The things you learn ...

... when cobbling together a blog.

Today I learned that there are a lot of angry librarians out there. Not disgruntled. Not cranky. Not even quarrelsome. Just plain angry. This when I was trying to populate the sidebar I've called Anecdotes, facetiae, satire, etc. In my pre-blogger days (that is, until this week) I might drop in on Librarians Guide to Etiquette or Annoyed Librarian to enjoy self-mocking jibes at the library community. It seemed something definitely worth sharing.

I found many of these dyspeptic blogs nestled in a blogroll of the Annoyed Librarian, whose wry stylings I admit enjoying. Granted she labels her roll Library Blogs and Websites: Political, Humorous, Informative. The blogs that alarmed me must be the 'Political' in that collection of strange bedfellows.

An interesting thread running through many of these blogs is the conspiracy theory. I haven't had too many professional dealings with the A.L.A., but I have a hard time believing they're the center of a cabal whose evil goal is fluoridating the water, figuratively speaking. In any event, there was a distinct us-against-them thread running throughout. The profession, they bemoan, is heavily weighted by wrong-thinking liberals set on despoiling the name of Library. It's sad to contemplate the self-loathing inherent in thinking you're the persecuted minority within your chosen profession.

One of the reasons I was attracted to this profession -- enough to want to be part of it -- was the universally good-naturedness of its practitioners. Librarians may be overly self-effacing, I reasoned, but they're fiercely proud of who they are and keenly aware of their intrinsic worth. It's probably one of the reasons that librarians have such a high approval rating with the general public. It's not often that a librarian will throw a book back at you. The infrequent exception tends to stand out glaringly. I never imagined these were inherently left-wing traits.

Librarians, like sanitation workers, lawyers, and houseparents, are political (well, some of them, at any rate), but as a group they tend not to be bomb tossers. 'Earnest' might be the worst thing you say of them collectively; in some cases, 'blinkered' or at their very worst, 'strident'. (In the interest of full disclosure, I work in the prussian blue core of the Blue States.)

In the end it put me in mind of the fact that, even in the hands of librarians, the quintessentially impartial, there's no pretence that the blogosphere is anything but personal. And If 'political' here means 'conservative' or 'right-wing', all power to her. Maybe in this instance, however, it would be wise to wield those library-learnt categorizing skills more deftly.

 

Comments

[Dances With Books]

Ah, ALA and the Cabal. By now, I have pretty much learned to tune out the right-minded brethren of the profession. For people who pretty much control the country to be whining about being the minority in their profession, there has to be some self-hating or other issue in there. Then again, they kind of still do it even though they control the whole country. Go figure. Some people you just can't please. In the interest of fairness, I pretty much tune out a lot of ALA as well; they do good work for things like defending our First Amendment and privacy issues, but there are days when I just wish they would keep to themselves and stop embarassing the profession. Oh well. In spite of that, I think, like you, I was attracted to the profession because of the overall good nature of librarians. By the way, I discovered you via AL, and I think I may have to linger and read on a bit. Thanks.