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

Library Trends, Wntr, 2008 by Juris Dilevko

In this environment, the purchase of alternative books and periodicals by libraries was viewed as an act of social advocacy that had little place within the traditional framework of intellectual freedom and professionalism. For collection-development specialists, this implied that their primary task was meeting short-term user needs, all within the context of cost containment, streamlined operations, and speedy service. Reliance on a "Give 'Em What They Want" philosophy, approval plans, and serials vendors meshed perfectly with the idea of library professionalism as managerialism, a term used by education scholars to signify an emphasis on "productive efficiency" and "allocative efficiency" in decision-making processes (Fitzsimons, 1999). Rather than searching out alternative publications that addressed thorny issues from viewpoints that challenged conventional ways of thinking, collection-development specialists allocated scarce resources as productively and efficiently as possible in order to meet "explicit standards and measures of performance in quantitative terms" (Fitzsimons, 1999). It was both sad and ironic that one of the most important legacies of the 1960s for librarianship was convincing itself that the "Give 'Em What They Want" philosophy empowered people.

Given these developments, it was only a matter of time before a for-profit entity such as Library Systems & Services (LSSI), described as the "the first company to offer full outsourcing (or privatization, to some) of public libraries," appeared (Oder, 2004, p. 36). Contracted to manage about twenty financially tenuous public libraries in the United States by the middle of 2004 (Oder, 2004, p. 38), LSSI generated profits "by paying lower salaries and benefits, hiring fewer librarians, ... choosing less-educated employees" (p. 37), spending less on materials, and increasing the hours worked by volunteers (pp. 38-39). According to Vice President for Business Development Steve Coffman, its aim was to make libraries "more like bookstores" (Oder, 2004, p. 40), an approach that was not unfamiliar to one of the key members of LSSI's Advisory Board, Charlie Robinson, the originator of the "Give 'Em What They Want" philosophy (Oder, 2004, p. 39). Any pretense that collection development was an intellectual endeavor carefully conducted by knowledgeable subject specialists was gone, gradually eroded by the implacable forces of deskilled centralized selection and approval plans. Libraries had indeed become "dynamic" and "responsive," as Berman had hoped, but they emphasized the economic aspects of that dynamic responsiveness instead of its sociocultural and knowledge-building aspects.

THE REJECTION OF OUTSOURCED COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT

Danky (1994a) rejected the outsourced vision of librarianship, believing that it was an "ubiquitous" and tragic "abandonment of expertise" on the part of librarians (p. 3). Echoing the insights of Wayne A. Wiegand, he traced the origins of "this disintegration of librarians as sources of expertise" to Melvil Dewey, who "sought outside academics to aid in the selection of appropriate books for the collection" (Danky, 1994a, p. 3). Once the fundamental task of book selection was outsourced to others, Danky (1994a) felt that librarians "doom[ed] themselves to a subservient position, one where they deny their abilities [and] their power to affect their own professional world" and the community around them (p. 3). Librarians' reliance on centralized selection, approval plans, and serials vendors to develop collections was only the latest manifestation of the outsourcing process started by Dewey. Outsourcing robbed the librarian of subject-specific knowledge, resulting in a situation "where the librarian [who] knows about the materials in the collection has become something relegated to special collections, to rare books and other smaller, less central parts of library service" (Danky, 1994a, p. 3). It was understandable that librarians were given scant respect: they had been "socialized" not to "know books," but rather to "know how to apply the standards dictated by conventional canons that have been developed outside the profession" (Wiegand, 1986, p. 395) and to spend their time on managing and organizing collections using "new technology and improved methods of administration" (p. 397).