I, Too, Will Fight You for the Library.
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Among my favorite poems is this one by Taylor Mali entitled “I’ll Fight You for the Library.” What I like most about Mali’s poem is how willing the speaker is to put his career on the headsman’s block to protect the primacy of student learning in the library (“the only place in the school WITH BOOKS!”) and within an educational institution wherein administrators seek to dominate physical and intellectual space. That Administrative class dominance has a ring of the familiar in most American educational institutions, and the mark of it is often a matter of fiscal “efficiency.” This has even led some to posit that physical libraries are obsolete.
For example, at one of the colleges where I work, the physical collection has diminished year by year. Even for the size of the college, it is among the most anemic book holdings I have ever encountered in a library. I went to high school in a relatively small town, and the holdings at my high school library were more substantial. The explanation? They’ve gone “digital.” They have “ebooks.” Ebooks, particularly of the academic sort, are not actually books; they are indexed content. Students do not read them the way physical books are traditionally read, i.e. in a cumulative way. Instead, they hit Ctrl+F, search for a term, copy it, and paste quotes into their papers. This is not really reading, as there is no prolonged meditation on a topic, nor meaningful time spent following the contour of the author’s thought. Another problem with ebooks, of course, is that you don’t own them. You own a subscription. The library pays a tidy sum every year so students can access ebooks which will appear on their devices for a few days and then disappear. They can only be printed in sections. Try to print the whole book and the system will shut you down. In other words, the library does not really possess an ebook, and so when libraries trade a physical book for same digital title, they haven’t really done an equal exchange at all.
That’s part of why I’m so uncomfortable with the “free digital textbooks” fad. Students almost assuredly won’t read them cover to cover, as my grandmother was wont to do at the beginning of every semester in her school years. They will mine them for quotes and answers, but retain very little because they’ll have spent so little time with them. Not only that, but digital technology fragments attention, disrupts focus, short term memory, and leads to what Nicholas Carr calls “power browsing” instead of reading. “Free digital textbooks” aren’t really free (someone pays, and in the case of California’s K-12 digital textbook initiatives that someone is the taxpayer), aren’t really books and they won’t be read like books. Not only that, but unlike a physical book, they are subject to change, editing, and outright retraction, according to whatever agenda comes to power.
Moreover, computers and especially smartphones are devices of distraction by nature, but the purveyors of digital “textbooks” make their wares tablet and smartphone friendly. Books require concentration and time. Phones and tablets eat time and scatter focus. They’re actually the opposite of books in this way, and are largely poor tools for teaching a student anything you wish them to retain.
Another argument for digitizing academic collections and outsourcing physical textbooks to the cloud is the illusion of “going green.” Surely paper, which is an almost infinitely renewable resource, is more “green” than a server that must remain “on” and be powered from any number of energy sources, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, every year…forever.
Finally, of course, there are the Administrative darlings that digital “libraries” (which aren’t libraries) will “save money” (probably) and “increase efficiency,” (probably not) which brings me back to Mali’s poem. If the ebook can’t do the work of a physical book, can’t train habits of mind that encourage deliberation and close reading, and will result in a student becoming a fairly shallow thinker (but expert internet-user), then I think the cost is too high, whatever ebooks save in dollars. Student learning must be primary, not the administrator’s agenda. Whatever smooth, bright digital matriculation machinery Administrators try to erect to please their legislative masters who will, in turn, dispense lavish taxpayer funding, the students who pass through the lower intestine of higher education will emerge no smoother and brighter for their journey. Rather the opposite, I fear, considering the way colleges are failing.
So, I am concerned that libraries are shrinking physical holdings. I am concerned that Open Source Educational Resources are billing themselves as “Libraries” when they are really jumped-up digital databases. A library is so much more than just a curated collection of holdings. When library services degrade, the culture isn’t far behind. And who among us will, like Dr. Joseph D’Angelo in Mali’s “I’ll Fight You for the Library,” stand up to insist that libraries are crucial and nonnegotiable? Who in the community will demand that physical holdings remain physical, and grow? What teachers will insist on physical textbooks and proselytize reading for knowledge and pleasure in the digital age? What parents will take the devices of distraction from before their children’s eyes and put books in their hands? What administrators will eschew lavish sums whose strings necessarily undercut the very possibility of producing educated, thinking, well-read and well-prepared students? Who will risk their jobs to say the Digital Emperor wears no clothes?
Where have you gone, Dr. D’Angelo? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
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