Core Chapter Concept: Reducing libraries, librarians, and their tools to a universal scheme is impossible—and dangerous.
And so we’ve come to the point where many discussions of libraries start: types of libraries and how libraries are organized. There is a reason we come to these topics so late in this guide. The strong focus of librarians on how libraries are categorized is a huge problem because it implies that the structure and mission of libraries are determined more by the types of communities they serve than by the communities themselves (believing that an academic libraries have more in common with one another than a small community college library might have with a school library, for example). It also implies that there is some overriding universal structure common to all libraries Both of these implications are, in fact, misconceptions born of an overemphasis on efficiency in libraries over the past 200 years and an adherence to reductionism as a way of approaching the world.
A joke to start out. God calls a meeting in heaven and invites Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy (he’s the reason we use Latin names to label plants), Melvil Dewey, who created the Dewey Decimal System, and Betty Johnson, a rural library director who had died the previous week in a car crash (it wasn’t her fault).
God says, “Well, I’ve done it. I’ve announced the Day of Judgment is upon us. But I have a problem. Turns out when I first came up with this plan there were fewer than 7,000 of you, but today there are more than 7 billion. They’re all behind that door over there, and I’m having a hard time figuring out who gets to go to heaven and who gets to go to hell. You are all experts in classification, so I thought you could help out.”
“No problem,” says Linnaeus, as he steps through the door. An hour passes, two, three. After four hours, a haggard Linnaeus trudges out the door, muttering to himself, “So many people, I ran out of Latin.”
“I shall not fail,” declares Dewey, confidently striding through the door. Seven hours later, a desperate Dewey crawls back: “I ran out of numbers!”
Without a word, Betty Johnson goes through the door and emerges half a minute later: “Done!”
“That’s astounding!” says God. “How did you do it?”
“Simple,” says Betty. “I asked all those who ever voted to support a library budget to raise their hand, and told the rest they could go to hell.”
Betty’s “solution” is the epitome of efficiency through reductionism, the idea that you can understand any complex system by breaking it into smaller and smaller parts and that, once you understand all the parts (or, in Betty’s case, the most important part), you’ll understand the whole. It is with this view that Dewey put forth his decimal classification system. He took the world’s knowledge (defined at the time primarily as nonfiction books and manuscripts) and broke it down into smaller and smaller parts until he described everything, or thought he did. Dewey fit the world’s knowledge into ten major categories from “General Works” (the 000s) to “History and Geography” (the 900s). Then he broke these ten categories down into subcategories and kept breaking these down until he could “correctly” identify a single item. Let’s use “Religion” (the 200s) as an example. Dewey broke “Religion” into ten subcategories, one for religion generally (the 200–209s), one for the philosophy and history of religion (the 210s), one for the Bible (the 220s), six for Christianity (the 230s through 280s), and one subcategory for “Other Religions” (the 290s), under which he grouped Islam with Babism and the Baha’i faith (in the 297s), and then he kept on breaking these down until he ended up assigning one number to the King James Bible (220.52) and another to the Koran (297.122).
To be clear, despite my potshots at the classification approach, I readily admit that it’s been amazingly powerful and successful over time. Indeed, throughout history, libraries have used the power of classification—specifically, reductionist classification—to great effect. Their classification systems have brought order and accessibility to millions upon millions of items. And they allowed libraries throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to gain extraordinary efficiencies that saved the time of community members, cut costs, and gave birth to the very profession of librarianship. In an analog world, these systems still rule.
The problem with the classification approach in librarianship today is twofold. First, too many librarians feel that there is such a thing as an “objective” classification system (we addressed this in chapter 4, so I won’t rehash it here). And, second, too many librarians have sought to bring the “efficiencies” of classification to our profession itself. Take a look at a library organization like the American Library Association (ALA, which counts Dewey among its founders). The ALA is first subdivided into the Public Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the American Association of School Librarians (the only unit that has “librarians” in its name), and each of these subdivisions is further subdivided into a myriad of committees and task forces. The urge to subdivide has led librarians to slot themselves into ever smaller groups to get work done. “I’m not a librarian; I’m an academic librarian”; “I’m not an academic librarian; I’m a technical services academic librarian”; and so on. It has become a sort of Daedalus’ Maze—a system so complex it is inescapable.
All this subdividing makes it difficult to approach the field in a holistic manner. For example, there was an impassioned debate about information literacy among academic librarians.1 They debated things like threshold concepts and the importance of having or not having standards. It was an intense and important discussion, but one that occurred totally outside another impassioned debate about information literacy among school librarians over the past two decades. The result is that these two groups of librarians failed to benefit from each other’s insights and perspectives on a key issue for both. Thus, in their quest to capture the efficiency of classification tools, librarians have actually fragmented both their work and their effectiveness.
This same quest for efficiencies through universals can be seen in the way many libraries structure themselves. Most library staffs of any size are divided into administration, public services, and technical services. The public service division manages community-facing systems (except the catalog) such as reference, circulation, story times, in-depth research services, and so on. The technical service division manages collection development, cataloging, and computer systems including the catalog. In fact, it is the catalog that shows the limitations of this approach even to the most die-hard traditionalists. On the one hand, the catalog is an inventory system. Technical service librarians use it to collect and catalog materials. On the other hand, the catalog forms the community-facing interface with that collection. Members can use the catalog to find and evaluate items and, in many online systems, to leave reviews and even to add their own materials or resources.
Having public service and technical service divisions may make sense to librarians, but these divisions are not based on how community members interact with library systems. When, say, scholars in an academic or public library or in an industrial research lab work with librarians to find out what is already known about the topics of their studies, they go to public services. And when they want to safely store the data they’ve gathered, they go to technical services. But what if they also want to set up blogs to disseminate their findings or to incorporate them in online courses? Do they go to public or technical services? So we see how a relatively well known community type, scholars, must dance back and forth between divisions created by and for librarians. How do inventors using 3-D printing or genealogy researchers publishing books map to how librarians organize themselves? The short answer is they don’t.
You may think this is more a rhetorical or logical problem than a practical one. Yet it lies at the heart of how community members interface with the systems of the library. It is the same problem that has led to public libraries in Syracuse, New York, looking exactly like those in Seattle, or Norway, or Kenya. It’s a “McDonald’s approach” to libraries. Make libraries all the same the world over so that members will find them familiar no matter where they go. Except that librarians and the libraries they build are not in the fast-food business; they’re in the community and knowledge creation business. Libraries need to look like their communities.
Should librarians be organized into technical and public service divisions simply because “that’s how we’ve always done it,” or “that’s the most efficient way” (efficient to the librarians, not the community)? The answer should be self-evident: the best way to organize the professionals and staff of libraries is to meet the unique needs of their communities.
Thus one academic library replaced technical and public services with teaching and research services, and one public library turned all of its librarians into production librarians to help community members create knowledge, and videos, and books, and websites. We’ve already talked about how the British Library transformed reference librarians into business consultants. The point is that communities shouldn’t have to conform to a rigid library structure just so it’s easy for librarians to find their cohorts in the field. Each library should look like its community. Our job as librarians is to find great ideas in any industry or structure and adapt them for our local conditions. So let’s stop reducing ourselves, our libraries, and our communities to some common denominator that mangles the unique qualities all three of these bring to the task of knowledge creation.
With the very real consequences of reduction laid out, I shall now turn to ways in which different types of libraries can embrace their communities. The goal is not to create a common template for academic, public, school, and special libraries—quite the opposite. The goal is to highlight examples and means of shaping the library platform for overarching communities.