of managerial sins, old coots, and librarians versus technologists

The Seven Deadly Sins of Library Managers seem to be about the same issues as with managers everywhere:

1. Micromanagement
2. Lack of communication
3. Fostering divisiveness
4. Abusiveness
5. Failure to listen
6. Avoiding conflict
7. Taking credit for others' work

The above list is mostly about librarians managing other librarians.
There is also a huge challenge structurally in practically all organizations these days around generation gap and technology, and between the technically trained and the non-technical.

As Peter Morville writes in Ambient Findability

The Internet has shifted the landscape of informed decisions , but the impact is not entirely positive. For insight into the dark side, ask librarians. They'll tell you about students who never visit the library, but instead surf the web for a few good hits, with little appreciation for the authority, accuracy, currency, and quality of their sources. They'll lament the public's lack of appetite for Boolean search. They'll complain that scholarly networked databases and peer-reviewed journals sit untouched, while Google churns out fast food for the minds of the masses. Librarians are on the front lines of an invisible struggle over our information diet and, for better or worse, the scales are not tipping in their direction. In fact, according to Peter Lyman, a distinguished professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems, it's already too late:

There's been a culture war between librarians and computer scientists.
And the war is over. Google won.^[*]

^[*] "Search for Tomorrow" by Joel Achenbach. Washington Post, February 15, 2004, p. D01. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42885-2004Feb14?language=printer.

While I agree with Peter's framing of this upheaval as a culture war, I don't believe the battle lines cleanly divide librarians and computer scientists, and I'm positive it's not over. If we are to know the true nature of this conflict, we must not judge the book by its cover. A recent skirmish serves as case in point. In a Library Journal article, Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association, defined the blog as:

[An] interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web.

After deriding the "blog people," Gorman then set his sights on "McGoogle":

Google is, in fact, the device that gives you thousands of "hits" (which may or may not be relevant) in no very useful order....Speed is of the essence to Google boosters...but, as with fast food, rubbish is rubbish, no matter how speedily it is delivered.

After reading this piece, one might write off the entire library profession as a bitter anachronism, but this would be a shame, for the words of Michael Gorman are at odds with the majority of librarians. In fact, many of us were horrified by this high-profile display of ignorance, and some librarian bloggers even called for his resignation.

This unfortunate episode exposed the true fault lines within librarianship, and these same divisions exist within most other communities and institutions in education, government, health, and business. This is not a contest between librarians and computer scientists, but an ongoing revolution in the definition of authority.

Now if you want to talk about the definition of authority, here is the fact: the old rule over the young.

This is good when knowledge comes from decades of experience, and when things change slowly.  But technology makes things all topsy-turvy.  The knowledge of technology is greater in the young than in the old.

How old?

US Senator Byrd was born in 1917, making him 88 years old in 2005.
US Senator Stevens was born in 1923, making him 82 years old in 2005.

These are learned men.

And Senator Byrd, despite looking rather foolish in The Daily Show's Coot-off, has said some very wise things about the current political situation.

But I wouldn't want them chosing my DVD player.

And I certainly wouldn't want them deciding about essentially the international law on DRM-based digital copyright, but they went right ahead and did that anyway.

This still might be tolerable, if it was the exception rather than the rule that management and political decisions had to be made about technology.  But many, many decisions are now about technology.  It's worse than that, many actions are now about technology as well.  I can imagine how frustrating this must be.  For decades, you are Master of the Books.  All is perfectly catalogued.  And then all of a sudden, no progress can be made without some technical person who knows nothing of the lofty arts of librarianship writing some code to do some stuff.  Every idea has to be translated through a technical layer.  There is a great danger here.  Because the technical people are typically younger, trained in a different discipline, and their power is threatening, they are dismissed by those in control.  "Oh, we'll get the techies to do it," they say dismissively with a wave of a hand, in the same tone as a prof says "left as an exercise for the student". 

Techies?
Excuse me?  The people you are just dismissing probably went to school for as long or longer than you did, learning material as difficult or more difficult than you did, almost certainly competed for a job in a marketplace more crowded and challenging than when you started, and were educated more recently.

How would you all like if we referred to you as old libbies?

I suggest you start delegating to those with technical knowledge when appropriate, start communicating what it is you want, and start working to integrate the technical and library teams, rather than dividing them.

Or perhaps, as the Economist suggests in Defending video games, the solution is simply time.  Not because time cures all, but because time kills all.

Novels were once considered too low-brow for university literature courses, but eventually the disapproving professors retired. Waltz music and dancing were condemned in the 19th century; all that twirling was thought to be “intoxicating” and “depraved”, and the music was outlawed in some places. Today it is hard to imagine what the fuss was about. And rock and roll was thought to encourage violence, promiscuity and satanism

...

Eventually, objections to new media resolve themselves, as the young grow up and the old die out. As today's gamers grow older—the average age of gamers is already 30—video games will ultimately become just another medium, alongside books, music and films. And soon the greying gamers will start tut-tutting about some new evil threatening to destroy the younger generation's moral fibre.

Deadly manager sins link via Library Boy.

Previously:
January 10, 2005  the fall of the temple of books