An alternative vision of librarianship: James Danky and the sociocultural politics of collection development

The loss of subject expertise among collection-development specialists worried Danky because he was convinced that extensive subject expertise was a vital prerequisite for informed collection development. The prevalence of electronic aggregators was another instance of outsourcing that prevented libraries from "think[ing] globally, collect[ing] locally" (Crohan, 2000, p. 374), thus impoverishing collections by restricting them to the kind of juried "best of" model found in LLTBO. Conversely, the nonjuried long-tail distribution model found in ALL was a stinging rejection of a collection-development approach in which only those items that gave "a painless, even pleasant overview" of a given topic were deemed worthy of inclusion in an anthology and, by extension, a library collection (Katz & Klaessig, 1973, p. v). For Danky, it was important to include what others might consider to be "inadequate, anti-intellectual, [and] downright distasteful documents" (Katz & Klaessig, 1973, p. vii). ALL was therefore an eloquent invitation to collection-development specialists to reorient their practices so that they no longer conceptualized professional expertise in terms of excluding works based on artificial criteria, but in terms of including as much overlooked material as possible. Exclusionary practices were embodied by outsourcing, as manifested in centralized "Give 'Em What They Want" selection, approval plans, and serial vendors turned electronic aggregators. Inclusionary practices were symbolized by non-outsourced collection-development activities performed by librarians who had not abandoned their subject-specific expertise in the name of "productive efficiency" and "allocative efficiency," who deployed that expertise by purchasing hard-to-find (alternative) materials, and who understood that library collections containing alternative materials were the only ones that would lead to "increased understanding" and socio-cultural liberation. These were the kind of librarians who welcomed each issue of Counterpoise, a journal founded in 1997 by Charles Willett, because of its ability to "concentrat[e] information" about alternative and hard-to-find materials in one place (Dilevko & Dali, 2004, p. 73). These were also the kind of librarians who strove to convince administrators to emulate the library at the Minneapolis Community & Technology College (MCTC), which allocated first 10 percent and later 15 percent of its materials budget to alternative-press resources (Eland, 2000; MCTC, n.d.).

Invoking the spirit of George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, a book where Orwell "concluded enigmatically that we (meaning all of us) would solve the problem of poverty when we chose to" (Danky, 1996b, p. viii), Danky believed that it behooved each librarian to confront the lack of alternative publications in libraries with "initiative," "energy," and "tenacity" (Danky, 1996b, p. viii). Becoming an expert in "something, anything" was the first step in a process that would inevitably lead individual librarians to include alternative publications in their institutions. The more one knew about a topic, the more one realized how many gaps existed not only in one's knowledge of that topic, but also in the library collections that symbolized knowledge of that same topic. Alternative publications could help fill those numerous gaps.