Stepping Up: Shaping the Future of the Field

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Stepping Up Shaping the Future of the Field
ALISE 2005 Boundary Crossings LIS Education in
a Global Context

• John Leslie King

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Thanks To

• Toni, Fiona, Pru, Deanna
• Various deans and directors

Joan Durrance Margaret Hedstrom Karen
Markey Olivia Frost John Seeley Brown Dan
Atkins Leigh Estabrook Joanne Marshall
Nancy Pearl John Unsworth Dorothy Gregor Cliff
Lynch Anno Saxenian Chris Borgman Bill
Gosling Julia Gelfand
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Respek
Civility Courteous behavior, politeness, formal
or perfunctory regard sufficiently observing or
befitting accepted social usages not rude. From
the Latin civis, or citizen. Respect To feel
or show deferential regard for to esteem to
relate or refer to concern. From the Latin
respectus, past participle of respicere, to look
back at, to regard.
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Three Themes

• Confidence
• Opportunity
• Assertion

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The Crisis Thang

• The anxiety discourse
• Not new
• Goes back a century
• Not unique to LIS
• Computer science and information systems
• There are some common signatures
• Horizontal violence
• Approach/avoidance conflicts over metrics

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Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook
Handbook 2002 data, median salaries of salaried
workers only
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Assorted Bummers

• Importance to the world ? -- recognition ?
• Unstable professional frontier (e.g., funding)
• Low Respect (low salaries, burdens of a feminized
  profession, academic weakness)
• Practitioners vs. Academics
• The L-Schools vs. the I-Schools

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Crisis of Confidence

• The challenges are real!
• But so what? Thats why this field exists.
• And what are we doing about it?
• Fighting over names
• Looking for salvation in the past
• Mistaking entitlement for principle
• Were wrapped around the axle

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The library.. Gives nothing for nothing
Helps only those that help themselves Does not
sap the foundation of independence Does not
pauperize Stretches a hand to the aspiring
Places a ladder upon which they can only ascend
by doing the climbing themselves This is not
charity This is not philanthropy This is the
people themselves helping themselves.
Andrew Carnegie, 1889
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As a general rule, institutions fail because of
overzealous adherence to their own first
principles.
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Some First Principles

• Access
• Collaboration
• Diversity
• Education
• Intellectual Freedom
• Preservation
• Privacy
• Professionalism
• Public Good
• Service

• Wisdom
• Compassion
• Knowledge
• Freedom
• Justice
• Empowerment
• Prosperity
• Beauty
• Innovation
• Courage

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Whats Changed in 115 Years?

• Lots of technological change
• Public libraries as we know them today
• Academic library education programs
• Literacy from 90 to 99 for whites from 53 to
  98 for people of color
• Universal suffrage and civil rights reform
• And lest we forget what Carnegie was thinking

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Rectangularization of Mortality (Fries, 1980)
Life Span 1.5 Working life 2 Working
population 4 Productivity 4.5 Capital
investment 10 Personal income 10 (inflation
adjusted)
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Hard work

Critical Infrastructure
Knowhow
Hard work

Cultural Institutions
Knowhow
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We Won!
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Game Over?

• The list of challenges remains long
• 1-2 billion people are illiterate
• 1-2 billion people are poverty-stricken
• 2-3 billion live without political freedom
• The Age of Enterprise continues
• 1 billion with internet access (103 in 10yrs)
• 2-3 billion with telephony (104 in 10 years)
• Digital access to content is accelerating

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Where We Are Now

• Our work is not yet done
• We are wasting too much energy arguing
• The challenge are worthy of us
• A distant mirror and great fortune

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• 756 -- Umayyad Dynasty of Al Andalus
• Library at Toledo 9th-11th cent. held ancient
  Greek/Arab works philosophy, math, astronomy,
  rhetoric, science, medicine
• 1085 -- Fall of Toledo to Christian forces of
  Alphonso VI
• 1105-1490 translations into Latin led the
  Renaissance

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• 1436 Gutenberg builds press
• 1455 42 Line Bible printed
• 1462 Attack on Mainz printers
• 1517 Luthers 95 Theses
• 1521 Diet of Worms
• 1545 Council of Trent
• 1560 European depository laws
• 1660 The Royal Society founded
• 1662 Bodelian Library
• 1683 Ashmolean Museum
• 1620 Bacons New Organon
• 1637 Descartes Meditations
• 1687 Newtons Principia Mathematica

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Access

• Library at Toledo knowledge was there, but
  inaccessible access changed the world
• Print helped Luthers disintermediation move
  beyond salvation to human purpose
• Carnegies aphorism and the 115 years since
• Access to knowledge and empowerment -- isnt this
  what we are here for?

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Its All About Opportunity

• Global illiteracy and poverty can be licked
• How big did the challenge seem in 1889?
• Technology enables, but we must learn how
• Weve always had to figure it out as we go.
• Learning-by-doing is the only road forward.

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Time to Assert Ourselves

• A crisis of confidence is a waste of time
• The opportunity has never been greater
• We must step up to the challenges we face
• We have already started -- thats why people are
  worried!
• The revolution is underway
• Some suggestions

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The Retirement Crisis

• Simple economics.

Bring it on! We kill two birds with one stone.
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The Library Funding Crisis

• Whats broken -- Them or It?
• Cultural institution or critical infrastructure?
• The Public Goods problematic
• Multiple challenges, multiple models
• We should be the research leaders in this
• Productivity and Baumols Disease
• Examples

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The Core Curriculum Crisis

• What wont work accreditation mandates
• The ecology of accreditation structures
• Transformation of accreditation practices
• Embrace experimentation
• When you dont know what to do, do lots of
  things.

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The L-School vs. I-School Crisis

• Whats in a name? A language game
• KALIPER showed whats really going on
• Profligate vs. prophetic
• Life in Pasteurs Quadrant

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High
Pasteur
Bohr
Fundamental Knowledge
Edison
Low
High
Practical Application
Donald Stokes Pasteurs Quadrant Basic Science
and Technological Innovation. Washington
Brookings Institution Press, 1997
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Respek

• An exercise in opinion, nothing more
• Diversity in thought and action
• We create our future, though not exactly as we
  please.
• Risky business -- high-risk/high-return.
• Would we have it any other way?

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