"And how does this affect me?" International diplomacy and my job

Source

When diplomats get expelled, they're all going to come to my place of work, and almost all of them will visit the library. Here's what we do.

1. Some of these diplomats are going to be offered a buyout, given the offer to retire. They'll take retirement seminars, and make use of the library's Career Transition Center print and online collections.
2. Some will be retrained. Russian speakers may luck out, finding openings in other countries that use a Cyrillic alphabet. Others might not be so lucky; maybe they'll have to learn Pashto, or Danish, or Portuguese... and take the appropriate courses concerning the sociopolitical and cultural aspects of new destinations. 

Regardless, all of these people will be looking for housing, some will be looking to place children in local schools, and all will be adjusting to life in a new place on short notice. It's incredibly stressful.

Anyway, we'll be here with the resources they need, and we'll be here short-staffed, thanks to a hiring freeze.

Librarians in the Age of Trump, Media Bias Edition

This infographic has been making the rounds in my social media bubble(s). Friends, librarians, and friends who are librarians have all shared it.

Via Vanessa Otero

I am uncomfortable with this infographic for two reasons. The first concerns political culture in the United States. The second is more library and information science (LIS) -centric.

First, the political economy, and as a result the political culture, of journalism in the United States is rife with false equivalence, which the above image reflects. Take the center gray circle, for example, helpfully labeled "Great sources of news." The Washington Post and National Public Radio have, in the past month, featured soft-focus articles on Richard Spencer, a neo-Nazi white supremacist. Meanwhile, CNN, "Better than not reading news at all," routinely hosts debates that feature neo-Nazis and/or climate change deniers.

This infographic neatly shows how abhorrent and wrong views make it into mainstream discourse, often under the guise of hearing from "both sides," as if denying climate change is a valid opinion, based in the scientific method. As if racist, bigoted hate speech deserves these platforms. The above image, in showing a level playing field between left and right, normalizes the normalizers.

Yet there is something more insidious about it. The idea that Hillary Clinton is a liar comes from the late New York Times op-ed columnist William Safire, who labeled her a "congenital liar" in a 1996 opinion article.* That same paper employed Judith Miller, who for years wrote uncritically about the non-existent weapons of mass destruction the George W. Bush Administration asserted Iraq possessed as a pretext for war. And yet as presented here, it is a great source of news, well within the mainstream.** All three of the news sources discussed above, as well as the television networks within that gray bubble of great news sources, devoted countless hours to Clinton's email scandal at the expense of actual policy issues, and breathlessly shared a Russian disinformation campaign designed to do lasting damage to our country. Meanwhile, The Nation, which on occasion will challenge the corporate-owned and venture capital-backed media organizations that sit to the slight right of it, is shown as barely credible. Per Stephen Colbert, reality has a liberal bias, yet the level playing field shown here distorts as much as it illuminates. Predictably, the best critique of mainstream media, liberalism, and facts I've read comes from Jacobin, taking square aim at the center and center-left of this infographic.

In fact, liberals’ nostalgia for factual politics seems designed to mask their own fraught relationship with the truth. The supposedly honest technocrats and managers — who enacted neoliberal measures with the same ferocity as their right-wing counterparts — relied on a certain set of facts to displace the material truths they refused to acknowledge.

One pictures Jacobin, like The Nation, placed somewhere near that hyperpartisan liberal line, with little journalistic value. Make of that what you will.

The United States, writ large, is not the only entity with a culture that would make this infographic so popular. Librarians, of which I am one, fancy themselves as defenders of facts, of truth, and of access to information. And on our best days, we are. But the same tendencies that lead librarians to create LibGuides for all sorts of issues, and that lead us to "one-shot" hour-long information literacy sessions as solutions to problems is behind the sharing of this very flawed image. Were this infographic to be the start of a conversation — and judging by the replies to Otero and discussion elsewhere, maybe we will get there — it would be one thing. However, it's far more likely that this image will be deployed as a bandage, covering a wound, allowing us to move on. Did something happen? Here's a LibGuide. Need to impart critical thinking skills in an hour? We can do that.*** Or, at least we say we can, rather than do what needs to be done, which is a far more thorough and deep embedding into our communities. Please do not uncritically share this image. There's much more work to be done. Thank you.


* That Clinton would refuse to release transcripts of her speeches to Goldman Sachs and obfuscate about using a private email server did her no favors here.
** I have subscriptions to both the Times and the Post, and routinely donate to WAMU, Washington, DC's local National Public Radio station.
*** Librarians and library staff along should not bear the entirety of blame for the propagation of the one-shot, which is often all the time we are granted by teachers and administration.

Yes, Libraries Are Oppressive. So What Now?

 Two questions:

1. Are libraries designed to create and perpetuate inequity?
2. Does the answer to the above question matter?

Two answers:

1. Kind of.
2. No, because regardless of intentions, libraries are oppressive.

I wish I knew the source for this, but I don't, so... fair use. 

"the library, as an institution, isn't that oppressive or designed to create and perpetuate inequity."

There's an out of context quote for you, taken to provoke maximum outrage, since

"the founding of a large public library could be motivated by multiple reasons, some of them perhaps contradictory."

The source for these quotes is Wayne Bivens-Tatum's "Libraries, Neoliberalism, and Oppression." In his book, Libraries and the Enlightenment (again, via Library Juice Press), he writes.

Harris and DuMont are quite critical of the admittedly stuffy movement in nineteenth century libraries to Americanize immigrants through education, arguing that Ticknor and others merely wanted to suppress dissent and the rising ideologies of socialism and communism. Even if Ticknor and other conservatives were motivated by a fear of, say, communist demagogues convincing the undemocratic masses to revolt, or whatever the fear was, this does not undercut the fact that they did indeed seek to educate people and to provide them with the means to educate themselves throughout their lives. That the founders of the Boston Public Library were not trying to educate revolutionaries does not take away from their accomplishment. We could just as easily interpret their actions as an early stage of progressivism. (p. 114)

Yet it seems there is a tension in his writings because of how he reconciles, or does not, the contradictory origins of public libraries.

The library is an institution, which has policies to define who is and is not a member, channels to resolve disputes, as well as feedback mechanisms. These structures intentionally legitimate some behaviors, and just as purposefully discriminate against others.

Many libraries deliberately practice social exclusion. Exclusion may also be an unintentional consequence, along with the illusion of community expertise where there is none.* The library is not unique or alone in this. Every institution has ways to include and exclude. Whether these actions and practices are intentional or unintentional is in many ways besides the point. Libraries, and librarianship, are implicated and often strengthen them. As I was saying: "libraries, and librarianship, are both radical and conservative; simultaneously perpetuating and undermining neoliberalism."

Indeed, Bivens-Tatum has written about this topic as well.

The best I can hope for is that we think globally and act locally, which requires understanding the larger context behind the specific challenges to the public good while doing what we can to fight against those challenges. 

R. David Lankes, David Shumaker, and others, are attempting to separate librarianship from libraries.

One of the principles of embedded librarianship is that librarians are important whether they work in libraries or not. In exploring the landscape of embedded librarianship, I've encountered embedded librarians who are part of library organizations (but spend a lot of time away from a library space), and others who are not part of a library organization at all. 

My focus on this principle makes me hyper-sensitive to rhetoric that over-emphasizes the institutions and minimizes, de-values, and depersonalizes the professionals. I think this happens a lot, subtly, in our professional literature. (Source)

Given this formulation, while libraries are implicated in neoliberalism, maybe librarianship doesn't have to be. Thoughts?

* Both links in this paragraph via Cecily Walker, who worked on alerted me to the project.

Related, elsewhere on this site:
Libraries and Postmodernity: A Review of Radical Cataloging
Toward of Unifying Field Theory of Librarianship
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in Academic Librarianship
The Adjunctification of Academic Librarianship
More Thoughts on New Librarianship
Data and the Surveillance State
Libraries as Structures, Libraries as Agents, Late Capitalism Edition

The Subtle Joys of Selecting on the Dependent Variable

Academic research in the social sciences has a variety of aims, but much of it seeks to explain or elucidate phenomena or condition(s) and the relationships therein. In research parlance, this phenomena or condition is the dependent variable. One should not select cases that satisfy the criteria of the dependent variable; doing so is called selection bias and can lead to incorrect conclusions.

To wit, here is an example of selection bias from my former field of study, political science.

Analysts trying to explain why some developing countries have grown so much more rapidly than others regularly select a few successful new industrializing countries (NICs) for study, most often Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, and Mexico. In all these countries, during the periods of most rapid growth, governments exerted extensive controls over labor and prevented most expressions of worker discontent. Having noted this similarity, analysts argue that the repression, cooptation, discipline, or quiescence of labor contributes to high growth. (Geddes, 134 pdf)

If one were to make policy recommendations based off this research, one might advocate that developing countries repress labor unions in order to get economic growth, the dependent variable.

Reaction Gifs, as always. And Clueless. 

As it turns out, Alicia Silverstone is right to be skeptical about this claim.

In order to establish the plausibility of the claim that labor repression contributes to development, it is necessary to select a sample of cases without reference to their position on the dependent variable, rate each on its level of labor repression, and show that, on average, countries with higher levels of repression grow faster. 

The two tasks crucial to testing any hypothesis are to identify the universe of cases to which the hypothesis should apply, and to find or develop measures of the variables. A sample of cases to examine then needs to be selected from the universe in such a way as to insure that the criteria for selecting cases are uncorrelated with the placement of cases on the dependent variable.(Geddes, 134-5)

A random sample from a given universe is one such way to test a hypothesis or a relationship, but selection bias is not random, and when one does this, the research findings may be biased.

However, there is a flip-side to selecting on the dependent variable: the results are often not only relevant, but highly entertaining.

To wit, James Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed is, in my mind, a towering achievement and an immensely absorbing piece of research. Of course, he selects on the schemes that have failed.

Via Google Books

And that brings us to library and information science.

Stanford University's Jacqueline Hettel and Chris Bourg are conducting research on "assessing library impact by text mining acknowledgements" from Google Books (Source). It is an impressive and creative way to measure how libraries can positively affect scholars, and at present it is in the "proof of concept" stage, so it is still early. Information and early data on the project is available at the following links.

http://www.linguabrarian.com/measuring-thanks/
http://www.linguabrarian.com/thanks-method-1/
http://www.linguabrarian.com/a-method-for-measuring-thanks-part-2-scraping-query-results-for-analysis-in-a-collaborative-project/

It seems that these scholars have a dependent variable robustly defined and measured in the form of acknowledgements that thank libraries and librarians for their help with research. While they have acknowledgements, proof of the impact of libraries, the dependent variable, they do not have the causes of these acknowledgements, and as a fellow librarian, the causes are what I am after. Those causes lead to a new metric of academic library success in scholarly communication. As of now, this work appears to be called "Measuring Thanks," a title that may hint at possible selection bias. I look forward to hearing more about the project, and I hope that they have not selected on the dependent variable by focusing on it at this early stage. As was the case above, a random sample of books, and the acknowledgements therein, is one way to avoid this bias.

Academic researchers are not supposed to select on the dependent variable, but doing so can lead to interesting and entertaining finds. More research that satisfies these latter conditions, please.

Data and the Surveillance State: Toward a New Ecology of Libraries

Image from the film The Lives of Others. It's excellent. Go see it. 

Years from now, we're going to need someone to help us make some sense of the surveillance state (b. 2001), which collects vast amounts of our data, which begets more data about that data.

In short, we're going to need librarians and archivists.

The data that the state collects can and will be used against it later. History has borne this out. Truth and Reconciliation commissions, court cases, oral histories... archives are sites of contestation, of resistance. Archives are an opportunity to build new power structures, to speak truth to official versions of events.

And to ensure that future generations have access to this data, we'll need librarians and archivists right now, too. Privacy is now a good, a commodity, and it's one that information professionals can offer.

Last year I visited the Baltimore Aquarium and was impressed with how conservation was embedded into the building. It's not just a place to see fish, but a place to learn about how to keep those fish around. We need to do this for privacy, for sensible copyright law, and for open access materials, among others.

The ecology of libraries should look more like that of the aquarium.

• Secure browsers, search engines and email platforms, to the extent that these are possible.

• In library instruction "one-shot" sessions, educate patrons not just on how to select sources for a particular task, because: 

our teaching must go beyond tools and skills, so that we can help students understand how information fundamentally works. This means exploring the moral, economic, and political context within which we create and share ideas. Access to information, she writes, is not enough. Our students need to see themselves in the context of "individuals and groups of people actively shaping the world as knowledge producers in a way that renders the consumer-producer dichotomy irrelevant." (The incomparable Barbara Fister quoting Christine Pawley)

• Discovery platforms that take open access, embargoes, and paywalls into account; educating people while they search.

• Notifications in the stacks and the catalog concerning

• banned and challenged books, and 

• items that are affected by copyright extensions.

• Expanding digital literacies to include privacy education. (pdf)

• Staff that can leverage the power of the Internet to stay one step ahead of governments and multi- and trans-national corporations.

• Organizations and member institutions that fight for privacy, like the American Library Association (ALA) and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA). 

• Signage. 

Source is the above link. Glorious, isn't it? 

And more.

We're going to need to, sometime in the future, remind us how and when we lost our damn minds. Let's build for this now.

Elsewhere on this site, related:
The Library as Aquarium, or, The SOPA Post

Toward a Unifying Field Theory of Librarianship, Or Not.

 Ahhh, the social sciences; forever concerned with measuring up to the natural sciences. Today's attempt at turning librarianship and library science into physics, or at least (re)starting the discussion, comes from the excellent In the Library With a Lead Pipe, a must-read blog if you're a librarian, which puts posts through something like peer-review, except that it's the same circle of peers doing the review for the far majority of posts. The search for "a philosophy of librarianship" is problematic for many reasons, chief among them is that doing so is a hunt for a moving target. No doubt physics has changed in the last thirty years, but it's still the study of matter (a media) and motion (actions of said media). Large swaths of a physics textbook published in 2012 don't look much different from one written in 1982, nor does a lab. A library, however, with a few notable and forlorn exceptions, looks very different, and the study of information, of making it searchable and accessible by a given community, has gone from the print medium to multiple media, some of which only exist as a spec on a hard drive, mainframe, or server. And so the Lead Pipe article, written by Emily Ford, begins with the sad tale of the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) "digital literacy corps," for which librarians were apparently not consulted (even though they were). Ford assigns blame for the alleged lack of consideration to the deep cause of a lack of a philosophy of librarianship. The author's goal 

here is not to contribute to the groundswell of victim rhetoric that surrounds the de-funding and de-professionalization of librarianship. Instead, I aim to shine a light on what I think is happening. Namely, we haven’t yet sussed out the philosophy behind what it is that we do.

And yet Ford leads with the very discourse she decries, understandable, since everyone I know in the profession bemoans libraries' and librarians' lack of power. Interesting, then, that the word "should" occurs so often in this article, as a philosophy of librarianship is, by definition, an invitation to argue over norms, normative concepts, and power. Biology is the study of life, not what life should be. The latter is eugenics, a word that, again, understandably, has some negative connotations. This is not only a conversation as to what librarianship should be, but also a conversation about the conversation. 

Sound ideas about what librarianship is and what its goals are permit us to claim a degree of autonomy in institutions where we might otherwise serve as mere functionaries rather than as the professionals we are. Without a philosophical foundation, we lack a basis for making decisions regarding how to change our institutions in response to external forces, with the potential result that we do not play the role that we should in decision-making.

That's a quote from Rory Litwin, approvingly cited in the article, but one can substitute any other group of social scientists, those who practice normative science. A hallmark of any reputable and established social science is putting old wine in new bottles, and so it is with a philosophy of librarianship. James Periam Danton, again cited in the Lead Pipe article, properly historicized librarianship in 1934, arguing that it should be

derived from the predominating ideals of that society. Consequently, before a library philosophy can be formulated, there must be an understanding and recognition of the ideals and purposes of the society into which that philosophy must fit.

I find nothing to disagree with in the above two quotes, which to me seem to lend support to library science as Kuhnian "normal science." Geology took a long time to come around on plate tectonics. We take a long time to come around on library science syllabi, on linked data and the semantic web, and on the angst that comes with measuring ourselves via natural sciences. I wonder if digitization has or is creating a paradigm shift, a punctuated equilibrium, but one that cannot touch the "hard core" of librarianship, if one intersubjectively exists.

The Semi-Sovereign Library

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

Ford and Lead Pipe want to have this conversation. In doing so, they're attempting to determine the scope of the debate, via their audience (of which I am a part). I don't know Lead Pipe's site analytics, but anecdotally the blog is popular on social networks like Twitter and Google +. However, both those, as all social networks are, often function as an echo chamber. This may be an issue with Lead Pipe's "peer review," and it's definitely and issue in those media. Lead Pipe may be preaching to a choir by engaging its readership. I have my analytics and I know how that goes. Any fight for the soul of librarianship, or at the least a discussion over its values and philosophy, won't take place via that, or this, blog. 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 on twitter. A damning proxy statistic: fewer than one-fifth of dues-paying American Library Association (ALA) members, the very people one would think would have "skin in the game," so to speak, voted in that organization's 2012 annual election. Again, over eighty percent of librarians who pay money to belong to an organization couldn't be bothered to vote to determine that organization's leadership. That should be the real audience here, not the librarians on social media, which are epiphenomenal in the larger scheme of things. Our peers, it bears repeating, may not be our tribe. So I wonder if Lead Pipe's arena, its audience, of which I am a part, is one voice in a void. A welcome voice. Perhaps even a necessary one. But I worry that "a call to praxis" is a call to a praxis. 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. A call to praxis may limit these options, and may impose path dependence rather than healthy experimentation, may create a situation in which some tactics are more equal than others. 

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

As Ford argues, let's continually examine why we do what we do, what works and what doesn't. That's a praxis I can get behind, but it's not the praxis. That Decemberists' song? It's great. But it's vague. It's unclear from the lyrics why we fight. And maybe that's why it works for me. Why I fight might be different from why you do. Let a hundred flowers bloom. Do good, or do less bad, or less wrong. Make as much information possible to as many people as possible in as many ways as possible. On this, I hope we can agree. Besides, you don't want to be the natural sciences anyway. None of that stuff can be replicated. Good night, and good luck. 

Libraries, Consortia, Associations, & Two-Level Games

Librarians serve many masters, be they boards of directors, provosts, or deans, in addition to what is often a more explicit mission of aiding a given group of patrons, be they students or members of a community. Beyond the those served, many libraries are also members of consortia, an aggregation of libraries who pool resources and expertise to benefit all members. As libraries and their staff navigate a world in which people use Google first and libraries a distant second, one in which staffing shortages and other budget cut-related obstacles seem ever-present, consortia provide libraries with significant opportunities, though there are risks as well.
In the age of Google, in which library staff are often told that "everything" is available online, consortia allow libraries to greatly expand their offerings. To wit, my place of work (MPOW) has approximately 214,000 items available for check out. The consortium to which we belong has 11.2 million items. Consortia allow libraries to play a two-level game, wherein staff efforts to improve some aspect of the library that are stymied within the aforementioned given community are on the agenda at a different, sometimes higher, level. The very existence of a consortium creates a brain trust, a group of library staff one can discuss issues of programming, planning, strategy, tactics, etc with.


The concept of two-level games comes from political scientist Robert Putnam (1988). Putnam observed that democratic countries sometimes implemented policies that were the product of not only domestic, intranational, negotiations, but also external, international negotiations, often carried out through an international organization. The overlap of domestic and international concerns create what Putnam termed a win-set, an area of agreement in which a policy had an excellent chance of being accepted on both levels. Other scholars have built on Putnam's observations, adding new wrinkles. Mandelbaum (1996) notes that when Poland joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), its military leaders wanted protection from a neighbor that was historically an aggressor, Russia. Polish civilian leaders, on the other hand, sought protection not only from Russia, but also from the Polish military. One of the criteria for NATO membership is that a country must be governed by elected representatives, not the military. By joining NATO, Poland helped to ensure that the country would remain democratic following decades of communist rule. Civilian leaders used the lock-in effects of NATO membership to protect the country from a potential military dictatorship, cementing post-communist gains.


Libraries can, should, and do use consortia in these ways.

• Benchmarking: A consortium creates a price floor, enforcing minimum standards for membership. If most consortium partners have a resource, this exerts pressure to obtain it on a member who does not have it. In addition, consortia can be made up of similar institutions in an geographic area; this can be a boon for academic libraries because as the institutions compete for students, the libraries may benefit from something like a resource arms race, albeit a modest one given many budgets. On a more pessimistic note, it may be the case that budget cuts are mitigated by consortia membership, to which one can append the dreaded "more study is necessary." 

• Appeal policy decisions: While it is rare for a consortium to override a policy decision made at a library, a consortium can lobby for a course of action counter to that policy decision. Indeed, library staff who are stymied within their library may appeal to a consortium. For example, a university with strict policies on loaning audio-visual (AV) material has to relax its policies within a consortium. This creates tension between Access Services and the AV departments. Access Services uses a consortium to ensure that the AV department maintains the same standards on access within the university as well as the consortium community.

The consortia is the "good cop" in these scenarios, which puts naysaying local administrators on the defensive, particularly vis-a-vis their colleagues at other consortial institutions.


There are other benefits to consortia. Members share resources, which may eliminate the need for multiple copies of a physical item, depending on how it is used. Members can negotiate as a group with publishers and other vendors, obtaining resources at less cost than each library would incur on its own. Consortia are able to generate data which is useful for collection development. If a library makes requests in a certain call number range, patterns may emerge that point library staff towards groups of resources that are locally underrepresented. Consortia are also useful for networking.


Associations are less binding, but they allow for similar library behavior.

• Appeal and differ to authority: Implementing an information literacy program at a school can be a daunting task in which library staff encroach on territory, the classroom, that is often the province of traditional, for lack of a better word, faculty. The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) website has a wealth of information on information literacy, including standards, collaborative tools, and talking points, many of which are designed for librarians to engage other campus actors. These actors may differ to the authority of the ACRL on this issue. 

However, consortia and associations have downsides. Their creation, implementation, and governance take staff away from other tasks; create further bureaucracy; and, like many institutions, take on a life of their own, which may include codifying and reifying the power structures in place at the time of the consortium's founding.


On balance, the advantages of consortia appear to outweigh the disadvantages, and because of that many libraries are members. The LIS Wiki site has not been updated in almost a year, but contains links to many consortia and associations, reflecting their popularity. 


Works Cited: 


Putnam, R. (1988). Diplomacy and domestic politics: The logic of two-level games. International Organization. 42(3): 427-460.
Mandelbaum, M. (1996). The dawn of peace in Europe. New York: Twenty-First Century Fund. 

Is Information Snobby? Is Craft Beer?

To me, the statement "I care about my library members but I don't care about what they read" sounds like cognative dissonance.
— Andy Woodworth (@wawoodworth) May 19, 2012

The library where I work doesn't do a lot of reader's advisory; we're an academic library with a very limited selection of books that, on average, people read for pleasure instead of scholarship. But I'm hesitant to label this a "public library issue," and move along. Librarians, you should care what gets read. But first, some background, via Andy Woodworth's blog, Agnostic, Maybe. Be sure to check out the comments on those posts; there's a spirited back and forth.

I wrote this in 2008:

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 students 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.

Now, we can have an argument about whether or not Twilight is information, and whether or not it contributes at all to civil society. Here's one pro: Benedict Anderson defines nationalism as an "imagined community" in which people who will never meet engage in the same thoughts and same activities and, knowing this, develop feelings of affection and affiliation. In Anderson's argument, these communities are spread and fostered, in large part, based on the rise of the printing press, which disseminates information, including novels, at speeds previously unknown and unheard of. Anderson draws no distinctions, at least in the initial outlay of this argument, between high and low culture, speaking only to "print-capitalism." While the internet has played a role in fragmenting popular culture, take a gander at the Twilight book sales, and you'll see that commonalities are alive and well in the twenty-first century.

I'm comfortable in a world in which all texts are valid, though I'm also comfortable saying some are more valid than others. If Twilight is what gets you reading, then I'm okay with that, because I think of popular fiction as a gateway to something more. Is that snobbish? Maybe. I'm also comfortable being called that name. I have thick skin, and I suppose if the shoe fits....

The concept of something pop, something low or middlebrow as a gateway to something more, something subjectively better, is widely applicable. It's getting warm out, so in particular, wheat beers and witbiers. InBev, which owns Budweiser, makes a wheat beer called Shock Top. You've probably seen it. Miller Coors has Blue Moon. You've definitely seen it. These are gateway beers. They are conscious attempts by large companies to make a beer that is "like" craft. They are not. No matter, though, because these are the beers that will get you into craft beer, such as Allagash White. Who will do this? A good bartender, or, because we are nothing without titles, a beer director, or a friend whose opinion you respect. Such a person will see you with a Blue Moon or Shock Top, and recommend the next level up. I feel comfortable saying that nobody in the history of the world, ever, who has had Allagash White and Blue Moon prefers the latter. And so Blue Moon and its ilk are useful idiots. Yes, there is a teleology here.

And so it is with information. Some information is craft, some is not. Information is better than no information, and craft information is the best information of all. It is my hope that librarians practice craft information to the extent possible at their workplaces and in their lives.

(The Beer of) Small States in World Markets

In 1985, Cornell political scientist Peter Katzenstein wrote a book with an interesting argument. Katzenstein posited that small states, size referring to a measurement of a domestic economy, need open borders for trade due to small domestic markets and economies. One way to get open borders is to promote free trade. Of course, free trade also means that other countries, and their companies, will have access to the domestic markets of the smaller states, and odds are good, thanks to comparative advantage, that other states and their companies will be able to produce some goods and services more efficiently than the smaller states and their companies. To wit, a large company in a large country makes widgets more efficiently than a company in the smaller country. If these countries trade freely, the company in the smaller country may not survive. The larger company from the larger country will put it out of business. Katzenstein's central argument is that, given this, smaller states need robust social welfare safety nets, which commonly include robust unemployment benefits, health care, and free or low cost education, among others. Safety nets are needed because free trade under capitalism is inherently destabilizing. However, safety nets are expensive, which require not only high taxes, but also a grand bargain between labor, the state, and companies, with levels of economic cooperation and coordination that much of this audience (e.g., Americans) is not used to and suspicious of. This political and economic arrangement is called democratic corporatism, and if the above sounds somewhat familiar, it is because I have just described the oft-maligned social democracies of Europe; in particular, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the Scandinavian countries. And somehow, this brings us to craft beer.


If you have been following the rise of craft beer, you may have noticed an increasing international bent to tap and bottle lists, from breweries like Nogne O (Norway), Mikkeller (Denmark), De Molen (The Netherlands), and Baladin (Italy), among others. These breweries have created what Joe Stange terms a "postmodern, transnational craft beer scene," and they've done it in large part thanks to the principles that Katzenstein has written about. These, and other, breweries make beer for export markets, often collaborating with brewers from the US (Stillwater fits into this category as well), which is where the "trans-" suffix comes from. In order to get their beers noticed abroad, these brewers need to stand out, and by and large they have done so by making some unusual beers, with a healthy disrespect for traditional beer styles, or at least the styles dominant in the small domestic market.


For example, in 2009 Nogne O shipped 65% of its 8,000 barrels of beer to markets outside Norway, across twenty countries. In Washington, DC one can find a bottle of Nogne O for about $10. That same bottle will cost upwards of $20 in Norway, where it is made (source). Nogne O's founders explicitly looked to the US for guidance on craft beer trends, and looked down on what was available in Norway. It seems that Norwegians noticed good beer leaving their shores, because in 2011 only 25% of Nogne O's output was exported, a dramatic decrease (same source).



To make beer for export one must cater to the American beer geek, who, in turn, has rewarded these breweries. Danish brewery Mikkeller is perhaps most well-known for a coffee-infused stout, in which the coffee beans used first passed through the digestive system of a civet, a southeast Asian cat-like creature. In 2008, Ratebeer's predominantly American users ranked Belgium's de Struise, famed for a series of barrel-aged stouts, as the top brewery in the world.
The rejections of adjunct-addled domestic lagers and absences of strong craft brewing traditions have allowed for a robust culture of experimentation in many of these states. Knowing that one will not move a large amount of beer domestically has been a boon to brewers in countries like Italy, where Birra Del Borgo cannot sell many bottles of Dodici 25, a barleywine-style ale scented with orange peels, to a populace weened on wine and amaro.


Belgium, with a rich, perhaps the richest, tradition of brewing, and ethnic cleavages between French- and Dutch-speaking populations that have lead to something like ethnic democratic corporatism, albeit with limited success, is not exempt from this discussion, as newer breweries like de Struise and Alvinne make beer for the US market, perhaps at the expense of a sense of place, of terroir. "There are a couple brewers in Belgium who are making beer for Americans. We’re interested in Belgium, we’re interested in their traditions," [importer Don] Feinberg says. "There are certain flavors that are true to a type of culture, and if you don’t believe that, you’re one step away from making soda."

Great beers in any style can now be made in any place. But to the extent that they don’t come from their own soils and land and brewed with love for their own people, they can only offer flavor plus the facsimile of a cultural experience. And while there is a lot of talk about an emerging global culture, I don’t know what it tastes like. I want to have as real a relationship as I can with as real a culture. And I will continue to seek out and fight for the beers of Terroir that represent cultures I do know, understand and love (source). 

Yet as the Nogne O example above shows, we may be moving past this discussion of place. Norwegians who want good beer now have more Nogne O on the shelves. As Stan Hieronymus has pointed out, and apologies while I hunt for his exact words, with some time a De Molen saison may impart a sense of place on the person drinking it, creating a Dutch saison as opposed to copying a Belgian one.


The likely audience of this post, much like the beers discussed above, is American. Beer is being made for us. Good beer, at that. Be flattered, as the tastes of the American beer geek are exported as well. We live in interesting times.


Civet pic via Wikipedia.
Katzentstein's book cover from Google Books, linked above.

On Payola and Libertarianism, On Beer and the End User

Last month, I wrote a blog post for DCBeer on payola on the DC beer market. It was well-received, with thousands of page views and kudos, and I'm thankful that many people read it. One of those people is the man behind Beer in Baltimore, who writes this

In a general philosophical sense, the concept of currying favor with retailers of your product via such "payola" is no different from a mega-retailer offering you a discount-club card membership, or Amazon's retailers offering free shipping, or McDonald's offering a toy with a Happy Meal, or even a bar offering a Happy Hour or Ladies' Night.  Or even the occasional complementary drink from a bartender at your regular pub.  The above practices, in a sense, are just as unethical and immoral as the practices being discussed in the article in DCBeer.  The fact that such "payola" is downright prevalent in the alcohol business bespeaks much more the profit margins and revenues involved in the alcohol business and the return on marketing from such practices (occasionally qualifying for the term "obscene").

I disagree. I am the "end user" of beer. I am also the end user of a discount-club card membership, hypothetically. In order for the above analogy to work, the retailer of beer would have to be the end user. But retailers are not. I am. You are, maybe. Oh, and that discount-club card membership, it's not free. It may not cost you any money, but it will cost you some privacy. 

Now we will add some more nuance.

They [both brewing companies and grocery stores] want your trade.  They're offering you incentives to do business with them.  You don't have to take them.  But you'd be a fool not to take advantage of such offers, if they are of use to you.  (As opposed to, say, the Turnip Twaddler that comes with the Ronco Tomato Musher.)

So one is illegal, the other is not, and there is an equality of opportunity here in that anyone may sign up for a discount-club card, and that even a craft brewer has the right to "sellout," to become popular and play with the big boys, Budweiser and MillerCoors. However, let's play the libertarian thought experiment and eliminate the government, or at least get it to the size where it can be drowned in a bathtub. Here, the equality of opportunity to sellout wouldn't matter. Rather, the larger brewing companies would simply "capture" the state, and use state apparati for their own purposes. To me, this is a central flaw in libertarian thought: the state won't wither away, it will be propped up and used by those who seek to use its power, or vestiges of power. Don't believe me? 

One more thing, of the craft brewing companies he mentions by name in his write-up, at least one of them was implicated by a distributor I spoke to when researching the DCBeer article.