Disturbance at the Gorman House
Ah, Michael Gorman! That salty ALA President who sees blog people everywhere! He looks upon their works and despairs!
I first encountered this Gorman quote–
If you believe, as I do, that there is a crisis in library education that threatens the very existence of libraries and librarianship, you are likely to draw a negative reaction from a variety of people. First, there are the millenniarist librarians and pseudo-librarians who, intoxicated with self-indulgence and technology, will dismiss you as a ‘Luddite’ or worse. They and their yips and yawps can safely be left to their acronymic backwaters and the dubious delights of clicking and surfing.
–at Karen G. Schneider’s site. We all had a good laugh over that one, let me tell you.
I read El Presidente’s column in full this sunny morning, as it is posted in PDF format on Gorman’s website. (Wait, he has a website? He must’a been intoxicated on technology when he set that up. One can only hope that when he sobered up in the morning, he didn’t feel the need to gnaw his own arm off to get away from the site.) (Note to librarian bloggers: mocking Michael Gorman by painting him as a grouchy technophobe is easy and fun!)
Now that I’ve read the column in its entirety, I can say that I’m not in complete disagreement with Gorman. My own library education was far from the abstract “library science” jibberjabber that Gorman bemoans, but that’s because the UWM School of Information Studies, despite its nosebleed academia name, is very grounded in the practical applications of its curriculum. Which is one of the reasons I enjoyed my time there and feel it was money well-spent. However, I’ve heard other library school graduates complain that the program they went through was too heavily weighted in abstractions and academic mumbo-jumbo. So, Gorman may well have a point. I think library and information programs should be focused more on the practical than the abstract, even if the applications of the field are varied and include far more than public and academic libraries.
But that quote that Schneider and others have been spreading ’round the Web? That yipping and yawping about “millenniarist librarians and pseudo-librarians”? Even in the context of the full column, it’s phenomenally jackasstastic.
May 12th, 2006 at 10:05 am
Gorman frequently bashes the library technorati, but as a Library Leader, I’m convinced he’s more canny strategist than Luddite. Gorman knows how to turn a phrase, and I personally was delighted by his “yips and yawps” line. And, he’s got a point, as you admit in your post. Library education is a sacred cow, and like most sacred cows, needs slaughtering. Gorman knows how to get people’s attention, and he’s a fine practitioner of the Art of Rhetoric. That’s a 1.0 skill that might not be appreciated by all the newer versions out there.