Knowledge for Sale

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Should librarians be fighting back or adapting to the new status quo? It's worth noting that few professions define themselves in more activist terms. According to the American Library Association, librarians are "proactive professionals responsible for ensuring the free flow of information and ideas," working to "meet the challenges of social, economic, and environmental change." The ALA encourages its 64,000 or so members to recognize the contributions they can make in "ameliorating or solving the critical problems of society." In addition to public libraries, there are more than 90,000 school, 3,500 academic, and 1,250 government libraries, and nearly 10,000 special libraries dedicated to a particular activity, company, or field. If librarians took their charter seriously, their influence could be profound. But that's easier said than done.

If you search the shared library database WorldCat by subject for "menstrual cramps," you turn up a single German title: Untersuchungen Ÿber die Wirkung der Unterwassergymnastik bei Frauenleiden. You need to enter "dysmenorrhea" -- spelled correctly -- to reach the many citations that are actually germane. The stereotype is that librarians enjoy holding such search secrets and making others ask for the magic key. That's true in some cases, but many others find pleasure in the librarian's historic role as guide and giver. Vermont-based librarian and blogger Jessamyn West says, "I love helping people for free. I like the 'Aha!' moment when I'm explaining something and I see a patron understand it and get happy all at once." The influential library cataloguer Sanford Berman puts it this way: "I cannot have information I know would be of interest to someone and not share it."

Berman is known for turning that simple desire to share into a political act. Over more than 20 years working in the Hennepin County Library system in suburban Minneapolis, Berman and his staff created what may have been the most accessible library catalog ever. Each item was findable not only by author, title, and a general subject heading or two, but also by countless specific headings and copious notes (for keyword searching and getting a sense of a work). They also added alternate title entries, so users could enter partial or mistakenly remembered titles.

Tapping into a system stripped of academic obscurity and arcane biases, users could find materials by typing in things like "new baby in family," "moving to a new neighborhood," "fear of freedom," "eco-fiction," "Native American holocaust," "restaurant cookbooks," and "road novels," among many other terms. The result was a living, intuitive search engine -- an intricate, human-made network of cross-references, a kind of collective art form. (I'm biased, being one of the "Sandynistas" who helped Berman assemble it.)

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