Library Juice 3:17 Supplement 2

Library Juice 3:17 Supplement 2 - May 3, 2000 Third Core Values issue supplement A communique from Mark Rosenzweig on the core values statement Date: Mon, 1 May 2000 18:09:47 -0400 To: plgnet-l[at]listproc.sjsu.edu, srrtac-l[at]listproc.sjsu.edu From: Mark Rosenzweig <iskra[at]earthlink.net> Subject: A Guide to the core values discussion/issues [Some of you have seen some or all of this before, but I thought it would be useful to provide a single document which you can use for initiating discussion, for forwarding to interested parties, etc. Feel free to distribute as needed, to paraphrase it, add to it, edit it,use in whole or in part, or refashion it in any way that gears it to your particular needs. For those of you who have already received all or part of this material, my apologies for the repetition, but it may be useful to others. Forgive, too, the inordinate length of this posting, but I wanted to give you easy access in immediately usable form to some material to work with. MARK R.] +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ There are three interrelated issues in what one might call the re-visioning of ALA. These are issues which must be brought up at the level of your local/regional associations, your local/national divisions, your informal caucuses and groups, your individual libraries, your library schools : 1) the intransigent refusal of Council to consider changing back the quorum rule to a quorum which we had been actually able to attain and which allowed membership at conference, for virtually all of ALA's history, to meet, deliberate, and refer resolutions to Council. 2) the new, official "ALA-speaks-with-one-voice" policy which disallows SRRT and other such units from exercising free-speech rights and sending their own positions out to the public even with prominent disclaimers that they represent only the opinions of, say, SRRT and NOT ALA ,and the explicit threat (in writing) of dissolving units which violate this sanction and expelling individuals who are thought to have done so. There is the related idea that ALA can only have ONE message (i.e. something like "branding" or a logo) for the public, a concept of what an association does which is being driven by PR and advertising consultants and a leadership with a heavily corporate-influenced management perspective. 3) The promotion of an absurd "core values statement", the necessity for which is obscure, which will become the new primary public AND internal point-of-reference for what ALA stands for but which fails utterly to capture the core beliefs of librarianship; which very selectively represents what we stand for; which represents what it does in the most passive, "inactivist" voice; which uses the insipid language of PR; which refuses to use even the term "intellectual freedom (because, it is claimed, that is a term only librarians understand!) and which does not refer to our active opposition to censorship and numerous other central concerns (like opposing fees-for-service in public institutions, etc) Here are a couple of possibly useful quotes from letters of mine detailing specific points of opposition to elements of the Core Values document, FYI... (Please disseminate this whole posting as you wish and copy it for whatever meetings at which you might find it useful.) +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ "...I am particularly appalled by the section on "diversity" which doesn't even begin to comprehend what is at issue. The word is used but the meaning of it is lost. "Respect for the individuality and diversity of all people" indeed! This is not made any better in the exegesis of that slogan. Promoting equality and equity (for instance, racial equality/equity!), is not even alluded to, and neither is empowering the disempowered, recognizing how libraries can and must pro-actively serve special marginalized communities, etc. [By the way, this above point remains true even in the latest 5th version which supposedly "addresses" the diversity question by including a non-discrimination list (you know, like a perfunctory "no discrimination" clause in a legal document(... on the basis of creed race, nationality etc)., but nothing about librarianship PROMOTING diversity, in outreach, in collecting, in hiring, etc.] Elsewhere, the use of the term "equitable access" hardly sums up the need for [publicly cost free], unimpeded, enhanced and enabled, access in usable, meaningful form or that librarians are active advocates for open access in the face of all those forces which militate against it. No mention is made of social responsibility as a value or even of the social role of librarianship in promoting democracy,community and a pluralistic culture. There is no recognition of the need to positively increase access to different viewpoints. From our SR viewpoint, that completely negates the significance of expanding collections to include other voices, the alternative press, etc. There isn't even an endorsement of intellectual freedom and concrete opposition to censorship! This is HIGHLY disturbing to me from a social responsibilities perspective. On other than social responsibilities grounds, it does not recognize our commitment to the promotion of scholarship, research, inquiry, discovery and to the promotion of a "learning society" as it was once called. I believe it remains in this final form fundamentally flawed." ------------------------------------------------------------------- "...Despite the effort geared to making it a more effective presentation of our values for professionals and laymen alike, it is, in my opinion, a weak and uninspiring document, restating things which are much better and just as succinctly stated elsewhere in our policies, leaving out key values which we have historically held (unless, of course one is inclined to believe "it's in there" even though you don't see it). Among things I have not mentioned previously, it nowhere refers to the core value of ours that libraries are key institutions and librarians key actors in maintaining a public space which actively contributes to self-development, social improvement, cultural advancement,and the promotion of free public discourse, i.e. that it is our primary value that it is important, crucial, that libraries and librarianship and librarians be publicly (and privately!) promoted and supported and developed. The document at hand doesn't deal, in a related vein, with our commitment to the value of the profession advocating through the political process for public funding and library-enhancing legislation in the interests of our communities. Nor does it allude to the increasingly important value of gearing our work, political and professional, to overcoming the growing "information gap". It doesn't address our newer and highly pertinent value of using ourindividual and collective resources to shaping the direction of the development of information technology so that remains a key constiutuent to the unhampered expansion of a free public forum and resource base. These above are absent, but somehow, rather arbitrarily, on a list of only eight core items "the formation of partnerships" between libraries, something which (important though it is) is perhaps more of a "goal" or a "strategy" than a value is included. No commitment to fighting for legislation and funding, but "the formation of partnerships" is included? I don't get it." --------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The distinguished librarian Michael Gorman urges us to consider a number of our major problems with the Core Values document to be merely "semantic" ones, based on our apparent lack of access to a dictionary.. Therefore he urges us to come to our senses by whipping out the old Webster's and looking up the individual words which make up the compound terms "intellectual freedom" and "equitable access". Then we'll know what people must think the compound terms mean, by the mechanical adding up of the two units. And there, conveniently, will lie the key to eliminating what is at issue. Well, not quite. Let me just take "intellectual freedom". In its actual usage, in its historical context both within our profession and well beyond it, in its accumulated connotations which, in the estimate of any person (even a non-librarian!), would go beyond the sum of the denotations of the two isolated words that together comprise it, the term "intellectual freedom" is a rich repository of meaning which evokes not just dry dictionary definitions, but real struggles which have been fought and which continue to have to be fought. The term "intellectual freedom" in any case, connotes, even in its most common-sense reading, much more than Mr Gorman's preferred formulation "the freedom to form, hold and to express" ones own beliefs. It expresses, as we have always used it - and as we hope to have the public understand us to use it (or so I thought) - the right to access to the whole range of stuff out of which these "beliefs", these ideas, can be formed. It is tied, therefore, to our active "opposition to censorship", another expression which, for some reason, finds no place in the Core Values. What has been the problem with "intellectual freedom " and "opposition to censorship" which makes us suddenly believe they are incomprehensible to the public? Has our entire history of the use of these terms been shrouded in an obscurity which we only now realize in the wake of the Core Values Task Force's considerations? Or do we risk incomprehension on the part of future generations by maintaing the continuity of usage of these historic concepts? I don't think so, so I remain puzzled by the degree to which the Task Force is wedded to their substitute formulations. Mark Rosenzweig Michael Gorman has given me permission to post this to the Council list. GraceAnne DeCandido Michael Gorman <michaelg[at]csufresno.edu> > Most comments on the proposed values statement seem to center on > semantics. In particular, whether the phrase "intellectual freedom" is > or is not a term of art unfamiliar to those outside our field; whether > the statement's non-use of the phrase has a weakening effect; and > whether "equitable" is strong enough word. > > Webster's3 defines "intellectual" (as an adjective) as: Of, belonging > to, or relating to the intellect. "Freedom" hardly needs definition. > Therefore, anyone unfamiliar with the phrase or our meaning could read > the phrase as meaning "freedom to think"--something available in a > totalitarian state. Contrast that with the statement's: Freedom for > all people to form, to hold, and to express their own beliefs. I would > submit that the latter is unambiguous, clear, and expressed in terms > known to all. I have used the term "intellectual freedom" in my book > on values, but I expect it to be read, if at all, by librarians and not > by anyone unfamiliar with our particular uses of "intellectual freedom." > > The relevant Webster's3 definition of "equity" is: A free and reasonable > conformity to accepted standards of natural right, law, and justice > without prejudice, favoritism, or fraud and without rigor entailing > undue hardship. The relevant definition of "equitable" is: > Characterized by equity, fair to all concerned, without prejudice, > favor, or rigor entailing undue hardship. The staement's: "Assurance of > equitable access to recorded knowledge, information and creative works," > even if read more closely than by most, assures fairness, justice, and > rights to access without rigor. Can anyone quarrel with that? > > Forgive this Casuabon-like missive but I would like to inform the > discussion with some objective observations. > > Michael ------- End of forwarded message ------- +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I [MR] attach below a letter I just sent to Brien Kinkel which also might be helpful. ___________________________________________________ To: "Kinkel, Brien" <BKinkel[at]NCPC.org> From: Mark Rosenzweig <iskra[at]earthlink.net> Subject: RE: What is most important now? Cc: Bcc: X-Attachments: Dear Brien, The two best backgrounder items to the issue are the John Berry editorial in the current LJ, available on-line and in hard copy, opposing the document (there is also a brief article on the controversy in that issue) and the reprint by Rory Litwin on Library Juice as a supplement (either the last one or the one before that) of a significant part of the exchange which took place on the Council listserv. The key questions are "Why do we suddenly need an official "core values" statement at all?; why does it include what it does and exclude what it does?; why is the list so artificially abbreviated and phrased in the insipid language of PR; why is it being railroaded through Council? It is my contention basically that our core values are embedded in the ALA Policy manual, notably, but hardly exclusively, in the ALA Mission Statement, in the Freedom to Read statement , the Library Bill of Rights , the ALA Code of Ethics, the Poor People's Policy, as well as in many other sections (in which our commitments to free service in public institutions, civil rights, affirmative action,social justice and so on, are eloquently articulated). The most obvious thing about this statement is the refusal of its framers to even use the terms "intellectual freedom" or posit our opposition to censorship. This, I believe, is a fundamental and quite purposeful, revision of orientation which, even if it were the only thing wrong with this document would be quite enough reason to scrap it. I attach below the latest version of the core values document (with my response which precedes it on the page), which makes certain phony, superficial concessions to two points I raised, but which nonetheless remains a pathetic attempt to define "core values" in such a way that no one can effectively refer to them in any discussion as being violated by, let's say, "outsoucing" professional functions (as we once did) or violating the intellectual freedom of librarians themselves (as in the Berman case) or in charging fees for services in public libraries or privatizing public information resources or agreing to filter all internet access in a library or caving in to so-called community standards with respect to materials collected. As for the matter of the quorum about which you inquired: The quorum for ALA membership issues was raised by a resolution passed by Council which was sent out to members for a vote, without members having the slightest notion that it would effectively prevent such meetings from ever hapening, something of which the proposers of the new quorum rule were fully aware and which effect they actualy intended. It was raised from a quorumof 250 to a quorum of 1% of the mebership (which at present would mean 700 people) just to do business.That was done specifically to make it impossible for SRRT, et al. to have a meaningful forum for their ideas in an official context which a) would have to be reported on by American Libraries and b) which could result in the forwarding of resolutions from Membership Meetings to Council Meetings for consideration. In order to thwart SRRT, the ALA establishment was willing to close down a forum which had met regularly for most of ALA's history. The proximate cause was ONE resolution which passed, after much debate, in a membership meeting (and also was, also after much debate, over several years, passed by Council): a resolution opposing the well-documented censorship and cultural repression, the arrest of journalists, the confiscation of libraries, going on in Israel and the Occupied Territories aimed against Palestinian self-determination and anything which supported it, as well as involving very broad censorship of a whole list of the most unlikely materials. Now, in order to overturn the quorum rule and re-establish viable , regular membership meetings or take a widely supported counter-position to the core values statement or whatever, we have to have 700 people meet. That is highly unlikely a) because membership has not been able to convene for over 5 years and thus the idea is already well established that these meetings are a thing of the past and b) because it is realistically impossible to get 700 people to sit for a meeting of this sort when all kinds of other things are going on. 250, sure. 700, impossible. However, if we bring together a significant number of people for a membership meeting we can constitute some kind of unignorable forum at which the cre values issue, the ALA speaks with one voice policy and the quorum itself can be challenged . Thus the importance of getting as many people to that meeting (without any illusions of getting a quorum). Mark Finally, on the 5th(most recent (and probably final) version of the Core Values document with some cosmetic changes: Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 18:05:40 -0400 To: hpress[at]highsmith.com, alacoun[at]ala.org, "Maurice J. Freedman" <freedman[at]wls.lib.ny.us> From: Mark Rosenzweig <iskra[at]earthlink.net> Subject: On the 5th Draft of the Core Values Statement Cc: srrtac-l[at]ala.org, Bcc: X-Attachments: Before we start the celebration.... It's not clear whether [the addition of the word] "free" as in "free and open" means simply "unimpeded" or means that we [affirm our opposition] to fees for service in public institututions. Please clarify. Correlatively, there is no mention under diversity of "without respect to economic or social barriers" or anything to that effect, there or elsewhere. There is still no mention of (positively) promoting intellectual freedom. There is no mention of opposition to censorship, one of our most basic beliefs. There is no mention of the actively collecting the diversity of points of view of materials, or that we provide uncensored access . There is, of course, no mention of anything about the social role of libraries in promoting community or helping in the development of democracy. Also there is no mention still of the value of our advocacy of the extension of library services, the importance of promoting library education, or the imortance of promoting legislation favoring the development of libraries and professional librarianship. It is a true measure of the document that there is room for an upbeat phrase like "entertain and delight the human spirit". But what about the material that shakes-up, disturbs, angers, depresses, frightens, appals,? Does "American Psycho" or , for that matter, "Crime and Punishment" "entertain and delight the human spirit", or does it merely suport the "the differing needs of learners"? Mark Rosenzweig (below is the 5th version itself) --------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- From Don Sager Dear Colleagues: The Task Force has continued to review comments and suggestions on the 4th draft of the Core Values statement from ALA units, affiliates, chapters, and members of the ALA Council. As a result of these recommendations, we have made two changes which have been included in the following 5th draft. The first change pertains to the core value on access. We changed "Assurance of equitable access to recorded knowledge, information, and creative works" to "Assurance of free and open access to recorded knowledge, information, and creative works." The second change was made in the interpretation of the value on diversity. The previous wording was "We honor each request for assistance promptly and with courtesy, meeting it equitably with the fullness of tools at our command while protecting each person's common right to privacy and confidentiality." The new statement, including the value, reads "Respect for the individuality and the diversity of all people. We honor each request without bias, and we meet it with the fullness of tools at our command. We respect the individual's need for privacy, confidentiality, and the right of access to library and information services and resources regardless of race, creed, national origin, age, ability, gender, or sexual orientation. Librarianship and Information Service: A Statement on Core Values 5th Draft (28 April 2000) The library and information profession is enriched by the skills and knowledge of its individual members. Through their specialized training and experience, they contribute to the varied missions of their institutions and organizations. Over time, they have refined their services to meet the unique and ever changing needs of their communities. Despite the multiplicity of these skills and roles, librarians and information specialists hold the following values in common: Connection of people to ideas Assurance of free and open access to recorded knowledge, information, and creative works. Commitment to literacy and learning Respect for the individuality and the diversity of all people Freedom for all people to form, to hold, and to express their own beliefs Preservation of the human record Excellence in professional service to our communities Formation of partnerships to advance these values Interpretation These values encompass many principles and beliefs that may have special meanings or require a different emphasis in each of the varied professional associations representing librarians and information professionals. The following is one interpretation, which may be adopted or revised by these organizations, based on their individual goals and priorities: Connection of people to ideas. We guide the seeker in defining and refining the search; we foster intellectual inquiry; we nurture communication in all forms and formats. Assurance of free and open access to recorded knowledge, information, and creative works. We recognize access to ideas across time and across cultures is fundamental to society and to civilization. Commitment to literacy and learning. We aid people to become independent lifelong learners by selecting and offering materials that support the differing needs of all learners, and that entertain and delight the human spirit. Respect for the individuality and the diversity of all people. We honor each request without bias, and we meet it with the fullness of tools at our command. We respect the individual's need for privacy, confidentiality, and the right of access to library and information services and resources regardless of race, creed, national origin, age, ability, gender, or sexual orientation. Freedom for all people to form, hold, and to express their own beliefs. All people have the right to seek, to know, and to find. Preservation of the human record. The cultural memory of humankind and its many families, its stories, its expertise, its history, and its evolved wisdom must be preserved so it may illuminate the present and make the future possible. Excellence in professional service to our communities. Our commitment requires integrity, competence, personal growth, effective stewardship, and service to our discipline as well as to our public. Formation of partnerships to advance these values. We believe in the interdependence of libraries and librarians and advocate collaboration in all areas and between all types of library, knowing that collections and services evolve successfully through such collaboration. For future reference, the 5th draft has also been posted on the Core Values Task Force website. The URL is www.ala.org/congress/corevalues/draft5.html Don Sager, Chair, ALA Core Values Task Force ***************************************************************** Donald J. Sager, Publisher, Highsmith Press, P.O. Box 800, Ft. Atkinson, WI 53538-0800. Tel. 920/563-9571. Fax: 920/563-4801. E-mail: <dsager[at]highsmith.com>. Web: http://www.hpress.highsmith.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SOL: Spanish in Our Libraries List moderator: Bruce Jensen <flaco[at]ucla.edu> SOL site: http://skipper.gseis.ucla.edu/students/bjensen/html/sol.htm ___________________________________________________________________________top L I B R A R Y J U I C E | http://libr.org/Juice/ | | Library Juice is supported by a voluntary subscription | fee of $10 per year, variable based on ability and | desire to pay. You may send a check payable in US funds | to Rory Litwin, at PO Box 720511, San Jose, CA 95172 | | Original material and added value in Library Juice | is copyright-free; beyond that the publisher makes | no guarantees. Library Juice is a free weekly | publication edited and published by Rory Litwin. | Original senders are credited wherever possible; | opinions are theirs. 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