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An alternative vision of librarianship: James Danky and the sociocultural politics of collection development
Library Trends, Wntr, 2008 by Juris Dilevko
For Danky, the many were anything but trivial; in fact, they were at the heart of things. The biennial Alternative Library Literature (ALL) was therefore conceived by Berman and Danky as a response to the selection philosophy animating LLTBO (Berman & Danky, 1984a, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002a). It functioned as an antianthology, a "deliberately unbalanced collection" that spanned the years 1982-2001 in ten volumes (Berman & Danky, 1984b, p. 1). Unlike LLTBO, ALL was proudly nonjuried, with articles "arbitrarily" chosen by Berman, Danky, and the recommendations of coworkers (Berman & Danky, 1984b, p. v). In its ten editions, ALL contained 613 articles: 562 reprinted articles from other periodicals and 51 original contributions. Articles were typically arranged in thematic sections such as "People/Work"; "Censorship/Human Rights"; "Service/Advocacy/Empowerment"; "Women"; and "Multiculturalism/Third World" (e.g., Berman & Danky, 1996, pp. v-vi). In nine of the ten ALL volumes, there was also a separate thematic section entitled "Alternatives," which provided insight into both the theory and practice of building strong collections of nonmainstream materials.
Berman and Danky did not claim that the selected articles were the best of library literature. Rather, articles in ALL dealt with topics "usually overlooked or minimized in standard library media"; as such, they "truly represent[ed] the major out-of-the-mainstream concerns, viewpoints, and creativity" with which all librarians should be familiar (Berman & Danky, 1984b, p. v). Readers should not just be presented with purified library literature, as in LLTBO. Such an approach was disingenuous, especially because "[c]onventional library literature describes a world that does not exist, one of conventional people working in standard-issue environments," where more attention is given to "personal aggrandizement" than to "participatory democracy" (Danky, 1994b, p. viii). In a library world "where ... jobs are increasingly deskilled and demeaning," library workers should "turn back to a world of ideas" from "many places" (Danky, 1994b, p. viii; 1996b, p. viii). Only in this way could libraries assume real "value" for the "millions of people who are denied access to all other governmental institutions save prisons, welfare and asylums" (Danky, 1994b, p. viii). The diversity of sources from which ALL took its articles can thus be interpreted as a trenchant response to a "standard-issue" working environment where professionalism was equated with narrow specialization and the type of "restrictive procedures" (Danky, 1994b, p. viii, 1996b, p. viii) that ensured the domination of "corporate and conservative views of what librarianship is all about" (Berman & Danky, 2002b, p. 1).
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