A national online library? If its Google’s, it isn’t even a comprise of corporate America anymore, is it? Can we say proprietary? This AP article, “Scanning world’s every book means turning many, many pages” includes the phrase “books to be included in Google Inc.’s Book Search, a portal …to all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world.” That doesn’t sound theoretical to me; it’s the marriage of capitalism – that “Inc.” and the hubris are inescapable – with the world’s published history and the more I reflect on it and ideas I heard at a talk a year ago, the more I think it’s a civic shame of monumental proportions.
It’s not Google’s’ fault and it’s not libraries’ fault; it’s a failure of national civic leadership and imagination on every level in preserving for SOCIETY and presenting to the world our very heritage said Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan of New York University on February 22, 2007 in a talk entitled Libraries and Copyright: Hands Off, That’s Mine! Who Owns What, and for How Long?, part of the Boston Athenaeum’s bicentennial lecture series. Civic values got the Boston Public Library built – and filled – and then mimicked throughout America, including a splendid Italianate version in Providence, Rhode Island where I spent many hours during high school. And so what if the BPL’s location served the upper class more ideally than the working classes scattered elsewhere in the city. It was something for all of us to aspire to collectively. Corporate America’s robber barons idealized and then built CIVIC America.
That’s what we really need now in the online world. Civic, not corporate monuments. And it could be done on the cheap, too. Google’s exercise thumbs its nose at the thoroughgoing impoverishment of American society: see what a billion or two could have accomplished if only WE – all of us together – had had the vision. Reminds me of a line I’ve seen in the trailer for Charlie Wilson’s War that could be said of American society: “And you ain’t no Thomas Jefferson, so let’s call it even.” It’s been a long slide into the corporate ether.
A short piece in Boston’s April 9-16, 2008 freebie weekly dig entitled “80 percent of success is just showing up” cited high school dropout rates in large cities. No surprise, not showing up is a strong predictor for dropping out. Students with with high test scores yet high absence graduate at lower rates than those with low absence and low test scores. The Boston Plan for Excellence factors attendance in its newly developed Composite Learning Index (CLI), creating a risk profile for each student based upon academic and behavioral measures.
Showing up for the boring counts, too. The article included complaints about how teaching to the required MCAS test in Massachusetts has made high school more boring then ever, but the Boston Private Industry Council’s director does not think enough is being done to convince kids that a high school diploma is worth 2 million dollars over a lifetime of income. Interest helps: “’strong teacher-student trust made a difference of five days more of attendance over the year’” [there was no information on how trust was measured], the implication being improved graduation prospects.
So, unless you’ve got the talent to write a best-selling novel and strike it big, the ploddingly simple task of showing up pays off in the long run. We’re back to the hare and tortoise sculptures featured in Copley Square nearby the end of this weekend’s Boston Marathon.
Leading requires showing up! In fact, it’s one of the secrets to leading: being there, volunteering, following through.
Ann Wolpert, MIT Director of Libraries, did just that as she gave the keynote at Simmons College GSLIS (Graduate School of Library and Information Science) Alumni Day at 9am on a cold March 30 Saturday morning! I think we had all struggled in – at least the older half of us – see below. Based upon the multi-school event’s theme Educate, Empower, Transform: Preparing Leaders for the 21st Century, Ann focused most on leadership. She did not have any one thing to say, but touched upon a number of topics. Not least was showing up.
As for the 21st century: that’s a done deal. Wolpert noted two out of three librarians are over forty-five years of age, which means there’s a generational handover looming in library-land. It was evident in the room – a mix of over 45 professionals like myself and ever younger graduate students; a noticeably different mix from my own mid-career-changing graduate school days. Fifteen years in the profession and I am already an old dog!
Here are my notes and observations- (more…)
