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Re: Professional Responsibility
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From: bookmarch_at_aol.com
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 11:11:47 -0400 (EDT)
We are, I believe, getting confused between instances and principles. In th e instance Debbie and Sue are certain that several recent and/or popular/fa miliar books are so clearly inaccurate/harmful/stereotypical that it is a l ibrarian's "professional responsibility" to weed them out or not replace th em. Others may not agree. That is a specific example of the more general is sue that is our topic -- the fact that a librarian's judgment is always the intersection of several strands; her training, her background, her profess ional experience, her sense of her community, her taste -- as well, of cour se, as the outside reading she has done in journals, reviews, scholarship, blogs, listservs, etc. As I recently told my Masters students at Rutgers -- there is no single right answer about which books belong in a collection. Rather we are training them to refine the basis of their judgment. But in t he end the conclusion one of them reaches may be totally at odds with the c onclusion I reach. There is no exact sc ience to book selection or collectio n building -- but there a difference between uninformed subjectivity and tr ained analysis. That is the difference we can all agree is the foundation o f librarianship as a profession. After that we can have it, debating the va lue of individual books.
Marc Aronson
Received on Sat 25 Sep 2010 11:11:47 AM CDT
Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 11:11:47 -0400 (EDT)
We are, I believe, getting confused between instances and principles. In th e instance Debbie and Sue are certain that several recent and/or popular/fa miliar books are so clearly inaccurate/harmful/stereotypical that it is a l ibrarian's "professional responsibility" to weed them out or not replace th em. Others may not agree. That is a specific example of the more general is sue that is our topic -- the fact that a librarian's judgment is always the intersection of several strands; her training, her background, her profess ional experience, her sense of her community, her taste -- as well, of cour se, as the outside reading she has done in journals, reviews, scholarship, blogs, listservs, etc. As I recently told my Masters students at Rutgers -- there is no single right answer about which books belong in a collection. Rather we are training them to refine the basis of their judgment. But in t he end the conclusion one of them reaches may be totally at odds with the c onclusion I reach. There is no exact sc ience to book selection or collectio n building -- but there a difference between uninformed subjectivity and tr ained analysis. That is the difference we can all agree is the foundation o f librarianship as a profession. After that we can have it, debating the va lue of individual books.
Marc Aronson
Received on Sat 25 Sep 2010 11:11:47 AM CDT
