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

Library Trends, Wntr, 2008 by Juris Dilevko

To help solve this problem, Danky asked future librarians to take it upon themselves to know "something, anything" by choosing their "own subject to become an expert on" (Danky, 1994a, p. 3). And once they had become experts--defined as being "steeped in the literature, know[ing] the trends, know[ing] the authors or creators of new works of value" and being able to "offer informed opinions"--they would invariably contribute to strengthening their libraries' "commitment" to an active "social role" (Danky, 1994a, p. 3). Librarians with in-depth subject expertise were therefore the building blocks of any library "where all ideas, regardless of form or source, can find a home and where the curious, or desperate, can [subsequently] find" those ideas (Danky, 1994a, p. 3).

Perhaps the most important consequence of subject expertise was that librarians were never satisfied with their current state of knowledge and constantly strove to discover new sources with which to expand and deepen their existing knowledge in the belief that "all ideas, regardless of form or source" should be available at libraries. Discovering new sources was exactly what Danky did during working trips to far-flung cities. In London, England, he scoured numerous bookstores such as Compendium Books, New Beacon, Freedom Books, and Gay's the Word for alternative periodicals, enriching the Wisconsin Historical Society by more than two hundred rifles, including "British National Party literature" and "an antiracist Leeds United supporters' fanzine" (Danky, 1991, p. 678). An even more compelling illustration of Danky's commitment was his experience in Miami during a visit in the mid-1990s. The Miami-Dade Public Library (MDPL) claimed that it had taken great strides in bringing library services to diverse populations, but Danky, in the midst of compiling "a national bibliography of African-American newspapers and periodicals," discovered that the claim was exaggerated (Danky, 1998, p. 4). The small number of African American periodicals at the central location of MDPL and the nonexistence of Haitian American periodicals at an MDPL branch purportedly serving the Haitian American community was a revealing statement about the true extent of MDPL's "accomplishments" (Danky, 1998, p. 5). The dearth of Haitian American periodicals at the MDPL branch in question was all the more inexplicable insofar as Danky unearthed no less than "27 new [Haitian American] titles" at a bookstore situated about "125 feet" past the MDPL branch and "a different mix of titles" at a "second bookstore, a mile or so away" (Danky, 1998, p. 5). Even more incomprehensible was that none of the titles he purchased was "held by an OCLC library" (Danky, 1998, p. 5). The physical distance Danky traveled to purchase these titles was small--125 feet and, subsequently, another mile. But the psychological, intellectual, and symbolic distance traveled was immense--a striking indicator of the distance between two different visions of collection development.