Final Thoughts on New Librarianship, the Wrap-Up Post

In order to have a "New Librarianship," there must be an old version or versions to replace. And yet, if one looks around, much of what R. David Lankes terms New Librarianship has been with us for a while. There is a certain amount of forgetting that goes into New Librarianship, and Lankes knows this, as he mentions it in the preface to his Atlas and he links to Elaine Harger's Progressive Librarians Guild review (pdf) of the Atlas during the final week of the course. An atlas is, after all, a collection of maps. Maps illuminate some things, but obscure others, and deliberately so.

I have to admit (as Lankes himself frequently does) that there is much here that is not new to librarianship at all. (Harger, page 92)

Indeed, a cursory glance at the discussion board for the course reveals that librarians have been practicing New Librarianship for some time now. To wit, the discussion of librarianship as a (false) choice between remediation and advocacy is filled with stories of New Librarianship in practice as well as nuance that rejects Lankes' binary language.

What Lankes has done here, and to be fair, this is by no means all he has done, is to name it and codify it. This behavior, New Librarianship, is now a brand. New Librarianship is observed and named by Lankes. That is, New Librarianship, with conservation theory at its center, is based on empirical evidence.

Again, to the Atlas, which, on page 14, shows that Lankes has a mission first and foremost, and needs a worldview that fits the mission. He works backwards to get to ontological and epistemological issues, rather than using it as a starting point. It is an interesting choice.

Taken from the Atlas website.

New Librarianship is an inductive approach posing as a deductive one because the latter is seen as more scientific, more prestigious. This makes the use of Conversation Theory all the more puzzling. Though it posits that knowledge is created through conversation, there are other worldviews that support Lankes' mission, librarianship serves communities while simultaneously being a part of those communities, and the "grand challenge" that accompanies it.

Take, for example, Jurgen Habermas' work on the public sphere, which could comfortably fit libraries and librarianship, while also discussing, and see below for more, class.

• Libraries house and further rational discourse through the organization of collections coupled with the principle of unfettered information access. 
• The field enacts the principle of critique and rational argumentation through the commitment to balanced collections, preserving them over time, and furthering inclusion through active attempts to make collections and resources reflect historical and current intellectual diversity. 
• By their very existence libraries potentially verify (or refute) claims to authority in making current and retrospective organized resources available to check the bases of a thesis, law, book, article, policy etc. continuing the process of debate which lies at the heart of the public sphere and democracy. 
• By policy and practice, my field has sought to reach out to those not served - or sometimes not wishing to be served! - to make access to information and education more widely and universally available. (John Buschman, On Libraries and the Public Sphere)

Alternatively, (post)structural approaches deny Habermas' rationality and complicate not only the relationship between libraries and communities, but also Lankes' views on how conversations influence our behavior.

• The library-community interplay shares a natural affinity with Pierre Bourdieu's concept of "field." 
• Conversations can be treated as micro-dialectics. Neo-neo-Hegelianism, anyone? Or at least a discussion of how outside forces, slightly more on this below, effect librarianship. 
• Feminism

In addition, though not (post)structuralist, there is a lot of John Rawls, Richard Rorty, and Robert Dahl in what I term "democratic approaches" to librarianship. It is also worth asking, as at least one librarian has, if we need more or new theory, as opposed to refining what we already have.

While Lankes is explicit about both rediscovering practices that never went away and about the origins of his thought process, but then seems to forget them throughout both the Atlas and the course. These "rival" approaches all share an ideological transparency that is missing from Lankes' course and Atlas. They show their work and directly promote a worldview from which all else flows, whereas in this course it is usually unclear on whether theory informs practice or vice versa.



Lankes' relationship to observable, empirical phenomena is no doubt informed by his worldview, but he selects the former before the latter, which confuses many a librarian who's taken the course. Two other conflations, facts with behavior and constructivist theories of learning with constructivist worldviews, also mar the course. Lane Wilkinson has done masterful work tackling the latter of these. For the former, at times it seems as if Lankes himself is still unsure of the distinctions.

Labeling his librarianship as "new" also allows Lankes to designate some practices and behaviors as old, implying, or explicitly stating, that they are not worthy of continuation. Take the concept of collections, for example.

Over the past few months, numerous librarians have called for explicit agendas for librarianship. There is much about New Librarianship that needs to be made (more) explicit. To that end, Lankes' course is most welcome, but more work needs to be done, as much of this course and the book it comes from seems to take place in a vacuum, impervious to or ignorant of the outside forces that really will shape librarianship, as they always have: economics and politics.

In this vacuum, given conversation theory as applied to libraries, what are the theories and testable hypotheses that follow? What would be, what could be, to use Lankes' words, "well validated" in this barren world?

Lankes graciously links to his critics, but he can afford to. After all, he's the one with the Atlas, with the brand. And he's done a tremendous service to the profession with this Atlas, the course, and his generosity in discussing them. I can't recall the last time I saw so many librarians energized by something in the profession.

Finally, much digital ink has been spilled, and I'll link to none of it here, about Massively Open Online Courses as "disrupting" education. There is nothing remotely disruptive about this MOOC. There are lectures, readings, and assignments. All that's missing is a physical location. Online education, based on my small sample size of this course, webinars, and my online Masters of Library and Information Science program, looks very much the same as online education in 2005, when I helped to develop a distance-learning version of a Political Science course for a DC-area university. And in turn that looks similar to a "regular," brick-and-mortar course.

More thoughts on New Librarianship here.

Still More Thoughts on New Librarianship, Week 4: Elitism

Though I completed R. David Lankes' New Librarianship Massively Open Online Course in early August, many people did not, so I saved my thoughts on the final week of the course until now.

Lankes begins with a discussion of lending versus sharing, and though he does not explicitly mention economic terms, he hints at them. Sharing, according to Lankes, will allow a library, and a community, to, in the words of former President Bill Clinton, grow the pie.

Via Giphy, as always.

Present in the tension between lending and sharing is the debate between libraries as organizations that are collection-centric versus those that are community-centric. A collection-centric library is less of a public good than a community-centric one, because in the former a lent item benefits one or a few people at a time, whereas a shared item, be it physical or digital or metaphysical, has the ability to effect a larger number of people at a given time. I could bring in John Stuart Mill here, as well as a discussion of rivalrous goods and excludability (both those pages need work, by the way), but our eyes might glaze over.

Slide from the course.

To Lankes, while the collection of items is shrinking in many libraries, it is, as a concept, not going anywhere. The roles of libraries are changing, and the community is now, in many ways, the more important collection. Thus librarians should move away from the word "user." People are members of a community, they're doing more than checking out books, more than receiving lent items. Call them members.

The Grand Challenge to librarians, according to Lankes, is "how to coordinate a knowledge infrastructure (technology, people, sources, permissions) to unlock the potential and passions of Society."

But the death of the user also means a death for libraries. Lankes seems to have forgotten that the modern history of libraries is founded, in part, upon a patron (yes, that word)-client relationship. That is to say, we librarians have something users want. We are in a position of authority and power. The elitism present in this relationship is not something that is going to die easily. It is ingrained into libraries. While discursive structures can be made and unmade, as is the potential with all social constructs, it will not be an easy task.

The library, then, should be a focal point, a place where the community comes together to create and share. The mobilization, however, of the community by the library makes me a bit uncomfortable. Although the library is a platform, the existence of a platform is not enough. If you build it, people won't just come. They need a reason.

There is something statist, corporatist, about the library-community relationship that I would like to see fleshed out. As I librarian, I want my building, my online space, to be a third place, but it is a slippery slope from collaboration and sharing to extraction. We do what we do to benefit a community, not to benefit a library at the former's expense. Would Lankes, or any other librarian, be happy if a community realized its full potential, its aspirations, without a library, through some other means?

Though Lankes outlines the relationship between the library and the community, and though he says the library is a part of the community, Lankes himself uses binary language when discussing this. Old habits, old discourses, die hard.

More thoughts on previous weeks of the New Librarianship MOOC here.

Even More Thoughts on New Librarianship, Weeks 2-3: Structure, Agency, Ontology

Earlier I discussed how R. David Lankes choice of conversation theory within a constructivist worldview lead to unexamined political biases, which, in turn, lead to a discussion on twitter. Conversation theory also has some empirical baggage that goes unexamined within the course.

Here be dragons!

Truth by consensus implies that truth is created, rather than discovered. It would be more correct to say that instead of truth, Lankes is talking about some sort of intersubjective agreement, or solution, or belief: a consensus-based outcome of conversation. This agreement may be taken as true, but it is taken as true only by a certain group of people having a certain conversation at a certain time. In short, any agreement created is not truth, it is not gravity, for example, contingent upon a host of situational factors. Different people at a different time may come to a different agreement. The same people at a different time may come to yet another agreement.

Constructivist theories of learning are not the same as worldviews. How, what, why, and where we learn are often socially constructed, but facts are not.

When Alfred Wenger proposed his theory of plate tectonics in 1915, he was met with skepticism. Sixty years later, it was widely-accepted. We now know that this theory is fact. It is true. No consensus can validate or invalidate it. It simply is, because truth exists, and is discovered or uncovered. Conversation may aid, or be the sole source of, discovery, but bidden or not, truth is present.

End point.

One of the slides that Lankes put up in week three of the course looked familiar.

In particular:

Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0268401213000509 

Anthony Giddens' argues that structure and agency mutually constitute each other; like yin and yang, or love and marriage, you cannot have one with out the other. Margaret Archer's concept of morphogenesis attempts to unpack this relationship. The end result is something like a dialectic, or a conversation, if you prefer, between structures and agents, over time.

Libraries are structures. Librarians are agents, except when they're not. Communities are similarly both structures and agents. It's messy, like reality. 

What might New Librarianship look like using this approach? In week four Lankes leads a discussion on criticisms, critiques, and alternatives to New Librarianship. Maybe we'll find out. 

Librarians are not heroes, super or otherwise. We are agents navigating structures, some of which we helped to create. #libraryontology
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) July 11, 2012

If you're interested:

Archer, M. (1988) Culture and agency: The place of culture in social theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Archer, M. (1995) Realist social theory: The morphogenetic approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press..
Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

More Thoughts on New Librarianship, Weeks 2-3: Bias in Librarianship

In weeks two and three of R. David Lankes' MOOC on new librarianship, the course shifts from theory to practice, though the former informs the latter in at least two ways.

First, librarians as facilitators, and second, libraries as platforms.

We are given conversation theory, and as such, it is the job of librarians to facilitate and participate in conversations among and between communities. I have never thought of myself as a facilitator, and it will be interesting to see if this changes as a result of the course. Facilitation is, to me, but one form, albeit and important one, of the services that librarians provide communities, and there was a rather intense debate between Lankes and Steve Matthews concerning the roles of power and activism that inevitably come from starting or hosting a conversation. I suspect that we, as a profession, are often more like Matthews' analogy of the DMV clerk than Lankes lets on, yet we are not just agents directed by principals.

The issues of power and activism beg questions in both the traditional and modern senses of the term: Does librarianship have a left-wing bias? Can you be a librarian and not be political?

Here's what Lankes says:

Now, one can be a radical change agent without being liberal, but I am hard-pressed to find an example of a conservative change agent librarian in this course or The Atlas of New Librarianship. It is difficult to envision a scenario in which conversation theory would lead to any other outcome except the one above. In short, Lankes' choice of conversation theory, a critical theory with a constructivist worldview, ensures that this is the outcome. Why are librarians "radical positive change agents?" Because Lankes chose critical theory. Or, conversation theory dictates that librarians facilitate conversations. Ergo, thanks to conversation theory, librarians are radical positive change agents. If X, then X.

So, to the self-identified conservative and/or Republican librarians I know, and yes, they exist, congrats. You are sticking it to The Man while you are at work. How do I know this? Because like conversation theory

Via The Colbert Report and Memegenerator

That the liberal bias of conversation theory, not the liberal bias of reality, goes unexamined, so far, in the course is a major flaw, as it has implications for library and information science curricula; the self-selecting pool of people who chose to become librarians; and interactions, or conversations, if you prefer, with communities. At the very least, if this is Lankes' version of librarianship, it needs to be examined and discussed.

UPDATE: Thanks to the always-excellent Lane Wilkenson and a spirited discussion on twitter, I amend my comments. While librarianship, as Lankes envisions it, has a left-wing bias, I cannot in good faith attribute this to conversation theory. As you were.

Like Centre Pompidou, the pipes of librarianship need to be on the outside.

To be a librarian is to be unable to escape from politics, according to Lankes. And his use of conversation theory limits the terms of those politics. In the interests of disclosure, they are politics that I subscribe to.

"Information, and access to it, is a powerful leveling tool. By teaching patrons to access information, librarians and other library staff make it possible for patrons from traditionally underserved backgrounds to have the same access to information as more advantaged groups. This equality of opportunity also plays an important role in civil society and democracy." If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be here. (source)

Libraries as platforms, then, are cradles of democracy, and stewards of cultural heritage, which are explicitly political activities. The grand challenge comes across as less so, with the politics implicit instead.

"The politics of culture never announce themselves as political."

- Stephen Duncombe

Are you ready to be mobilized, fellow left-wing librarians? Are you up for the grand challenge? 

Thoughts on New Librarianship, Week One

Many moons ago, when I was in a political science PhD program, a group of us critiqued each other's prospecti. A colleague proposed a study of presidential nominations for positions to be approved ("advise and consent") by the Senate, which would confirm. I argued that presidential nominations already took into account the likelihood of a successful confirmation, so the real story was in the why and the how of whom the president chose in the first place, not in the actual nomination. Granted, a president could nominate someone with no chance of confirmation and then propose a second solution, not unlike a child asking for a pony and "settling" for a video game system, but I find that unlikely given the political capital one would put at risk. The initial choice is what matters, and here it was going unexamined.

R. David Lankes' Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) on "new librarianship" suffers from a similar problem. First, I am asked to assume Conversation Theory, a worldview that supposes that knowledge comes from conversations and dialogues, be they internal or external. This, too, goes unexamined. Why chose this worldview, what are its strengths, its weaknesses? What is being revealed, and what is being obscured by using this worldview? Who benefits from it?

The outcome of every conflict is determined by the extent to which the audience becomes involved in it. That is, the outcome of all conflict is determined by the scope of its contagion. 

- E.E. Schattschneider

Lankes want to have this conversation. In doing so, he's attempting to determine the scope of the debate, via their audience (of which I am a part).*

Conversation theory is simultaneously the dominant paradigm & untested? #newlib https://t.co/ax0SVaKjSq & https://t.co/JlvOok0btw
— Jacob Berg (@jacobsberg) July 12, 2013

In this MOOC, I am already forced to agree with things that I don't, or things that I may not, but haven't had the time to properly examine. Take, for example, Lankes' mission statement for librarians, which doubles as the answer to a multiple choice question in a testing module.

"The mission of librarians is to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities."
- R. David Lankes

In a testing module, participants are asked what the mission of librarians is. The answer you are supposed to give, whether you agree with it or not, is above. I find this problematic.

Second, in this course, Lankes takes for granted that there's some intersubjective, agreed-upon "improvement" for a given society, and in doing so, reifies the community itself, ignoring the very real battles that take place therein.

Discussions over the values and philosophy of librarianship won't take place via just this course. Rather, a larger discussion of a philosophy of librarianship will take place in a world in which not every, and indeed not most, librarians are in it, or participating in the #newlib twitter back channel. We have societies, communities, to answer to, and to discuss with. There are many roads to Damascus. Librarianship is multifinal, from a path, from a philosophy, there are many potential outcomes, some of which I may like, others I may not. Alternatively, assuming a worldview may limit these options and may impose path dependence rather than healthy experimentation, and may create a situation in which some strategies and tactics are more equal than others.** Having talked to Lankes, I know that alternative theories and worldviews will be discussed later.

Conversation and dialogue are not the only sources of knowledge. I say this as someone with only a tenuous connection to positivism and objectivity. Yes, there is an objective reality full of true facts out there, but for the most part I think that reality is mediated by ideational, ideological, historical, and social constructs. This explains why we fear the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea's nuclear stockpile, but not that of Great Britain. "Ideas, most of the way down," if you prefer.

For me, the real success of week one of the course is the excitement with which I see people approaching librarianship, and discussing their worldviews. That is, to me, a worthy goal in and of itself. Let's see where this excitement takes us.

* If the off-set quotes and subsequent line looks familiar, it's because of this.
** In which I rework what I wrote in the above link, beginning at "Discussion."