Our Enduring Values: Librarianship in the 21st Century

The main theme of this book is that the impact of technology is, or should be, to enhance libraries, not replace them; there are enduring values that must be upheld. The author does not help his case in the early pages by listing several factors that he claims to have a greater impact than technology, ignoring the fact that several of them – e.g. globalisation, the advent of global news companies, even the rise in global terrorism – are enabled or greatly accelerated by technology. He is of course no Luddite: he is fully aware of the advantages electronic technology can bring to library services. But he is an incrementalist and evolutionist, not a revolutionary. This book is his credo.

After reviewing four other authors’ statements of values, Gorman offers his own list: stewardship, service, intellectual freedom, rationalism, literacy and learning, equity of access to recorded knowledge and information, privacy and democracy. After a chapter on “The library as place”, he then examines his values in turn, a chapter to each. Each one begins with a discussion first of the meaning of the concept, then of the relationship between it and libraries. The values are, it should be noted, different in kind: libraries should practise stewardship, service and equity of access, behave rationally, contribute to literacy and democracy (which they should also practise) and observe privacy. Most of them are an expression in library terms of values that are those of liberal democracy, not necessarily of a capitalist society; equity of access, for example, is not far from equalisation of access, although Gorman distinguishes between them (Schement (2001) offers an excellent discussion of this issue). I would question placing privacy as a value on the same level as the rest.

The least strong chapter (there are no really weak ones) seems to me that on “rationalism” (since this is largely a philosophical term, “rationality” might be a better term). His statement that “reason and rationality are not the foes of faith” is disputable; it is hardly rational to believe something for which there is no evidence. More to the point, his belief that “librarianship is a supremely rational profession” seems to me to be just such a statement of faith; it ought to be based on reason and be practised rationally, but that is true of any organisation except those that pride themselves on their rejection of reason, though it is more honoured in the principle than in the practice. His principles of good organisations are wholly in line with modern managerial thinking – but managerial thinking is prone to change from decade to decade, often more quickly. In any case, libraries are not independent bodies, as he notes elsewhere, and it is not easy to be a rational servant of an irrational master (as he also points out elsewhere, it is often most rational to adapt to circumstances in the interests of the longer term).

Gorman does not neglect his usual targets; they include the state of LIS education in the USA, the false prophets of the electronic information future, the “library without walls” and frequently the American Library Association. His nightmare vision of a future in which virtual libraries have taken over (pp. 36ff.) is meant to shock, and does. He might have developed his suggestion (pp. 38‐9) that future electronic journal economics could lead to fragmentation – what I have called “infobricks”, as opposed to “infohouses” (Line, 1986). But he is an optimist, since he believes that the nightmare vision is just that – a nightmare, which will not happen, because people will not allow it to (“humanity is, in the end, both practical and realistic” (p. 40)).

Maybe he is too optimistic about the future of libraries. I hardly ever use libraries of any kind, because I do not need to. By use of my own modest collection, judicious searching of the Web and access to some key electronic journals, I can carry out what research I want to reasonably well. For recreation, I buy novels and much non‐fiction in paperback, because paperbacks are cheap and light and easy to carry around and they don’t have to be returned to libraries. I am not a typical public library user (I am not a public library user at all), but I am sure many others share the same information habits, including most scientific researchers (Line, 2001). Gorman does not explain what the library can and should do for such as us; he merely states that electronic journals unsupported financially by hard copy versions are not economically viable, implying that they may not be with us for long. This is improbable, and does not answer my question.

Some of the text has a US bias – especially the passages relating to library education and the chapter on “Intellectual freedom”, where also his analysis is less detailed and profound than that in a recent paper by Sturges (2001). His occasional excursions into philosophy are a little naïve at times. But these are relatively small points. There is a lot of common sense in the book, and a lot of sense that is less common. There are also some good ideas: one set of examples can be found in the chapter on “The library as place”, setting out ways of, for example, accommodating the disabled user and providing for dual use (i.e. shared academic/public libraries, housing community auditoria etc.).

Many of the book’s points will be familiar to those who have thought much about the issues, though it is useful to have them stated. Some however are not so obvious: for example, the possibility that the Web culture, with its instability, impermanence and ephemerality, could be a regression to the script culture after 500‐plus years of the print culture; and the fact that selection from the universe of material potentially available has been done, however imperfectly, by publishers.

Occasionally Gorman is plain wrong (as opposed to controversial). Journals as a means of scholarly communication date from the seventeenth century, not the eighteenth (p. 38). And the statements (pp. 47 and 82) that public libraries were created for the working class and benefited them more than other classes, widely though they are believed, are not really true; much of the nineteenth‐century working class was illiterate, and the middle classes had a strong interest in promoting and using public libraries – their borrowings were grossly disproportionate to their numbers (Black, 2000). Things have not changed much: with 20‐25 per cent functional illiteracy in both the USA and the UK, overwhelmingly concentrated in the “working class”, the public library depends on the middle classes for most of its use and even more of its support. These facts somewhat weaken Gorman’s arguments on literacy and learning and on equity of access. I doubt too that “libraries are children of the enlightenment” (p. 103), since major libraries, some open to the public, existed long before that.

The book is strongly personal: it is dotted with “I”s – and none the worse for that. Gorman’s heart is very much in the right place – which appears to be on his sleeve (if I may mix my metaphors). He effectively invites the reader to agree or disagree with his more dogmatically expressed views; and I am sure that he would be disappointed if any reader agreed with all he says. (He would certainly agree with Dr Johnson: “I dogmatise and am contradicted; and in this conflict of opinions and sentiments I find delight”.) In this spirit, one of his statements that I take issue with is that Ranganathan is “by common consent the greatest figure of librarianship in the twentieth century” (p. 18). Well, you can count me out of the consensus, Michael. But for his Five Laws, he would surely have been forgotten long before now, except by those few unfortunate librarians in India struggling to make his unusable Colon classification work. As for the laws themselves, 1 (“books are for use”) and 5 (“the library is a growing organism”) are more or less obvious, while 2 and 3 are oddly worded, suggesting that every reader needs only one book and vice versa. The third – “save the time of the reader” – is the most sensible, and it is consistently broken by most writers on librarianship (indeed, by most writers on most subjects).

Gorman’s book cannot be accused of wasting the time of the reader. His credo/polemic is written clearly and concisely. As a generally well argued statement of values, it should be read by both proponents and opponents of a hypothetical brave new information world. The latter need to read it more than the former; I wish I could think that they are as likely to do so.