collection, it’s not necessarily the same book that the publisher actually publishes. Giving ARCs to teens–or any patron–without letting them know that it’s a review copy and not the final version of the book is a misrepresentation. Furthermore, ARCs are flimsy paperbacks and in libraries, where books get lots of use and abuse, an ARC just can’t hold up to even a regular paperback, much less a hardback.

I was totally jazzed to receive a copy of CATCHING FIRE (the second Hunger Games book) at ALA this summer and read it the night I got home and emailed a few thoughts to the contact person listed in the front of the book. Since I wasn’t working with teens at the time, that was all I could do–that and continue to rhapsodize about how amazing the series was with friends and colleagues. But once I’m working in a library, I love the idea of distributing any ARCs I can get my hands on to teens to have them review them. Teens get sneak previews at upcoming books and can promote them to their friends and help the librarian (me!) decide what to collect, and writing reviews helps them develop their literacy skills and gives them a chance to feel like they matter to publishers. And as a bonus, you can use those reviews to promote the book within the library once you order it. As for what to do with an ARC once a teen has reviewed it–why not have another teen read it? And another and another until the book just falls apart. After that, recycle it and use all of those reviews for Great Library Justice.

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Leave a Comment February 17, 2010