ARE "SKEPTIC" AND "COWARD" SYNONYMS?

James H. Sweetland, North American Convenor

The following is inspired by a memo, some recent advertisements, and a comment from a colleague.

While the library and, to some degree, the information science literature, continues to discuss the importance of the "cybrarian", "information specialist", or "information manager": (rarely anymore is the term "librarian" used in this context) to the developing world of connected information, most of the rest of the world has a different image - the librarian as fearful, as out of touch, out of step, and in general, about to be run over by progress. I refer, of course, to the general press� discussion of the Internet as replacing libraries, and more specifically, to the training and development and academic image of the librarian as seen in recent advertisements.

Much of the profession sees librarianship as a forward thinking discipline, whose members developed classification systems which apply both to paper and electronic sources; which developed the first large, textual/bibliographic databases (like OCLC), when the computer world was still talking about 500,000 records as a "very large database"; which developed a full text system handling the entire Roman alphabet, including non-English diacritics (again, like OCLC) when many computer systems people were questioning if it were feasible to provide upper and lower case letters; and many now see the profession as moving completely away from the book and print to too much emphasis on electronics.

However, on a regular basis, many of us receive notes about new training sessions and conferences which are aimed at a mythical little grey being, terrified of the future and wholly computer illiterate. Thus, we get announcements telling us that, thanks to Windows, or NT, or the latest commercial software, we no longer need be afraid of the computers. We get brochures telling us that, once we purchase this software, or use this Web program, we will be happy, because it is so simple that anyone can do it. Possibly the extreme is reached when a librarian of my acquaintance, being considered for a webmaster/systems administrator job, asked for some suggestions of technical manuals, and received a number of recommendations for only one title-Windows for Dummies. Not to say that this title, and the series in which it exists, is not a good one, but would the same title be suggested to a person with an engineering background, or with a degree in MIS (Management Information Systems)? I doubt it.

Some of the problem appears to be a very important, if not critical, aspect of most librarians� education, if not their personality-skepticism. As a group, librarians are not ready to jump on the latest bandwagon merely because it is the latest. As a group, we often are among the very few in a given organization to ask the salesperson with the flashy multimedia presentation the hard questions, questions like: "but what, exactly is the source of the data in your system?"; "how is your system better than the one we have been using for the past 15 years?"; or, "why should we pay you all this money when there is another system/database/service which covers the same material (but maybe doesn�t use frames, or animation, or complex color schemes)".

It is possible that the problem is merely one of the sales pitch trying to ignore the hard question by attacking the questioner, but I doubt it. I fear that the real problem is that "librarians", much like "professors" have developed a reputation for being easy to intimidate, for, in a word, being cowards. In this view, taking a position that a major change (or even a minor one) need justification becomes "evidence" of fear of change.

Or, in today�s environment, if the little boy who said the emperor had no clothes was a librarian, rather than realizing he was right, most of the crowd would have merely said he was too fearful to admit that the emperor�s new clothes were particularly fine, if unconventional.

• How do you react to the above statement?
• Is this the image of librarians in your experience?
• If yes, why do you think it exists?
• If not, why not?
• Should we try to change this image?
• Can we?

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