Internet Librarian

After half a decade of writing this column, I finally touched a nerve: The response to my January/February column (p. 34) on the National Union Catalog Pre-1956 Imprints (“Mansell” to the cognoscenti) generated way more response and e-mail than any of my previous efforts. I was quite surprised, especially by the range of that response, which came from librarians new and not-so-new, people who’d used it and loved it or just now learned about it, and folks who’d only had to move it from one building to another, a few huge volumes at a time, on a book truck in a rickety elevator with a surly undergraduate. (Thanks to you all for writing, by the way!)

This led me to wonder, of course: Why such a response? The easy, knee-jerk reaction is nostalgia for those good old days that Mansell represents, a time when we knew what we were doing, when we were comfortable and secure in our professional realm. And while at least a few of the responses I got fell into that category, that’s a little too simplistic to be a satisfactory explanation.

Mansell also connotes a time when we had a much stronger common experience, when there was a body of knowledge about sources and tools and communities and clients, and when What to Do seemed a lot more obvious.

Fear of flux

Now, of course, the tools are in tremendous flux, and not just reference sources: Witness the huge hoo-ha over RDA and the “death of cataloging” that’s being played out in the knowledge-organization world. Everything else seems up in the air. Some of our colleagues seem perfectly happy and eager to live in a world where everything changes every day—and they get to be a part of that change—and others just kinda don’t.

Exhibit A: the whole “don’t use Wikipedia” thing that rises up regularly and even makes the media now and then. This masquerades as concern regarding the quality of information, the importance of evaluation and authority, and so on, and no doubt there are genuine aspects of that at work.

It also makes us look like idiots. First of all, dismissing a complicated source wholesale smacks of mindlessness. Secondly, the thing is hugely popular, so it can’t possibly be all that bad. For us to ignore or even prohibit it is ostrich- (and Canute-) like in the extreme.

Newer tools inhabit a different conceptual universe. On the margins they can be spotty and superficial and sometimes downright wrong or even offensive; but they can also be more responsive, more interesting, and even—dare I say it?—more accurate and more authoritative.

We have to live in both these domains—the quick/dirty/easy and the precise/detailed/deep, each where appropriate and best. We have to be able to assess not only sources but also situations, when to use what and for whom and why. Sometimes Wikipedia makes sense, other timesWorld Book, sometimes OED, occasionally Word Spy. As Samuel Swett Green said in 1876, “provid[e] every person who applies for aid with the best book he is willing to read.”

Besides, there’s one simple solution if you’re unsatisfied with a tool such as Wikipedia: fix it. Think about it: With several thousand librarians in there fixing errors, citing sources, making it better, how great could it be? We all know there are errors and inconsistencies and things that just bug us in every tool we use. The idea of changing the venerable Mansell (or OED or AACR2 or MARC or whatever) used to be an example of hubris; now it’s part of the deal.