With respect to remarks by Gretchen Whitney--
"[Libraries] just aren't trusted information resources."
Do you mean "trusted" or do you mean something more akin to
"convenient" or perhaps something akin to "easy and
understandable"? If the students rarely go to a library or have
rarely gone to a library to find information, would their reaction to
it be a matter of trust or of something else? Trust or the lack of
it sounds like they went to a library but got bad information or no
information at all at some point, or perceived that they did.
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"[Finding information gave] them a sense of personal empowerment. "
The word "empowerment" has been used for rationalizing library
service for some years now. Witness the book _Information power :
guidelines for school library media programs / prepared by the
American Association of School Librarians and Association for
Educational Communications and Technology_ (Chicago: ALA,
1988). The gist of it is that finding relevant information is
personally empowering.
But, what does empowerment really mean? Perhaps more importantly,
can such personal empowerment be measured any more than, say, earlier
general library aspirations such as "self-improvement through
reading" or "adult education", two phrases that come from the periods
1850 to about 1900 and 1925 to about 1965 or so, respectively.
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"The situation is bad enough for young people. They can't find the
sex information that they need, and are driven to other resources,
for example. Libraries don't tell them how to avoid STDs, and don't
tell them who can."
It would be interesting to hear Ann Bishop of UIUC comment on this
rather general assertion given the nature of her community
involvement sense of library service.
"The situation is worse, far worse, for seniors, who seek info
on Social Security, the national financial situation, their pensions,
their retirement accounts, and the like.
Libraries (in my experience) simply run from these issues. They
themselves are untrained in these issues, and they have no earthly
idea how to refer users to others trained in these issues. Again,
they don't know how to refer folks to people who DO understand these issues."
Do we have any actual public service librarians, especially from
public libraries who care to comment on the foregoing grand assertion
as well as the one about youth (for which those who are involved with
youth services should be able to help)? Do we have any faculty in
states such as Florida (USF, or FSU) or Arizona who care to comment
on such things, given the reality of older people in their states?
Assertions of these kinds cause me to wonder, of course, if there is
any substantive empirical evidence for them? In my own many years
of involvement in libraries of several kinds, it seems to me that for
every anecdote of librarians being non-responsive, there are also
anecdotes for them being just the opposite--extraordinarily
responsive to people's needs. Also, my own observation is that
"Libraries" don't answer questions, but rather librarians do so.
Assertions have also over the years caused me to ponder more than
once whether the LIS professoriate may itself be sometimes out of
touch with many aspects of actual library service.
One anecdote from my own life pointed in that direction. I taught
cataloging for years, but once (in the early 90s) when I asked a
school librarian if I could bring my cataloging class to her library
to work on her non-book, non-print media collection for cataloging,
she agreed, but required me to come to her library by myself for an
entire day, and simply sit there and observe what was going on--how
the young who came into it used the library and so on and so
forth. I think she strongly suspected that my pre-occupation with
cataloging and other faculty duties simply gave me little sense of
the reality of her everyday work situation. Well, I did the day of
observation, and...
I was stunned! By the end of the day, I had not only observed many
spectacular services and activities that took place, but ended up
with several pages of notes consisting of research ideas that could
have been conducted with the school library at its focus--almost all
of it in terms of what we call "information use patterns." So much
for my own pre-conceptions (most of them uninformed) of what the
library did with its resources and my own easy conclusions that the
library (i.e., its personnel) was not a very useful or enervating
place, maybe only a boring and non-responsive place.
Fran Miksa
Professor Emeritus
School of Information
The University of Texas at Austin
