Guest post by Gary Hartzell
Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 02:41PM I left my hotel room in Bangkok exactly 24 hours ago and am now happily sitting in the Minneapolis airport waiting for my shuttle back to Mankato. Although thanks to Tylenol PM I slept about 20 of the past 24 hours, I am feeling fuzzy-headed. So I was delighted to get Gary Hartzell's permission to elevate his comments to The Essential Question to a "guest post."
Gary is a good friend and author of a book every librarian must read - Building Influence for the School Librarian. As a former school principal, Gary brings a much needed objective view to our work, value and strategies for advocacy. (He is also a great speaker and workshop presenter, despite being a fellow old white guy.)
Anyway, here is Gary's message:
In today’s electronic environment and damaged economy, the value of libraries per se is going to be questioned right along with questions about whether you can defend continuing to spend money on print as opposed to electronic resources. While the questions are valid, it too often seems that the one asking already has an answer – and the questions really are little more than disguised assaults on you and your program:
If that is, indeed, the case, then it seems to me that librarians need to respond vigorously, even aggressively. It’s not enough to say, “Well, you’re wrong” – or even to say “Well, you’re wrong and here’s why.” A passive response feeds into their stereotypical images of libraries and librarians. Display your expertise - politely and respectfully, but also relentlessly and mercilessly. Remember what Shakespeare had Richard III say about himself: “I can smile – and I can murder while I smile.” Bombard your adversaries with fact and demand that they respond with the same.
Never accept opinion without evidence, especially if you are challenged in public. Make your statement and then close with a question back to them. Don’t defend your library; make them defend the Internet. Put your antagonists on the defensive and make them think twice about ever attacking you again, especially in any kind of public forum.
You already know the standard and valid arguments regarding library value (if you need more or a refresher, I’m sure the ALA, the AASL, and the IASL will be happy to offer them to you), so there is no need to recite those here – especially the arguments regarding the untrustworthiness of so many Internet “sources”. Instead, let me add two other ideas that may be helpful. One has to do with the nature of copyright and the other with the nature of electronic materials.
First, copyright. A common line of attack is to characterize print materials as a thing of the past. Challenge this immediately. Ask what evidence they have that print is in decline -- then turn on them when they can’t produce it. Tell them that print isn’t dead, dying, or even ill. Even with the economic down turn, book sales in the United States stood at $24.3 in 2008. British publishers reported that 236.9 million books were sold last year in the UK at a total value of £1.773 billion. You can argue the new Kindle as a variation on print delivery, bringing books in a more convenient and portable form perhaps, but still bringing books. And that brings us to the copyright argument for libraries.
Ask library critics and Internet advocates outright what they know about copyright. It’s not likely to be much. Their ignorance is one of the main forces undercutting their Internet supremacy theory. Hitting at this is a useful approach in validating library value. You can use some of the fascinating arguments advanced by Thomas Mann at the Library of Congress to build a thought provoking case (“The Importance of Books, Free Access, and Libraries as Places and the Dangerous Inadequacy of the of the Information Science Paradigm,” Journal of Academic Librarianship, vol. 27, no. 4, July 2001, pp. 268-281). It is naïve, he says, to think that intellectual property laws are going to disappear or that human nature will outgrow the profit motive in the next century. If a profit is to be derived from copyrighted materials on the Internet, providers must limit who has access. Copyright restrictions mean that free access to everything produced probably will never come to the Internet. Libraries, on the other hand, freely make copyrighted material available in their print resources and can make copyrighted electronic materials available through their digital collections and database subscriptions.
Second, the nature of electronic resources even when they are trustworthy. Mann makes a powerful point that speaks to our educational goals. Exclusive use of electronic sources, he says, actually may undercut students’ ability to understand lengthy works. “Doing keyword searches … for particular passages is simply not the same as the much more important work of actually reading and absorbing their intellectual content as connected wholes.” Today’s students, you can argue as he does, certainly are comfortable with computers, but that’s not the same as saying that they’re comfortable reading and absorbing long works on a screen. The majority of the time, Mann argues, youngsters interact with screen displays that don’t require long attention spans and require less rather than more verbal interpretative skills. Because we want students to move from simple information access skills to knowledge development and application to understanding to wisdom, technology that fosters short attention spans is both dangerous and counterproductive. “Here is the important point,” Mann contends, “and there is no getting around it: If the higher levels of knowledge and understanding are going to be grasped, they require greater attention spans than do the lower levels of data and information.”
This tends toward a conclusion that libraries are vital to both education and the national intellectual life. Again, there isn’t room here to list the research studies that demonstrate the value of a balanced collection, and particularly the value of print materials – but you can easily find them through your own or a nearby university library’s subscription databases, and in back issues of publications like Library Media Connection, School Library Journal, Teacher-Librarian, and Emergency Librarian.
Be careful, though. These publications carry articles that are mixes of opinion and experience description, along with some articles that are research-based. While these are valuable for practice, they’re considerably less valuable for argumentation. It’s important that you separate research from opinion. You want to challenge your critics with factual evidence, not with another librarian’s opinion.
The research-based articles in these publications will have bibliographies that will lead you back to the original research reports. Track down those reports and use them in crafting your arguments. Of course, you’ll need to find more and different, but these bibliographies provide a running start. Once you’re familiar with the kinds of research journals that carry articles on topics likely to become contentious in your school or district, you can launch your search directly into those print and on-line publications.
Do your homework in advance. Put a list of supportive research article citations in your pocket calendar, PDA, Blackberry, or other device so they’re always handy. But also memorize at least a half-dozen so you can speak without hesitation. When you’re done, turn and ask your critics to cite specific evidence of electronic superiority, especially Internet superiority, in fostering student achievement. They won’t be able to do it.
