Michael Gorman: Libraries Today: Challenges and Opportunities—CLA Annual Conference

I was very surprised to see that CLA had invited Mr. Gorman to speak, and even more surprised to see that he had accepted the speaking engagement.  Not only is this a smaller conference as conferences go (and I know it doesn’t pay well as conferences go), but a lot of the flack that Gorman has caught from his public blunders (the Blog People incident, saying that he would not be willing to go to jail to protect a patron’s reading records) has come from California librarians, including bloggers like me.

Gorman was introduced by State Librarian Susan Hildreth, which was interesting in and of itself.  Hildreth has always been a proponent for change and innovation, technological or otherwise.  Gorman, well, is not. 

Gorman began by encouraging ALA members to attend ALA Annual in New Orleans.  He framed his talk as covering the nature of what libraries and librarians do today.  He spoke a bit about the new library that is hopefully being built at CSU Fresno.  New library building projects, according to Gorman, require as much space as possible, as few walls as possible, and as many electrical outlets as possible.

Gorman reprised a theme he touched on at the LITA Annual Conference: that librarians are responsible for interacting with and recording the human record.  At one point he compared librarians to Catholics and archivists to Protestants…something about librarians being more strict and hierarchical and archivists being bare-bones and loose.  This guy really likes biblical and Christian metaphors…every time I’ve seen him speak, he’s made one.

Gorman of course made his trademark anti-Google remarks, the first of which was that inter-library loan is somehow comparable and superior to Google, which “delivers a pile of rubbish to you at 0.97 nanoseconds” and that it’s “…in no particular order.”  Yeah, that’s great.  Everything that exists and that is quality information is in print, right?  And of course everything worthwhile is also available via inter-library loan, which often costs money, money which all of our patrons have to spare and are happy to spend to get information?  And Google’s relevancy ranking, which is superior to any used in any library catalog I’ve ever seen, is apparently worthless, right?  Get real.  Wake up to what’s going on in information science and librarianship today.

He also said that Google is “probably too stupid to have a library.”  He said that Google has been picking on him for years now.  Is that so?  My interpretation of facts is that Mr. Gorman has been “picking on” Google…making disparaging comments like the one above, and it’s not Google who’s picking on him about these comments, but those of us in the profession who don’t appreciate his regressive nothing-created-after-1990-is-any-good attitude.

He believes that we suffer from “technological delusions” and that librarians kowtow to people who would much rather spend money on computers than anything else.  That has not been my personal experience, actually much the opposite, so I disagree again.

Gorman stated that it should not be a crime to read what you want to read, and it’s none of the government’s business what people read.  Odd that he says that, but would not be willing as a librarian to actually stand up for his profession’s ethics (and apparently his personal beliefs) by protecting his patrons’ reading records and going to jail to prevent that from happening.

The single thing that raised my hackles the most was that he set up this false dichotomy (as he always does) between upholding traditional library/librarian values (preservation, intellectual freedom) and technology.  He disparaged library scohols for teaching javascript classes, saying, and I quote "Any idiot can create a webpage."  Yes, any idiot can.  Hell, a robot can.  But an idiot cannot create a good usable webpage for a library that is well-organized and utilizes some of those principles of traditional librarianship he mentioned--it takes someone who is both a techie and a librarian.  And apparently, according to Gorman, you're not allowed to be both.  And if you're a techie in librarianship, you don't belong here.

Oh yes, and once again, true to form, he whisked himself offstage immediately after he finished talking, not taking questions at all from the audience.  I have to wonder if someone from the ALA PR department has warned him to not take public comments or questions, as he so often alienates those very people who he's supposed to represent.

I didn't think it was possible for Gorman to alienate me even more, but he did just that.  Shame on Michael Gorman for shunning those people in the profession who are its future.