Access and/or selection

NOTE: This has been expanded into a chapter in Libraries, Community, and Technology,

"Librarians have never been in the business of determining what their patrons should read or see" ACLU document.

We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want. Tao Te Ching, #11.

At the core of our profession are two values, complementary and sometimes contradictory. According to one value (access), libraries exist to provide people with information (packaged as books, videos, Internet connections) that they would not otherwise have. We provide a base level flow of information that is an essential contribution to an enlightened citizenry and individual fulfillment. According to another core value, (selection) librarians exist to choose from the information flow that which is useful to a community and its individuals. For many years, librarians were able to keep these two values in fruitful tension, providing increasing levels of access while refining selection processes. Over the last decade, it appears that the pace of technological change is overwhelming our ability to maintain a viable synthesis, limiting how we discuss issues and dividing the profession.

One group, often more technologically minded, feel that access is now the main raison d’être for libraries. This group’s paradigm is often quoted by Judith Krug of ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom "If I had enough money and enough space I would select everything". Since the Internet has the appearance of a "free lunch" and cost sharing is increasing the affordability of fee based systems, it is now possible to clearly visualize a connected library that can indeed select everything.

The access group also has a great deal of faith in the value of information and the ability of people to find and use information to better themselves. "Information wants to be free" declare their signature files. Increasing the volume of information is viewed as a solution to problems like AIDS, teen pregnancy or unemployment. Like Rousseau, they are Romantics in their view of education, believing that learning must be self-directed and that a librarian’s main role is to open the gate and then step out of the way. Information is value-free and libraries should be too.

A second group, often more service oriented, feel that selection remains a core task for librarians. They find their paradigm in Raganatan’s "Help the reader". Mere access does not help the reader, is poor service and is suicide for the institution. When they visualize an access oriented library, they do not see any local connection, any human contact, any librarians to help people through the growing infoglut. It is the common phenomenon of more actually being less.

For the selection group, librarianship is a value added profession. The mounds of data must be organized, sifted, evaluated and, finally, selected. It is this refined product that is of value to the community and justifies the continuance of the institution. They balance their concern for individual rights with a concerns for the welfare of the community. They are children of the Enlightenment and unconscious communitarians. All choices necessarily involve values and the library that does not recognize this is mere chaos.

Many long term library issues are illuminated by examining them in terms of these two groups. For as long as there have been public libraries, there has been a discussion concerning the proper balance between access and selection. It extends from Mark Twain in the 1890s to paperbacks in the 1950s to current concerns about the "canon". Librarians have been able to keep both values in mind while developing a synthesis, a consensus approach that is concerned both with meeting demand and with fulfilling needs.

The current state of technology has disrupted this synthesis by changing the nature of collection development, eliminating or limiting areas where librarians formerly exercised their professional judgment. Shared systems, full text databases and, most importantly, the Internet now bring into libraries items that local librarians did not select, that do not meet the local library board’s collection development polices and that, in some cases, violate local, state and federal laws.

Take for example, a hypothetical small/medium public library. They choose not to buy "The anarchist cookbook" not because of its cost or the size of their building, but because they feel there are already quite enough ways for children to learn how to blow off their hands. Similarly, they choose not to purchase "Hustler" and would not even if their periodical budget tripled. Understandably, they do not select obscene materials. Despite this, patrons at this library have easy access to bomb making instruction, pornography and even truly obscene materials.

This library is part of a shared automation system, so that any item that is purchased by a library in the system is part of the shared virtual collection and is available to all patrons. Patrons place the hold themselves and no library staff is involved until checkout. This process often accounts for 10-20% of circulation at libraries in many shared systems. A director can write a collection development policy, a library board can approve that policy, a librarian can follow that policy, but it places no limits on what is actually available at that library.

The shared automated system includes full text magazine databases, with over 1,000 titles. The cost of the databases is included in the library’s share of the cost of the system. Which databases are purchased is decided by a committee system libraries, but the titles included in the databases are selected by a corporation as a business decision. The actual selection of titles available is no longer controlled by the library or librarians. A portion of the collection development has been outsourced to a private corporation.

It is with the Internet that the lack of synthesis and the reason for it becomes most clear. In just a decade, the Internet has gone through several distinct phases, from a primarily governmental and educational entity to a specialist’s tool to a commercial venture. As a supersized vertical file, it contains everything from Supreme Court decisions to odes to the "Princess of Whales", from Medline to pyramid schemes, from the New York Times to the Drudge Report. By changing its nature every couple of years, it defies our attempts to fit it into our conceptual universe. By mixing that which we can no longer live without (primarily government and reference related sites) with sites that we would prefer not to have (unreliable information, frauds and scams), the Internet challenges our profession to accept or reject it as a whole.

Our ability to reach a consensus of the proper place of the Internet and other new technologies is further complicated because this is not just a library issue. The future of information technology is increasingly in the hands of corporations, governments and fickle public opinion. The stakes are much higher, but our input is relatively minor.

Despite the hoopla and hype, the profession needs to continue to work with both our familiar values, access and selection, to fit the Internet and other new technologies into our conceptual framework. Without such a balanced approach, the results will lack coherence and will not be appreciated beyond the boundaries of our profession. It is our duty to bring to the national debate our special expertise in providing both access and selection. They are the core of our profession and our contribution to the community.

Meet the One Librarian or Return to One Librarian's Opinion

12/04/02