Earlier this year, just in time for what may be the biggest public library funding crisis ever, Harper Collins published Marilyn Johnson's This Book is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, a sort of love letter to the profession of librarianship. Though not exactly a blockbuster, it's been doing surprisingly well.
It's maybe not so surprising that librarians like the book a great deal. At the ALA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. this past June, they were lining up by the hundreds at the Tantor Audio booth to meet Johnson and get her autograph on the audiobook edition.
What's harder to have predicted is the fact that it's also doing very well with library users -- this even despite the fact, revealed by Johnson, that librarians sometimes refer to them behind their backs as "losers" rather than "users." (According to Johnson, some librarians prefer the more colorful term "mofo's.")
When I checked earlier today at the Cuyahoga County Public Library, 11 out of 20 copies were out on loan. At the Free Library of Philadelphia, 11 out of 30 copies were circulating. At the Chicago Public Library, 23 of 48 copies were currently out. At the Seattle Public Library, there were 54 active holds on 22 copies. The Hennepin County (Minnesota) Public Library catalog shows 125 current requests on 24 reservable copies. And at the Boston Public Library 12 out of 13 copies were circulating or on hold, and the 13th copy is for in-library use only. Not bad for a rather specialized topic.
Johnson's book isn't so much about libraries as it is about librarians. She says she became interested in the people who make up the profession while working on a previous book on obituaries. Among the most interesting obits she read, says Johnson, were the ones about librarians -- including Fred Kilgour, founding director of OCLC and Henriette Avram "the mother of the MARC record."
As public libraries all over the country are cutting staff and services and at times struggling to justify their very existence, Johnson's thesis is that we need professional librarians more than ever. "Like Girl Scouts," says Johnson (forgetting momentarily about the many males in the profession), "they want to help."
Johnson describes modern Americans as suffering from "information sickness" (a term she borrows from a highly obscure but rather prescient-sounding sci-fi novel of the 1980s), and librarians, she says, can heal us. We turn to them for tech support when we don't have a corporate IT department behind us. Even with Google on our desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones (devices which, Johnson hastens to remind us, not everyone owns), we go to librarians when we don't know the words to search for.
"Are librarians obsolete in the Age of Google?" she asks rhetorically. "Are you kidding?! Librarians are more important than ever!" And if you don't believe her, she says, try using the Massachusetts Library Association's online Library Value Calculator, that totes up each reference question asked as being worth an average of $7.00.
Johnson puts a lot of her focus on reference and instructional librarians, but in a way, her book is a crash course in Library and Information Science in general, offering a pretty good overview of the profession. She provides a little bit of easily overlooked history when she reminds her readers that it wasn't so very long ago that libraries were not interlinked through global online catalogs and connected to their patrons 24/7 via the Web. There was even a time when there was debate about whether computers had any place at all in the library.
With the eye of a social historian, Johnson looks at how, in the last decade or so, librarians have embraced blogs and other forms of social media and become tech-savvy "cybrarians," pushing out beyond the walls of the library and creating an online "biblioblogosphere." Thus, did a historically silent profession "turn clamorous," rethinking and transforming the profession in a process that's far from over.
Perhaps the most historically significant part of Johnson's book is her chapter on "The Connecticut Four" -- the small group of public librarians who bravely sued the U.S. Department of Justice over its attempts to use provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act to demand private information about patrons and their activities.
Recipients of the Justice Department's top-secret "national security letters" are barred, on pain of federal prosecution, from publicly discussing or even acknowledging receipt of such letters. Johnson's thorough recounting of the Connecticut episode makes clear the extreme ways in which librarians are sometimes thrust onto the front lines of the ongoing battle to preserve civil liberties. Even in the Obama Era, she pointedly observes, the threat has not completely receded.
Johnson talks a lot about technology in libraries, and Playaway even gets a mention as an example of cutting-edge tech embraced by forward-thinking librarians for the good of their patrons/mofo's
Not all librarians call their patrons mofo's of course, and this is not a book about all librarians. Rather it highlights the type of librarians who have inspired the author and who we all should appreciate more. The book comes just in time for a new season of public library budget cuts around the country, with no clear end to the cutting in sight.
Johnson talks at some length about the new breed of "tattooed librarians," and, as noted, her following among the profession seems assured. The Harper library blog even features a photo of one newly graduated information specialist who took Johnson's tattooed librarian idea to it's utmost extreme and had the Super Woman-like image of the book's cover inked at full size onto her thigh. Definitely not your grandfather's librarian.
Narrator Hillary Huber reads the audiobook version with great skill, moving with equal grace through passages on online catalog migration as well as sarcastic rants by bloggers such as "The Effing Librarian." Her reading makes for a quick and enjoyable listen to a timely and important book.
To receive blog posts in your e-mail inbox or RSS reader, click on "subscribe to this blog's feed".
Like this post?· Click on the button below to "like" it FaceBook-style.
Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta
