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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
As shown in Table 3, the top 10 journals from which ALL drew articles supplied 24.14 percent (148 articles) of its total contents of 613 articles, or 26.33 percent of its 562 previously printed articles. As shown in Table 4, ALL drew on 240 journals for its 562 previously printed articles. Twenty-seven journals, representing 11.25 percent of the total number of journals, each provided at least 5 articles, which cumulatively represented 45.20 percent (254 articles) of the total number of previously printed articles that appeared in ALL. On the other hand, 162 journals, representing 67.50 percent of the total number of journals, provided one article apiece, which cumulatively represented 28.83 percent (a plurality) of the total number of previously printed articles that appeared in ALL. Compared with LLTBO, ALL drew on more journals for its reprinted articles (240 titles, as opposed to 169 titles for LLTBO) and took a significantly smaller percentage of its reprinted articles from a core set of journals (26.33 percent, as opposed to 42.18 percent for LLTBO). The percentage of articles that ALL reprinted from journals that supplied it with one article (28.83 percent) was more than twice as large as the percentage of articles that LLTBO reprinted from journals that supplied it with one article (13.90 percent). The titles alone of many of the 162 journals that were sourced only once by ALL bear witness to Berman and Danky's multidimensional view of librarianship: Adbusters, Asian American Justice Watch, Black & Ethnic Minority Workers Group, Central America Connection, Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism, Human Rights Interest Reporter, Social Anarchism, Tikkun, and Whole Earth Review.
In addition, other than Collection Building, there were no overlaps between the top ten journals sourced by LLTBO and ALL (Table 1 and Table 3). And, as shown in Table 5, the core titles that appeared most frequently in LLTBO hardly ever appeared in ALL, again with the exception of Collection Building. Viewed from another perspective, 38.55 percent of the articles appearing in LLTBO (244 articles) were taken from the twenty most prestigious journals as determined by directors of ARL libraries (Kohl & Davis, 1985, p. 42), while only 3.91 percent of the articles appearing in ALL (22 articles) were sourced from this same set of twenty prestigious journals (Table 6). Finally, seven of the top ten journals from which LLTBO drew its articles also appeared among the twenty most prestigious journals as determined by ARL directors, while none of the top ten journals from which ALL drew its articles appeared among this same set of twenty prestigious journals. The core titles used most frequently by LLTBO as sources of its "best" articles to a great extent mirrored the titles deemed most prestigious for tenure and promotion purposes by ARL library directors.
LLTBO and ALL were therefore two very different compendia: the former sourced its articles from well-established and well-known journals; the latter went much further afield to encompass a wide range of alternative periodicals. Not only was ALL a new kind of anthology, it also provided a blueprint for the way that libraries should develop their collections of books and periodicals. If librarians included alternative publications in their libraries, the resulting collections would be richer than if they had been put together under the auspices of centralized selection, approval plans, and serials vendors. In ALL, Danky formalized what he had known for years: the "trivial many" were in fact the "useful many," something that Juran admitted almost forty years after his initial statement about the "trivial many" (J. D. Eldredge, 1998, p. 500). If librarians read ALL, their professional performance and general understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of librarianship would increase. Articles from alternative publications were therefore highly useful. Libraries that developed strong collections of alternative periodicals and books were similarly useful because such alternative publications increased the understanding of patrons about any given topic.
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