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October 24, 2003
Libraries, tech, and gender
I started library school this fall. My cohort is gendered much the same way as the librarianship field in general—librarians have predominantly been women in the US practically since there have been librarians.
And I find myself in the odd and somewhat dubious position of Lead Technogeek of my cohort, despite the many and varied holes in my technological savvy. I’m given to understand that in not a few library schools, technological education has all but supplanted more traditional librarianship. Not the case where I am. Database design and information architecture are 800-level electives, and not a few of my colleagues cannot write a “Hello, World!” HTML page.
What I am finding difficult, as mystically anointed Lead Technogeek, is dealing with students and even professors who are actively hostile to technologies dear to my heart, electronic text chief among those. I don’t mean skepticism; I know the difference, and I actually enjoy talking with smart skeptics. I mean hostility, to the technologies and to those who advocate them.
Be that as it may. Quite aside from musty stereotypes, libraries have a reputation for missing technological boats. Making online catalogs work, involving themselves with standards bodies, using the Internet for communication with patrons—libraries have been slow, and they are still catching up. I notice also that considerable swathes of library innovation do not come from libraries, but from vendors who sell to libraries. (This worries me rather, but it is a topic for a different blog.)
All of this is buildup to a very simple question. Is the dominance of women in the field of librarianship a chief (or the central) reason libraries have resisted (and still resist) certain forms of mechanization?
Posted by Dorothea Salo at 03:20 PM in Academia | Permalink
Comments
While I do think libraries are painfully behind the times, I don't think it's a gender issue but rather a financial one. Libraries can barely keep afloat, let alone devote money to researching new technologies. It's really no surprise that the companies whose main goal is to make money are the ones advancing in the field. It's hard enough to get funding from the government (or corporation in my case) to maintain the collection you have, let alone look into new ways to preserve, store and provide access to it.
Posted by: Dawn at Oct 24, 2003 4:54:20 PM
There is definitely that.
That doesn't explain the hostility to me, though; if money were all, I'd expect two things: a wistfulness at missed opportunities, and a lot of participation in (and use of) open source and open standards.
I don't see either of these. There's some of the latter (in the form of use rather than participation), but not nearly what I'd expect.
Posted by: Dorothea Salo at Oct 24, 2003 5:02:43 PM
About openness - what is the OCLC actually like to work with? Does it matter a lot, a little, what? (Why is the Amazon API becoming the nonprofessional standard for referring to a book instead?)
Posted by: clew at Oct 24, 2003 5:05:37 PM
It's difficult to say where the tech hostility is coming from, without hearing more about the hostility. There's more than one kind, after all. But I will add that the hostility may not be about hating the tech, but about loving the book - and (wrongly) seeing tech as a threat thereto. (See also Baker, _Double Fold_.)
Posted by: misuba at Oct 24, 2003 7:01:23 PM
While I will say some of that hostility or at least non-technical vibe sounds familiar to me from my sojourn in library school circa 1997/1998, I think it is changing.
I work as a product manager for one of those big library automation software vendors and I'm very happy to say that in the dance with our customers we trade off who's leading frequently. Change comes from our side and requires us to do some educating and evangelizing, but I am consistently pressured by our customers in the most pleasant way to keep pushing the boundaries of what our software can do.
Take a look at the program for Internet Librarian and you'll see some things on the agenda you might not have expected: http://www.infotoday.com/il2003/default.htm
Still, I think there has been a difficult balancing act between preserving the traditional skills of the profession and adapting to new technology. I don't think that's an outcome of librarianship being a female-dominated profession, but more related to the historic problem of librarians undervaluing themselves in terms of both pay and leadership. We tend to be people drawn to providing service and perhaps that doesn't generally go hand in hand with positioning yourself as the information technology master of your community. Perhaps we should bear Bunter and Jeeves more closely in mind as role models and stop relegating ourselves to the scullery.
Posted by: Dinah at Oct 24, 2003 8:46:37 PM
clew, I don't know directly; I'll have a much better idea once I'm out of school and practicing, I'm sure. I talked with a couple of OCLC people a year and a half back, and frankly they intimidated the hell out of me. :)
They are, however, enormously influential among libraries and librarians, not at all IMO disproportionate to the services they provide.
Dawn, Dinah, misuba, thank you for thoughtful comments which I shall definitely ponder.
Posted by: Dorothea Salo at Oct 24, 2003 9:09:21 PM
Dorothea, on the flip side, libraries have been at the forefront of a lot of technology first. Librarians were among the earliest adopters of Internet tools (many, if not most, of the heavily used Gopher servers were library-hosted), and library catalogs were available online long before most other information resources were.
Yes, there are technophobes in the field--but there's also an enormous and strong group of technosavvy librarians.
Wish you could join us next week at Internet Librarian. It will be the first time I've been there, and I'm really looking forward to it. I'm sure that between me and Jenny Levine (and others who I'm probably not thinking of right now) it will be well-blogged, though.
Posted by: Liz at Oct 24, 2003 9:30:31 PM
"Yes, there are technophobes in the field--but there's also an enormous and strong group of technosavvy librarians."
My experience is as the only technology oriented person at a public library. I believe that the dichotomy of technophiles and technophobes forces libraries into only slowly adopting technology. Many staff members are primarily resistant to changing their well understood tools. Some are open to learning new tools, but I have found many of the experienced staff choose this field because they perceived it as glacially changing.
Many senior staff are overwhelmed by the rapid changes made possible with emerging technology. Unfortunately, these are the staff with the buying power. Inertia keeps them rooted in old technology. For example, only recently was I able to convince our senior cataloguer to stop purchasing shelf cards for a card catalog used only by two senior staff persons. And only then was I able to convince those staff persons to make full use of our online cataloging programs.
Posted by: CG Welch at Oct 24, 2003 11:57:30 PM
There tend to be differences in terms of types of libraries, as well. Academic libraries and "special" libraries (typically corporate or private organizations) tend to be much faster to adopt technology than public libraries.
Posted by: Liz at Oct 25, 2003 8:29:43 AM
I've wondered about the same thing in our public schools. There is still a lot of resistance to using technology in the classroom. Funding is definitely an issue, but could the bigger issue be that the majority of the teaching staff (especially in the elementary level) is female?
Posted by: Colleen at Oct 25, 2003 9:53:27 PM
I am a highschool teacher-librarian. My fellow teacher-librarians (in my school district) are female save one. And we are all the go-to gals in our schools when it comes to technology. The teachers are eager to learn but time is really a factor. They are already overwhelmed.
As far as HTML, etc. goes, why would that be important for a librarian to know? We want to help people access information, not create web pages. That would be like saying we should also have in depth knowledge of how the book publishing industry operates.
Lianne
Posted by: Lianne at Oct 25, 2003 10:12:08 PM
Um, you mean you don't? Dear me.
I confess I'm a little shocked that no connection is made between creating web pages, understanding book production, and helping people access information.
Perhaps I'm just weird to think it's all connected...
Posted by: Dorothea Salo at Oct 25, 2003 10:52:22 PM
I am a librarian at a major academic library in the US. The systems office at my library is half women and things still go too slowly for my taste (and I’m sure they wouldn’t want to hear that its their fault). That said I think I know what you are talking about Dorothea, in terms of fear and gendered feelings of “I’m not a tech-y person” on many levels.
While I think you have a point about gender and techno-fear and its impact on a whole on libraries, there is a major point which refutes your theory. Most major university and even public library systems are headed by men and men frequently run systems offices (and that was really true in the 70s, 80s, and 90s because its men who had the PHDs and could be the beginning of a whole other rant). Maybe they were incompetent for years, but…its just a lot more complicated than hitting the switch and getting a dynamic, technological organization in there. I think the place of libraries in the mind of funders (in my case, university professors/provosts/presidents) as paper based repositories as well as non-profit financing in this country has more to do with it than anything. I would also defend libraries for the reasons others here have…basically, I don’t think we’ve been that slow though we might be compared to say, Finance. I wonder to what field you are comparing libraries.
Sometimes hostility does accompany perceptive criticism though its important to be able to distinguish the two. What we do need are more people who have high expectations for what libraries can do, so I’m glad you are going to library school.
Posted by: jen at Oct 26, 2003 12:34:55 AM
I agree with jen's comments especially re: expectations and that whole other rant, though that's perhaps not surprising since I also work at a major academic library in the US. I also agree with Liz's comments that academic and special libraries are probably faster to adopt new technology than public libraries... still by and large too slow for my tastes, but not egregiously slow given the circumstances.
My two cents: I'd point out that being a librarian doesn't exactly pay the big bucks and it doesn't _have to be_ the most demanding profession. I think if you have a technological bent, you have to be quite specifically motivated to pursue librarianship instead of some other tech-related field, especially when those other tech fields can seem higher paying, more interesting, or actually cutting-edge. So maybe the relationship here is correlation and not causation: lower paying fields tend to have more women and tech-friendly expertise can be expensive...? These are assumptions are my part; this area isn't really my field. Another factor to consider is age. Librarians average high and tech friendliness is, in theory at least, a hallmark of youth. So given that many library systems departments, including my own, reflect a concentration of men.. so perhaps the nature of the library state of the art isn't just a reflection of gender-based techno-fear but perhaps also age and lowered expectations related to lower pay, etc.
I do know that it's a good thing to have more demanding librarians in the field, so again seconding jen, I'm glad that you've chosen to join us. :)
Posted by: carol o at Oct 26, 2003 9:14:55 AM
In response to Dorthea, I have an understanding of book production, but not an in depth knowledge. I happen to know basic HTML, but I am not at all interested in creating web pages. If I was, I don't think I would have chosen this profession. But perhaps my job as a teacher-librarian is so far removed from that of a professional librarian, that it is irrelevant to this conversation.
I do think it's sad that you are encountering hostility to new technologies. I have not experienced that. What I found really lacking among my fellow students was not technological ability, but people skills. Seemed like most of them would rather be in the back room cataloguing or otherwise interacting with a computer rather than with the public.
Lianne
Posted by: Lianne at Oct 26, 2003 10:49:27 AM
Carol, interesting point about compensation. When I got out of library school I compared the published starting pay for the head of the San Jose public library system and what I could start as working as a web developer. The comparison was extremely unfavorable to libraries and I took my talents elsewhere. Admittedly that was at the height of the bubble, but even so, though I am glad to now be working with libraries again, I'm glad to be working for a software company instead of in a library. Part of it is compensation, though I am earning much less than in my last job developing non-library software, part of it is not working in civil service with all the stagnation & bureaucracy that implies.
Posted by: Dinah at Oct 27, 2003 4:20:16 PM
Gender may play a role. Age and competing opportunities for the technologically savvy also. Plus, librarianship has been a postgraduate profession and graduates tended to come from Arts backgrounds rather than Sciences.
Posted by: Matt at Oct 27, 2003 6:43:57 PM
Gender may play a role. Age and competing opportunities for the technologically savvy also. Plus, librarianship has been a postgraduate profession and graduates tended to come from Arts backgrounds rather than Sciences.
Posted by: Matt at Oct 27, 2003 6:44:15 PM
Interesting thread...here is an article from the Education Policy Analysis Archives on technology refusal in schools. It's from 1994 - old in today's tech world, but the insights contained are still relevant today.
http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v1n10.html
Posted by: Gina Giuliano at Oct 29, 2003 4:59:21 PM
