This Book Is Overdue!

by Marilyn Johnson

  I caught her after a panel discussion called “Do Libraries Innovate?” (not enough yet, she and the other experts, all blogging librarians, agreed), and trotted with her from the hotel venue on to her next event at the Washington, D.C., convention center. An ALA staffer—“our Sherpa,” Karen teased—guided us along the crowded summer sidewalks.

  She mentioned, small world, both Michael Stephens (she’d helped with his dissertation), and Jessamyn West, whose video had just rocketed through the blogosphere. “She makes a great representative librarian,” Karen said. “Bloggers are more iconoclastic than most librarians, as you might have noticed. It may not be one hundred percent representative of the profession, but it’s a good image.”

  While power-walking, Karen reflected: “Maybe I’m just feeling optimistic because I’m at a conference, but basic library literacy has reached a tipping point.” She didn’t mean literacy as in reading books—of course librarians can read! She meant computer literacy. “If you don’t do the technology by now, you’re either retired or you’re off in a corner, waiting to be retired. There is still too much tolerance in the profession for being uncomfortable with technology, but not the way there was when I started fifteen years ago.”

  Karen is tiny, not quite five feet, and moved on that hot afternoon with speed and efficiency. “You know, she used to fix F-16s?” our guide said. Karen confirmed this; she had been a maintenance officer in the Air Force, where “lack of innovation was a deterrent to your career—and so was lack of excellence.” She quoted another blogging librarian, who had said, wryly, “Only in our profession would people who consider e-mail annoying be allowed to serve on a committee for tech innovation.” The librarians’ desire to extend their hand to all and their “Quakerly love of consensus,” as one put it—not to mention the relatively slow turnover in the ranks of elders—worked against streamlined innovation and took a toll on progress, at least as measured by the high-tech crowd. To Karen, librarians needed to step it up.

  She helped launch the American Library Association’s blog Tech Source, and for two years, she prodded and hectored librarians to use the tools of the web and rethink the profession. Her personal blog was her current “bully pulpit.” She sensed its impact almost immediately. Her literary work could take years to publish, her essays on technical topics, weeks; but she could blog about something on Free Range Librarian, and it would say, “Posted 2 sec ago.” Half the fun was in getting comments and continuing the dialogue; to subscribe to a blog without subscribing to its comments was to miss part of the point. “It’s the most amazing way to network with the world,” Karen enthused. And, just to give it a librarian spin, she added, “I love it that you’re self-archiving in real time.”

  Lest you imagine that all is smoochy in library blogland, let me point out that librarians, known for their tolerance and insistence on equality, can also be quarrelsome and fractious.

  The anonymous Annoyed Librarian (“Whatever it is, I’m against it”) calls Jenny, Michael, Lichen, Karen, and the crowd they run with the “twopointopians” (2.0 + utopians). Annoyed has made it her particular mission to belittle the new wave of techie-librarians and cast suspicion on their motives; they’ve made careers out of showing librarians what librarians could easily, she claims, find out for themselves. And their enthusiasm galls her: “‘What an exciting time it is to be a librarian! How lucky we all are! What great fun we all have! What wonderful opportunities we all have! How exciting it is to be us!’ Do any of us really get excited by all the supposedly excited librarians around us? Or do we just wonder what meds they’re on?”

  Her pointed, mocking, funny posts on the Annoyed Librarian are as widely read as any of the upbeat, tech-savvy posts on Shifted Librarian or Tame the Web or Free Range Librarian. When Library Journal began hosting her anonymous blog, the outcry was immediate. Who is Annoyed? Even the Library Journal editors claim not to know and negotiate with her (or him) through lawyers.

  As for the benefits of a networked profession, video-gaming in libraries, Twitter, or anything else that hints of hipness—don’t make her laugh. Annoyed is into ridiculing the profession and amusing herself and others while she nibbles “vermouth-soaked olives.” As for blogging? Annoyed sneers, “It ain’t that hard. Even I have a blog.”

  The Real Poop

  I had no idea poop was such a problem for librarians. Each day—and when I’m really into it, that means twelve times each day—I go to my RSS feed and scan the ninety-seven librarian blogs I monitor for new posts. (I’m a lightweight; Sarah Houghton Jan, who gives a goth twist to information science on her blog, Librarian in Black, keeps up with 450 of them.) I can always count on a dozen or two of these bloggers to enlighten and amuse me on the topic of technology and libraries, which is saying something. Kathryn Greenhill, a sharp Australian with the blog Librarians Matter, for instance, posted no fewer than six videos of librarians around the world performing variations on Michael Jackson’s Thriller (with book carts and without; with zombie makeup and without—fascinating and kind of scary). Kathryn, like the other 2.0 bloggers, is engaged in an occasionally playful but mostly serious effort to fast-forward librarians into the future. She isn’t blogging about the mess behind the stacks.

  Happyville Library was not a blog about poop, but poop was its genesis. It began in mid-2005 as Libraries for Dummies, but a certain publishing concern felt it owned the word dummies. So the writer came up with the name Happyville Library for her blog. The Happy Villain, as she calls herself, takes great pleasure in documenting the deranged goings-on in the public library in Illinois where she works. I remember a long, lovingly written post about checking in a DVD with goo in its slipcase. “What’s worse? White goo or brown goo?” she mused. “I’m struggling right now with that question.” Finally she decided, “Goo is never good.” Another post consisted entirely of “signs we never thought we’d need to make,” each of which told its own condensed story:

  While waiting for your ride home, do not set fire to your homework to keep warm.

  You may not take the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue into the washroom.

  Iguanas are not allowed in the building.

  If you are out of diapers, do not open the soiled diaper, scoop out the turd, leave the turd on a shelf, and then ask the librarian to tape the newly cleaned diaper closed again….

  She wrote about her coworkers, too, until one of them made a formal complaint. In order to keep her job, the Happy Villain agreed to shut down the Happyville blog and never write another negative word about her library, its patrons, or her colleagues. The only Happyville Library post that can be accessed on the Web now is the last, her farewell to the world of library blogs, with dozens of comments trailing below, some of them howls of disappointment: “I don’t think I can live in a world in which the Happyville Library blog does not exist. You’re killing me here!” and “No, you can’t leave! I need your blog too much for you to go!! You always show me that I’m not alone in Library Weirdo Land,” and, most tellingly, “I have always enjoyed how you can write so well about poop.”

  Did you ever? I mean, did you ever think that being a librarian meant dealing with poop? Talking about it, finding little piles of it in the stacks, writing about it on the Web. I certainly never thought that I would have to write about it. In fact, one of the things that appealed to me about this book was the intellectual, cerebral, almost disembodied nature of the subject of librarians in the digital age. I envisioned leaving the physical world altogether and leaning into the computer screen to commune with my subjects—following them along the path of digitization and the vapor trails of their thoughts, leaving even the mild stink of old books and rotting newspapers in the dust. I imagined the wired world of information and literature, full of brilliant, helpful, visionary librarians, as gleaming and immaculate as an Apple Store, except not just for those who could afford the Apple merchandise. I was spending my life trying to focus on what was new in librarianship: new attitudes, new targets for outreach
, the new issues and possibilities that computers in libraries represented. I didn’t want to be sitting in a sticky chair thinking about poop. Children, the homeless, smuggled-in soda bottles that spill all over the stacks, poop—these were all problems, as the academics would say, beyond the scope of my inquiry.

  And yet, here was poop.

  Kristen Gilbert, who works in a library in Rhode Island and blogs as Crissy, Queen of Fucking Everything, reports that her coworkers were abuzz the day they discovered someone pooped in the book drop. There was much speculation about how exactly the deed had been accomplished—perhaps the guilty party had pooped and then deposited it, since the alternative, given the construction of the drop, would seem to make balancing during the act difficult. Crissy thought it hilarious, but the librarians she worked with did not. I asked other librarians. Yes, poop is a problem, though not as big a problem as slashed budgets, the high cost of electronic databases, and the preposterous fees OCLC charges libraries to use WorldCat. However, one librarian recalled a patron they used to call Sir Poops-a-lot, who left a trail of turds in his wake.

  I wrote to the Happy Villain (whose e-mail address included the phrase “goo is never good”), hoping to gain access to the Happyville Library archive, but she continues to live in fear of losing her job, which, she hastened to point out, she likes. “I’ve heard many stories about anonymous bloggers who were ‘outed’ and lost their jobs, and frankly, I just cannot risk it.” As for the poop question, “Yes,” she told me, “people have left poop in the most unbelievable places. Mostly down in the youth department, but we have found what I have dubbed ‘rogue turds’ all over the library. What amazes me is that other librarians e-mail me routinely and say they too find them and are somewhat comforted to know that it’s not just their patrons doing this, but everyone’s…. People from faraway places like England, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia let me know that it happens there as well. People are strange creatures.”

  Rogue turds! Is it any wonder the whispering behind library staff doors has turned into exclamations on the Internet? They can’t keep this stuff to themselves. “When I first started blogging,” Happy Villain continued, “there was a terrible backlash from more prim and proper folks in the field, who butchered me on the Internet for disgracing their profession by making fun of some of the situations I found myself in. It wasn’t even that they didn’t like my sarcasm or my scathing retelling of events. These people were angry that I had violated some code of silence that said we weren’t supposed to talk about our ‘bad’ patrons or ‘geeky’ coworkers…. Despite how far it’s come, the field still abhors a big mouth.”

  She admitted that her personal blog, If I Ran the Universe, scoured as it is of most sarcasm and complaints, didn’t quite satisfy her. “I really miss the old days because there isn’t much catharsis out there for me anymore.”

  The Happy Villain watches other bloggers write about the absurd and abundant material in libraryland with envy, while her unvented observations gather steam. The pressure gets to her. Recently, she was writing about a conversation with another librarian on the subject of “the weirdos in our field.” Before she knew it, she had exploded: “…we forget how normal and stable we are until we attend a meeting at the consortium, and when these freaks return to the Mother Ship, all the stops are pulled out. I would not be surprised to find anyone wearing aluminum foil helmets or devouring their own young….”

  After we corresponded for a while, the Happy Villain confessed: “I did start another blog in the same vein as the old one, 100% anonymous, but I don’t update it often because I’m too paranoid that my bosses are out looking for me to start a new one…. Writers seldom just stop writing. We’re like serial killers in that way. You have to stop us, because we cannot stop ourselves.”

  5.

  BIG BROTHER AND THE HOLDOUT COMPANY

  “The basic thing—what we held on to—was, it just isn’t right to do this to innocent people.”

  The PEN America gala was just like high school, except instead of a prom king and queen, we had a tuxedoed Salman Rushdie and Padma Lakshmi in a slinky gown, gathering her skirts and melting into the revolving door at the Museum of Natural History. If you want to stand with the angels against censorship and fatwas, the PEN gala is an inspiring event, and a scene, as well. Famous literary types in sparkling evening wear gather to cheer the courage of writers and others who had risked imprisonment and worse to tell their truths. Inside the museum, the great hall of ocean life was lit like an underwater cave. A massive blue whale hung over the scene and flocks of seabirds and walruses behind glass witnessed our splendid invasion. And somewhere in the program, between the announcement of the winner of one prize and another, a modest-looking man and woman from Connecticut were asked to stand and take a bow. The FBI had sent them and two of their colleagues a national security letter, a top-secret demand to hand over their libraries’ computer records. Rather than comply, the Connecticut Four challenged the USA Patriot Act that authorized the letter and sued the government. They had been gagged, essentially, for a year while the case worked its way through the courts. Now they were free to be recognized by name and honored for defending our right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. Three librarians and the director of their library consortium, collectively known in the court case as “John Doe,” had become, arguably, the most celebrated incognito heroes since Deep Throat. George Christian, the director, and one of the librarians, Janet Nocek, now stood and waved and smiled at the enthusiastic applause. Christian’s glasses winked in the spotlight.

  My husband and I clapped and cheered along with everyone else, but we were also laughing. Unknowingly, we’d been standing with Nocek and Christian at the reception earlier in the evening, making small talk that began when the man had excused himself, leaned over to my husband, and plucked a piece of the dry cleaner’s cellophane from his tux. We thought we were passing the cocktail hour with two other wallflowers, lucky enough to score a ticket to this cosmopolitan scene. Instead, our fellow nobodies turned out to be the whole point of the PEN gala. We had been standing with our heroes.

  A few weeks later, I drove up to Hartford to get John Doe’s story from Christian and Nocek and their colleagues, Peter Chase and Barbara Bailey. A spring nor’easter was pounding the East Coast with rain so hard I hydroplaned up Interstate 95. What was a few inches of rain and some fierce, almost 50-mph winds compared to defying the FBI? This happened to be the same nor’easter that was at that very moment flooding Westchester, the first of the series of blows that challenged that county’s networked libraries. Here the storm led us to another story of networked libraries—but this one featured a consortium where the tech people and the librarians were firm allies, operating together so harmoniously, they were able to put a wrench in the secret workings of the federal government.

  Let it also be noted that these people came from their far-flung towns in a biblical downpour to sit in the café of the Mark Twain Museum in Hartford and recount their stories for me all afternoon, as if they had never told them before, had no other pressing business, and weren’t soaking wet. Having been gagged, they felt a duty to speak out and explain themselves to anyone who wanted to hear. They had made history, as their obituaries would someday record. They didn’t have the option to be nice, quiet librarians anymore.

  I commandeered a corner table near a big picture window, behind which an old oak tree was doing battle with the storm. I wiped the table myself, so I knew it was crumb-free when George Christian sat down and plucked an invisible mote off its surface, just as he had plucked the scrap of cellophane from my husband’s suit. A fastidious man. The Mark Twain Museum was central for the scattered librarians, and symbolic, a monument to one of Connecticut’s great literary figures, a writer who stood firmly against sheeplike behavior in human beings. “It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many can successfully resist,” Mark Twain once wrote. I was sure his spirit would be with us.

&nbs
p; Few principles rouse librarians more than the right of free access to information and the right to privacy in our choices. If a librarian phones our house to say a book we’ve requested has arrived, she will not tell our husband that Confronting the Batterer is in; she won’t tell our children we can pick up that copy of How to Break Bad News. What we searched for on library computers, from information about cancer or trans-sexuality to instructions on how to build a pipe bomb, was our own business. As recently as the 1980s, the FBI urged librarians to report people with Eastern European–sounding accents or names who were looking at scientific material; they called it the FBI Library Awareness Program, and librarians en masse resisted it. There are library confidentiality laws in place in forty-eight U.S. states, and rulings favorable to library confidentiality in the other two (Hawaii and Kentucky), and policies had been developed at most libraries to guard against “unreasonable searches and seizures”—everybody remembered that amendment, but librarians had developed muscles defending it. If an agent of the government wanted to know what we’d been reading, he had to show “probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation,” or a good librarian would stand between our records and his badge.