What I Learned Today

In my class on the History of Books and Libraries, we were recently introduced to this fun 9th century Irish poem. My own cat and I are amused.

The cat’s name, Pangur Bán, is a little tricky to decode. “Bán” means “white,” and “Pangur” seems to have been a common name for cats (maybe like Felix) that may mean “Fuller” (as in fulling cloth: beating it to remove dirt and impurities — like how cats knead blankets?).

I and Pangur Bán, my cat
‘Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
‘Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.

‘Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way:
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

‘Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
‘Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

Translation by Robin Flower

My class on the History of Books and Libraries started off with a tour of ancient writing systems and libraries. We covered a wealth of fascinating content. For example, it had never occurred to me that the Lascaux cave paintings were three-dimensional, since they were painted onto irregular cave walls! I’d only ever seen flat-looking 2D pictures like the one at right. Today you can visit the Lascaux cave paintings in 3D through the magic of the Internet. Do it! I sat there enthralled as I floated through the twisty little passages and came away with an entirely different sense of this early artwork. “Early” is an understatement. The paintings are estimated to be 17,000 years old!

I also learned that cuneiform tables had a 3D aspect not only in their wedge-shaped impressions but because, as chunks of clay, they were rather thick, and scribes took advantage of this to write on all sides, including the edges. Browse all sides of real tablets yourself! (Now I want to make my own, maybe out of Play-doh.)

We discussed various writing systems, and you can browse several historical scripts as well as (quite curiously) constructed scripts, mainly for English, that replace our current alphabet. One of my favorites is Heptal (rendered at right). We also discussed boustrophedon, a word I will never again misspell.

Finally, we covered the ancient libraries at Nippur, Ur, Nineveh, and Alexandria. The library at Nineveh was the creation of Ashurbanipal and grew to contain 30,000 clay tablets, with a complex indexing system and integrated book curses. My assignment for this week was to create a “learning activity” about Ashurbanipal and his library.

Dare you take my quiz? Will you earn yourself Ashurbanipal’s admiration or his scorn?

In the preface to a book I am reading on medieval book curses (“Anathema!” by Marc Drogin), the author notes, “I am a researcher and not a scholar.”

That comment brought me up short, because if asked, I’d have been hard-pressed to come up with a distinction. A scholar studies things; so does a researcher. Given my personal research activities and inclinations, I’d probably distinguish them in that a researcher (in computer science, say) also strives to come up with new solutions to problems. “Scholar,” a term we don’t use nearly as much, might bring to mind a more static image of someone who’s accumulated a lot of historical knowledge and expertise. But these boundaries seem blurry.

And that isn’t at all the distinction Drogin meant! It turns out that to him, a scholar is an expert on a particular subject, studying it directly (using primary sources, perhaps?). A researcher comes along afterwards and studies the scholars’ output, collecting and analyzing it (secondary sources?). My world did a 90-degree turn and suddenly brought into focus what “research” must be for the humanities (and others?). What do those folks think when I say I am a “researcher”? Are we even speaking the same language?

This also solves a niggling question that’s been in the back of my mind since spending more time in the library world. When librarians talk about doing “research,” they almost always mean “hunting down a piece of information in existing sources” like databases, dictionaries, texts, etc. In my world, that’s not research; that’s information retrieval. So I frequently misunderstand the term when it comes up in my reading. This encounter in “Anathema!” may provide another experience to help me properly interpret the term in the world of library and information science.

P.S. I am still a researcher.

This week in my “Information and Society” class, we’re tackling the topic of censorship. We were assigned to write a post about “what intellectual freedom changes and challenges do you see yourselves facing in your jobs and in libraries in general in the years ahead?”

Whether or not I am ever in a position to make selection decisions for a library, I expect to continue as a library user for the rest of my life. Consequently, library policies about their selection choices will affect me and my access to ideas and materials. Therefore, I am concerned by the gap between ALA-espoused ideals and actual library practice, with respect to censorship.

The ALA Library Bill of Rights states that “Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues.” The absolutist wording immediately gave me pause. “All” points of view? Regardless of merit, factual support, benign or malignant intent? Further, it implies that libraries must be encyclopedic; they have a responsibility for thorough coverage of all angles.

However, libraries in practice commonly violate this stated policy. Because they cannot realistically purchase every book in existence, they develop selection criteria. These commonly include authority, appropriateness, timeliness, accuracy, quality of the physical book, fit with the collection, and demand. Some of these criteria, such as authority, appropriateness, accuracy, and demand, curtail the provision of “all” points of view. While I personally appreciate the library’s effort to filter based on properties such as authority and accuracy, not everyone feels that way, including the ALA, given its wording in the Library Bill of Rights.

One of our (written) lectures, composed by Laura Reiman and Ellen Greenblatt (our course instructor), provided a fascinating walk through the history of censored material with LGBTQ elements. They concluded with this statement: “however much these parents and citizens would like libraries to stand in loco parentis as guardians of what children and young adults should read, this is clearly not the school or library’s role.” This argument is used to justify the library’s retention of items that individual parents do not want their children to see. Yet by the same argument, the library should therefore allow the donation and retention of all materials, no matter how biased or offensive, including the “ex-gay” and “gay cure” literature donated to a library in Fairfax, VA in 2008. Instead, the Fairfax information services coordinator rejected such books on authority and accuracy criteria, as well as a concern about possible negative impacts on LGBTQ students. While I find such content to be appalling and offensive, and I am in complete agreement with the motives for rejection, they are inconsistent with the Library Bill of Rights.

More generally, do we have an obligation to provide access to all materials, no matter how negative, hurtful, or inaccurate? Beyond the Library Bill of Rights, constitutional law suggests that we do. Board of Education vs. Pico (1982) established a link between the right to read (access) and the right to speak. “Illegal speech” (therefore not protected as “free”) includes “defamation, incitement, obscenity, and pornography produced with real children”. Many materials, including the “gay cure” literature, do not fall into any of these categories, so it is not clear that there is any constitutional basis for avoiding them, no matter how distasteful.

I am left with a question: Are librarians throughout the U.S. simply unable (due to community or other pressures) to adhere to this policy, or is the ALA Library Bill of Rights not a truly representative statement of the library community’s views? Aiken surveyed 400 public library directors and found that 50.9% of the 110 respondents “did not permit free access for minors to nonprint materials,” violating the Library Bill of Rights. Aiken concluded that “the ALA appears to be alarmingly out of touch with many of its members.” This seems to be a worrisome state of affairs!

One of Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science is that every book has its reader, and therefore the library should make it easy for books to be found by their reader. To that end, he advocated open shelving, meaning that patrons can access the books themselves and browse at will, as in a book store. This came as something of a surprise, because I’ve never encountered a library with closed shelving. I understand that in those libraries, the patron issues a request for a book, and a staff member retrieves it. The patron is never able to browse in an anonymous and uncommitted way, but must instead request a specific book, and then probably feels obligated to check it out, even if it turns out not to be to their liking. What a different environment that would be! I can’t imagine that being the standard for a public library. It was interesting to discover such a different potential model for libraries, and I am grateful that we ended up with open shelving as the default instead.

This issue came up not only in “Foundations of Library and Information Science,” the textbook for LIBR 200, but also in another book I’ve been reading, a 1903 text called “A Library Primer.” It is a charming how-to guide for the establishment and operation of libraries, and it also includes commentary related to our ethics discussions. Here is one excerpt showing that the advocacy of open shelving went back at least to 1903:

Give the people at least such liberty with their own collection of books as the bookseller gives them with his. Let the shelves be open, and the public admitted to them, and let the open shelves strike the keynote of the whole administration. (Dana, Chapter IV)

Dana goes on to give advice about the dimensions of the shelves:

Single shelves should not be more than three feet long, on account of the tendency to sag. Ten inches between shelves, and a depth of eight inches, are good dimensions for ordinary cases. (Dana, Chapter VIII)

and even chairs (ouch!):

In many cases simple stools on a single iron standard, without a revolving top, fastened to the floor, are more desirable than chairs. The loafer doesn’t like them; very few serious students object to them. (Dana, Chapter VIII)

I also enjoyed this encapsulation of the ALA core value of Service (which the ALA did not adopt until 1939):

The whole library should be permeated with a cheerful and accommodating atmosphere. Lay this down as the first rule of library management; and for the second, let it be said that librarian and assistants are to treat boy and girl, man and woman, ignorant and learned, courteous and rude, with uniform good-temper without condescension; never pertly. (Dana, Chapter IV)

The shelves are yours, and the librarian’s job is to courteously guide you through them, only when needed.