Eat-Your-Vegetables librarianship alive and well

I recently attended the NASIG annual conference.  As is often the case at library conferences, I attended a pleasing variety of moderately informative programs.  But this year, two rather unusual things happened:

1. I attended a lively informal discussion of scholarly communication
2. I attended a program that made me deeply, viscerally angry

#1 was entirely refreshing.  Everybody in the room participated, freely expressed their hopes and fears about libraries’ ability to provide relevant support for the scholarly enterprise, and altogether ignored the self-archiving/open access cant that sometimes comes to dominate such discussions.  I’m by no means against open access, but I don’t believe the ability to self-archive published materials is the most compelling basis for an institutional repository.  To my delight, we spent the hour discussing everything BUT preprints.

I have some doubts about Library 2.0 and don’t consider myself a blog person, but #2  made me want to leave the profession and slam the door behind me.  The program in question (“Column People”) addressed the future of traditional published columns now that there are over 80 million blogs.  The presentation was replete with the usual snide putdowns directed at blogs and bloggers (they’re trivial, the writing isn’t polished, etc.) and cited as evidence this post.  I was indignant on Jane’s behalf, and also miffed that the presenters were so fixated on the medium that they ignored the message: our communication customs force us to work hard instead of smart.  Speaking of working smarter, I suggested that neither a blog nor a column will retain an audience for long without a feed or other alerting service attached, whereupon the presenter accused me of passivity (I prefer “efficiency,” but whatever).  I don’t consider myself a passive reader – I’ll perform a thorough lit review when the situation requires it – but columns aren’t research articles.  A sufficient number of informed and informative opinions come equipped with feeds that I feel no pressing need to seek out those that don’t.

Personal indignation aside, the exchange betrayed some toxic beliefs about user complacency that have broader implications for the profession.  There is no inherent virtue in painstakingly seeking out information that could just as easily be delivered (isn’t this the whole point of serial publications?), but we reflexively characterize users’ desire to have good information delivered to them as laziness or passivity.  This emphasis of process over product is one reason we have been marginalized in the information marketplace.  Sure there are some lazy users, but the sooner this profession gets over its misguided contempt for efficient information gathering that capitalizes on available technology, the sooner we can provide tools and services that really reach our users.