Littera scripta manet.
—Horace.1
“Steward” is a word that derives from two Old English words, stig (“house”) and weard (“warden”)—that is, someone with responsibility for ensuring the safety and orderly functioning of a house or, by extension, any small community. It is still found in that narrow meaning. Its wider, metaphorical meaning goes back—at least—to the King James Bible and refers to someone or some entity who preserves the value of something and ensures that future generations enjoy the legacy that comes to them with an equal or enhanced value as a result of that stewardship.2 Someone who inherits an estate and improves it during the period she is a guardian before giving it to inheritors can fairly be said to have exercised stewardship.
Stewardship in the library context has three components:
• the preservation of the human record to ensure that future generations know what we know
• the care and nurture of education for librarianship so that we pass on our best professional values and practices
• the care and maintenance of our libraries so that we earn the respect of our communities
The task of the librarian, then, is to rescue the past for the enlightenment of the present, to preserve the past not for its own sake or for the curiosity of the antiquarian, but for the meaning it has for today and tomorrow.3
The inheritance of which we are stewards is no less than the complete cultural and historical legacy of the records of humankind—the “human record.” The value of stewardship is one of our most important duties and burdens—one that we must honor if we are to carry out our mission of preserving the human record and transmitting it to future generations. It is interesting to see how infrequently the question of preserving recorded knowledge and information in digital form is raised during discussions of the future of libraries. If raised, the question is usually dismissed as something that technology and cooperative action will solve, as if by magic and at some yet to be determined time. Somehow, it seems that historic role of libraries is being ignored, simply because all-digital enthusiasts dare not face up to the reality of the immense practical and technological problems posed by digital archives.
Librarians and archivists (whom I regard as members of the same church, if often in schism) have a unique role in preserving and transmitting the records of humankind on behalf of future generations. I do not use the word “unique” lightly. Many of our values and missions are shared with other groups and interests, but we alone are dedicated to the preservation of recorded knowledge and information—the human record. Publishers, booksellers, teachers, researchers, museum keepers are among the people who benefit directly from the fact that the records of the past are available to them, but only librarians and archivists are engaged in the wholesale preservation of those records. If a substantial amount of the world’s recorded knowledge and information were to be available in digital form—and only in digital form—we would be facing a crisis in the preservation of the human record that would dwarf anything that we have seen since the dawn of the age of printing. It is imperative that librarians work together to produce a grand plan for future stewardship that contains practical and cost-effective means of ensuring that future generations are able to know what we know.
Some say that the age of print will, at some time in the future, yield to an all-digital age. In contemplating that possibility, it is instructive to look at the transition to the age of print from the age that preceded it—the age of script. Thomas Jefferson wrote:
How many of the precious works of antiquity were lost while they existed only in manuscript? Has there ever been one lost since the art of printing has rendered it practicable to multiply and disperse copies? This leads us then to the only means of preserving those remains of our laws . . . that is, a multiplication of printed copies.4
In her magisterial work on the transformational effect of printing, Elizabeth Eisenstein discusses three attributes of the printed book that distinguished it sharply from the manuscript or, to use her terms, distinguish the print culture from the script culture. They are standardization, dissemination, and fixity. In many ways, her analysis of the script culture closely parallels a modern analysis of what I will call, for the sake of symmetry, the digital culture. This is especially true in the case of fixity. Manuscripts of the same “work” differed greatly one from the other to the same degree that various versions of e-texts differ from other versions—for the same reason (each copyist introduced change and error) and with the same deleterious effect. It is tempting to see the history of human communication as one of constant progress. Humankind has advanced from no recorded communication in prehistorical days through a variety of media, from clay tablets and stone to paper and digital media, each medium being more extensive and less durable than its predecessor. Because of the increasing numbers of communications made possible by digital technology, and because we retain the older media for the sake of their durability (using, for example, stone for memorials and vellum for important historical documents), it is tempting to buy the “onward and upward” theory. Could it be that the story is not one of progress? Could it be that future historians of communication (if there be any such) might look back on the five-hundred-plus-year period in Western history that began with Gutenberg and ended (on some as yet undetermined date) with the “triumph” of digital technology as an aberration—an island of fixity and transmission of the human record arising from the swamp of the age of script and declining into the digital swamp? Adrian Johns ties print to such concepts as “veracity” and “civility.”5 The point is that the stability of print and the standardization of publishing created an intellectual climate in which there is a bond of trust between the author, publisher, and reader. That implicit contract has the following parts:
• A book published by a reputable publisher is what it says it is.
• Reputable publishers publish books that can be trusted.
• A book by a reputable author contains facts that have been verified to the best of the author’s, editor’s, and publisher’s ability.
• A book by a reputable author contains opinions and interpretations that are the author’s or are clearly labeled as the opinions or interpretations of others.
• Citations, sources, and the rest of the scholarly apparatus in a book published by a reputable publisher clearly indicate the origins of the facts and opinions contained in that book.
• Each manifestation of a clearly labeled edition of a text is identical to all other manifestations of that edition.
Not a single one of those elements of the unwritten contract between publishers, authors, and readers is guaranteed to be present in the digital world of today and the foreseeable future. Take, for example, a “source” such as Wikipedia. It lacks all the characteristics of authenticity, fixity, and the rest that can forge a bond of trust with the user. There is nothing to stop anyone from gaining access to many digital resources and changing them to his heart’s delight before disseminating them as something they are not. That is the heart of the dilemma faced by authors and readers in a digital world devoid of fixity, standardization, and verifiable veracity.
How, then, should we exercise stewardship over the records of humanity? The simple answer, and the truest, is that we should do everything we can to preserve significant recorded knowledge and information in such a manner that it is available in an authentic and fixed form not just to the next generation—or even the next few generations—but for the indefinite future. The key word in the foregoing sentence is “significant.” One of the ironies of the present predicament in preservation is that we have solved the issue without having to make the kind of value judgment that “significant” implies. It is beyond question that the best—indeed, the only proven—way to preserve recorded knowledge and information is to print it on acid-free paper, make many copies, bind those copies well, and distribute them to libraries throughout the world. In that system, it is the publisher or printer or both who make the judgments as to what is published. After that decision to print, publish, and distribute, the rest is automatic. There has never been any better preservation system, and it imposes on libraries only the expense—the very considerable expense—of providing space for all those bound volumes. I will return to the question of value judgments based on assessment of “significance” later, but first will sketch the preservation issues that face each broad medium of communication today.
There are a number of enemies of print on paper, including damp, heat, quality of paper, and inappropriate or poor binding. That being said, there are two massive advantages: (1) the many duplicates of each publication, and (2) the seemingly limitless life of a well-bound text printed on acid-free paper and preserved in favorable conditions.
These are the mirror images of books in that drawings and writings on paper and other media are, by definition, unique, and very likely to have been stored, for at least some of their existence, in less than optimal conditions. I well remember the collection of the manuscripts of a world-famous poet with which I had the pleasure of working. Many drafts of the poems were written on the backs of bill envelopes, and the collection had been stored in various boxes made for holding shoes and comestibles and transported from one venue to another in the course of a peripatetic and adventurous life. Technology—particularly digitization—offers an excellent means of preserving, protecting, and disseminating unique manuscript collections.
Many of the circumstances that apply to printed books apply to these materials, but it should be noted that single maps are more fragile than printed books and that many maps and scores exist in fewer copies than most books.
From wires to wax cylinders to 78s to tapes of various kinds to EPs and LPs to digital tape and compact discs to streamed music held in a “cloud” by commercial concerns—it appears that we have moved through various stages of fragility and potential loss. A cautious person will note that we have no proof of the longevity and durability of any medium of sound recording; the use of each is subject to the future availability of listening devices. My grandmother had a phonograph on which she used to play her 78s of the beloved (by some) Irish tenor Count John McCormack. The sleek CD players of just yesterday are beginning to look as quaint as her phonograph looks and is today. Who knows how comical and peculiar streaming and iPods will look in twenty years’ time?
It is known that at least one-third of the feature films made in the more than one-hundred-year history of moving pictures are gone forever. The situation with shorts, newsreels, and the like is even worse. To quote a New York times journalist:
It’s bad enough, to cite a common estimate, that 90 percent of all American silent films and 50 percent of American sound films made before 1950 appear to have vanished forever. But even the films we have often live on in diminished states. An astonishing number of famous titles—like “King Kong” and “His Girl Friday”—no longer exist as original camera negatives, but survive only as degraded duplicates and damaged release prints. A great deal of important material—not just features but shorts, newsreels, experimental work, industrial films, home movies and so on—remains on unstable nitrate stock, and must be transferred to a more permanent base before the films turn to goo. And once the endangered material has been stabilized (the preservation step), it often must undergo an even more expensive process of restoration to recover its original luster: the removal of dirt and scratches, the replacement of lost footage or missing inter-titles, the cleaning up of degraded soundtracks.6
Many of the films that remain are on a brittle medium, are in colors that have faded, or depend on a process or projector that is no longer available. We have seen a number of video formats fail and others survive, at least for the moment. It is hardly likely that all or any of the currently used video formats (and the machines on which they are played) will be around, say, fifteen years from now. What about all those films that are available to be streamed from the “cloud”? Who will preserve them, especially those that are of little or no commercial value?
Many libraries contain artifacts and artworks that embody or contain recorded knowledge and information. The wise librarian takes guidance from museums, art galleries, and other specialists on the preservation and special treatment of such materials. This is yet another argument for the closer collaboration between libraries and other cultural institutions that I argue for elsewhere in this text.
The story of microfilm, microfiche, microcards, micro-opaques, and the other variations of the medium that first surfaced during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 is salutary. For most of the twentieth century, microforms were perceived as the salvation of libraries in terms of library space and of preservation. One variation—ultrafiche—contained so many images that it was predicted we would all be “carrying the Library of Congress around in a briefcase.” Nice try. Microforms have several drawbacks, chief among them the fact that most library users hate them. There is also the instability of some earlier forms of microfilm; the lack of standardization of reading machines for some microforms (microcards, ultrafiche, and the like); and doubts about the long-term durability of even the established microforms. There are many preservation and digitization of microforms projects (often lacking coordination and complete funding) that seem to offer hope that much of the parts of the human record that are found only in microform will be preserved and transmitted to future generations.7
There are so many intractable issues concerning the preservation of digitized recorded knowledge and information—and so few proposed practical solutions—that it is tempting to do what many digital enthusiasts have done: ignore them. However, it may be worth listing a couple of them here.
• The vast majority of digital information is worthless, of only temporary usefulness, or of very local interest. How is all that chaff to be separated from the worthwhile wheat? And who will undertake that Sisyphean labor?
• The hardware used to gain access to digital resources and the formats in which those resources are kept change radically and frequently. This means that preservation programs must also involve considerations of the hardware needed for access and constant refreshing of the formats.
• Even selective digital archives will be massive. Who is to ensure that governments and organizations will maintain those archives for centuries in the future?
This is a difficult and, in many ways, unanswerable question. As I have pointed out previously, librarians have largely left it to publishers and booksellers and, to a lesser extent, to the law and to library book vendors. After all, it is not librarians who decide what is or is not to be published and what is or is not a legal publication. Add to that our almost universally held belief that library users are entitled to everything that is available and you can readily see us as professionals who are reluctant to employ such criteria as significance and worth. All libraries, great and small, practice some degree of selection; but that selection has been, first, from a known and limited universe—the universe of published items—and, second, mostly confined to questions of suitability for the community that the library serves. In short, most librarians not only do not generally practice selection based on the significance or value of one publication as compared to another, but also actively shy away from such questions for fear of being accused of censorship. There is one shining exception to this pattern: the children’s librarian. I have always admired children’s librarians for many reasons—chief among them being their willingness to distinguish between “good” books and those that are inferior and to make selection choices based on their principles and values. The rest of us are reluctant and, anyway, out of practice. What then are we to do when faced with the Internet and digital resources of all kinds? There are really only three basic strategies, and none of them cause the librarian’s heart to leap with joy.
• We can ignore the question and give as much access to as many resources as we can without regard to value. This, of course, means ceding the preservation issue before we start.
• We can choose the digital resources that we give access to with care and choose the links we make from our bibliographic architecture with care and simply not bother about the rest of the digital swamp.
• We can consciously set out to choose, evaluate, give access to, and preserve those things that we find significant and of value. A noble endeavor—but one that calls for expenditures few of us are prepared to make—is based on the exercise of skills that few of us possess, and requires policies that none of us has, as yet, formulated.
To illustrate how tricky such discriminations can be in the digital realm, we need look no further than an example from the orderly world of print.
More than three decades ago, New Yorker writer Frances Fitzgerald published a fascinating book about the way in which the United States constantly revises its history.8 This influential and widely read work was based almost entirely on the study of high school textbooks from the past one hundred years. There must be few, if any, research librarians who would put outdated schoolbooks high on their lists of significant types of publication.
There are abundant other examples of the significance of the insignificant, and they all illustrate the immensity of the problem. That immensity should not discourage us from attempting to be good stewards of all our resources (including digital resources). On the contrary, it should energize us in our pursuit of the twin goals of preserving what we have and establishing systems that will enable us to preserve the future records of humankind.
The Modern Language Association, in a statement issued in 1995, reaffirmed the continuing importance of reading and the book and their primary role in scholarly enquiry.9 Though we all play a part in the preservation and provision of books, the fact is that the multimillion-volume research library has the lead role in that endeavor. We have done a fairly good job over the centuries of preserving almost everything of value in the print record. Absent malice and malevolent neglect, there is no reason why that almost total success rate should not continue. On the other hand, we have scarcely even begun to preserve digital resources. Vague plans have been drawn up; much has been said and little done. Success in that preservation effort is, at best, a very long shot indeed.
In his seminal article, Lee Finks defines stewardship as “a responsibility for the destiny of the library as an institution.”10 He stresses that the survival of the library and its collections is crucial to the futures of culture and society. This grand task is obviously centered on the preservation of the human record but also involves the survival and development of the library and of librarianship. In my opinion, that latter mission has two important components:
• preserving the knowledge of librarianship for future generations of librarians by means of library education
• assuring the bond of trust between the library and the society we serve by demonstrating our stewardship and commitment, thus strengthening the mutuality of the interests of librarians and the wider community
The second component depends on us acting with responsibility and ethics in the service of our particular community and of society as a whole. We have the implicit respect of most of the people we serve, which is a good foundation. However, that generalized good feeling needs to be intensified if it is to be of practical use. If we are to continue to earn the respect and support of our communities, we must demonstrate that our mission is relevant to their lives and to the wider culture. There is no better way to do that than to make that mission plain and to work hard on being good servants of the culture and good stewards of its records.
I honestly believe that libraries, on the whole, are doing a good job of preserving the records of humankind. I also believe that a certain lack of assertion is our only failing in demonstrating to our communities that we are good stewards. Modesty is an admirable trait, but excessive modesty can be a political mistake of the first order. We do good work and should not be afraid to proclaim it, especially to those who fund our activities. Library education, on the other hand, is a disaster verging on a catastrophe.
There are many villains and numerous failures in the sad story of American library education. Practitioners blame educators. Educators blame practitioners. Teachers, students, practitioners, the American Library Association (ALA) and other professional organizations, and writers of books and articles on libraries are all complicit in this train wreck. Almost the entire debate centers on “the ‘L’ word” (an annoying trope modeled on euphemisms for curse words), referring to how the majority of “library schools” (a term that they disdain) do not in fact use the word “library” in their name. This last is a particularly fatuous thing to do, as most of the renamed schools and programs produce graduates who seek employment in libraries. Though such semantic discussion is as futile as it appears, it is symbolic of the deep ill, the existential crisis, that has gripped our profession. (It is odd, is it not, that some librarians are fleeing from the word “library” as outmoded, when computer types happily use the word “computer” for the machines that are far more than the calculators the name implies?) Speaking for myself, I have lived most of my life as a librarian, love libraries, and will die proud of having been a librarian, without ever wishing to change the word “library” or any of its cognates.
The sad facts behind “the ‘L’ word” wars are these:
• A huge gulf exists between the interests of LIS educators and library practitioners.
• Three of the former intellectual powerhouses of American librarianship (the schools at Columbia, Chicago, and Berkeley) are dead or malignly transformed.
• Many LIS program graduates lack basic education in the central processes of librarianship.
• Many library programs contain two mutually irreconcilable cultures—a (female-dominated) culture of librarianship and a (male-dominated) information science culture.11
• Many practitioners and employers cannot or will not accept their role of training new librarians and fail to distinguish between education and training.
• The ALA accreditation process has become a farce gleefully exploited by LIS and “I-school” administrators.
Let us go to the basic issue. An enlightened employer—the consumer of the product of LIS programs—wishes to hire librarians who have been educated in the core competences of our profession.12 Is there a single employer in a library of any kind who wishes to hire someone in a professional position who lacks an education in any one of the following (under these or other terms): bibliographic control, reference work, collection development, library systems, and digital resources? I have noted previously that “education” is the key word here—not “training.” It is the role of the enlightened employer to provide training in, say, cataloguing, reference work, or collection development, but even the most enlightened employer cannot do that in the absence of a foundation of knowledge and understanding provided by a good education.
The adverse impact of information science on library programs cannot be overstated. Although a sadly overlooked article demonstrated and documented the fact that there is really no such thing as “information science,” this bogus discipline has a stranglehold on many of our LIS schools.13 Many of the courses that would add to the education of librarians are being elbowed out by IS and IT courses that have little or no relevance to the real work of real librarians in real libraries. The reason for this is that academics (mostly male academics) are pursuing their own interests, grants, and promotion or tenure at the expense of useful library education. Many of them are not librarians but refugees from other disciplines, or have little interest in libraries and their mission—indeed, think that the library has no future. It is a free country, and everyone is entitled to her views—no matter how wrongheaded. However, people with those beliefs should found their own schools and programs and not work to the detriment of the supply of future librarians. They certainly should not receive the imprimatur of ALA accreditation. If the profession is weakened and sickened in this manner, our mission of preserving “the library and its fruits” (Lee Finks’s words) will fail.
About the same time as ALA was finishing the long-drawn-out process of formulating approving its Statement of core competences, it was going through the process of revising its accreditation standards. Since the core competences are, in essence, a statement of what a graduate of an LIS master’s program should know, it would seem logical that accredited master’s programs should be required to teach those competences. Logic, unfortunately, had nothing to do with the case and ALA’s revised accreditation standards and proposed revisions of those standards contain no such requirement.14
The accreditation process, essentially, now works like this: The persons designated by ALA’s Committee on Accreditation (COA) ask the library program what it is trying to accomplish and then assess how well it is doing in that self-defined task. Thus, if the master’s program of the School of Information Studies at X University states that it is in the business of “educating information professionals for the new millennium” and that process does not involve the study of bibliographic control but does involve webmastery, that program will be judged on how well it produces webmasters. In this way, the American Library Association is saying, in essence, “Teach what you like and we will still certify your graduates as worthy to be employed in libraries.” One of the criteria for being a profession is that the professional body controls the education of persons wishing to enter that profession. This is true of, for example, the ABA and the AMA. Alas, it is not true of ALA.
Almost all advertisements for librarian positions contain the magic words “MLS (or equivalent) from an ALA-accredited program.” Until the past two or three decades, a prospective employer could assume a common body of knowledge in an applicant who was a graduate of an ALA-accredited program. No longer. Because ALA turned the process into what amounts to self-accreditation, the alert employer needs to look at the degree (by no means are all master’s degrees from LIS programs the “equivalent” of an MLS), the program, and the program’s curriculum—all of which is more work than we are used to, or should be asked to do.
It is difficult to imagine the American Medical Association accrediting a medical school that allowed its graduates to become doctors without having studied surgery. It is equally difficult to imagine the American Bar Association looking with approval on a law school that neither taught nor intended to teach constitutional law. Why, then, is no one puzzled by ALA’s acceptance of master’s programs that do not require their graduates to have more than the most elementary knowledge of, for example, cataloguing? What is the point of a list of core competences if there is no mechanism to ensure that they are taught in library programs and that their graduates possess them on graduation?
Accreditation is in crisis in other ways. Library schools have died, faded away, or become something else. Others are perennially said to be on the verge of leaving the accreditation process. This is generally assumed to be a very bad thing and library education to be on the verge of suffering mortal wounds. It may well be, but not because of high-profile defections. After all, an earlier crisis in library education was supposed to be fatal because fifteen library schools folded between 1978 and 1993—including the famous examples of Columbia and Chicago. They are much missed, but life goes on and what ails today’s library schools has little to do with the absence of those fifteen schools. My guess is that the same would apply if the soi-disant I-schools walked the information science plank. The key issue for them would be the employment prospects of their graduates who wish to work in libraries. Perhaps there will be none such and the defectors will, like Berkeley, cease to be LIS schools in fact as well as in name. On the other hand, I do hope that a “library program” that walked away from accreditation would not expect its graduates to be considered for jobs for which an “MLS (or equivalent) from an ALA-accredited program” is a requirement.
Another problem with accreditation today is the perception that the Committee on Accreditation (COA) carries out its work inconsistently and in the shadows.
Control of professional education is at the heart of professional identity and remains the connection between practitioners and educators. Our lack of it leaves us ailing, weak, and confused. Few librarians really understand the accreditation process, but they do understand its effect on new colleagues (and the lack of new colleagues). If the system collapsed or was outsourced or just faded away, where would we be? In that dread future, we would find ourselves trying to weigh the suitability of a person with an “MLS” from the Jack Daniels School of Information Economics against that of someone with a “master’s of information management” from the Millard Fillmore College’s School of Library and Media Center Studies. In a world in which no program is accredited, all programs are accredited. That is why our stewardship of our profession must revivify library education by
• insisting on education in the core of our profession and the necessary penumbral skills and knowledge;
• creating a core curriculum;
• accrediting MLS (or equivalent) programs on the basis of how well they teach that core curriculum; and
• ensuring that the accreditation process is firmly in the hands of ALA and is carried out by a radically reformed successor to the ALA Committee on Accreditation in an explicit, standardized, clearly understood, and overt manner.
If we are to succeed, individually and collectively, as stewards of the human record and our profession, we will do three things:
• Ensure that future generations know what we know by designing and implementing effective collaborative schemes to preserve recorded knowledge and information, irrespective of format. In particular, resolve the problem of controlling and preserving significant digital resources.
• Do good work and earn the trust and respect of the communities we serve.
• Revive, strengthen, and maintain library education by defining our profession, ensuring that LIS master’s programs educate new librarians according to an agreed core curriculum, and devising an effective and fair accreditation system controlled by ALA.
Notes
1. “The written word remains.”
2. Bible. New Testament. Gospel of Luke, 16:1–13.
3. Shera, Jess H. “Apologia pro vita nostra.” In Shera’s Knowing books and men: knowing computers too. Littleton, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1973. page 120.
4. Quoted in Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The printing press as an agent of change, volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. pages 115–116.
5. Johns, Adrian. The nature of the book. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
6. Kehr, Dave. “Film riches—cleaned up for prosperity” New York times (October 15, 2010) page C2.
7. See, for example, the University of North Carolina SILS Microform Digitization website: www.microfilmdigitization.com/about.html (consulted August 22, 2014).
8. Fitzgerald, Frances. America revised: history schoolbooks in the twentieth century. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.
9. “MLA Statement on the Significance of Primary Records.” In Profession 95. New York: MLA, 1995. pages 27–28.
10. Finks, Lee W. “Values without shame.” American libraries (April 1989) pages 352–356.
11. Hildenbrand, Suzanne. “The information age versus gender equity?” Library trends, volume 47, number 4 (spring 1999) pages 669–681.
12. American Library Association. Core competences of librarians (adopted January 2009). www.ala.org/educationcareers/careers/corecomp/corecompetences (consulted August 22, 2014).
13. Houser, Lloyd. “A conceptual analysis of information science.” Library and information science research, volume 10 (January 1988) pages 3–34.
14. See: American Library Association. “Standards, process, policies, and procedures.” www.ala.org/accreditedprograms/standards (consulted August 22, 2014).