I am a librarian. I like my job a lot. Unlike my previous career, it doesn’t require sixteen-hour shifts of hard labor plus homework, so I view it as my retirement. But sometimes I have to deal with other librarians, and then my job borders on intolerable.
I have just returned from one of those self-congratulation sessions that librarians euphemistically call “conferences.” Because librarians’ egos are inversely proportional to librarians’ relevance, they currently border on god-complex, and this particular conference was perhaps the worst example of librarian narcissism I have yet witnessed. Last year, I was at a conference where the attendees were invited to applaud themselves for the heroic virtue of being librarians, but this conference was even worse.
The keynote speaker was James LaRue, who is both a stuffy elitist and extraordinarily dishonest, and whom I might discuss at length in another post. Most of the sessions were spews of empty jargon, but the worst was the final session I attended, on large language models, which have unfortunately been dubbed “A.I.”
The presenters had little to say, though they showcased some fascinating new software such as Perplexity, Connected Papers, and Scispace, which can amass, analyze, summarize, and show the inter-connectedness of academic papers, as well as determine if a consensus exists.
What was striking about this presentation was not the tools it showed off but the naïve optimism of its presenters. It is no secret that the use of the library has been declining over the last few decades largely because of the rise of the internet. In response, librarians have invented what they call “information literacy,” which nobody can quite define but which every librarian writes or talks about. Supposedly, perhaps because they are surrounded by books all day, librarians have a unique ability to winnow fact from fiction and identify “fake news.” Everybody would realize how important librarians are if we could just get those poor, benighted, Google-using souls back in through the library doors.
In reality, anyone who’s spoken to a librarian for more than five minutes knows that librarians have no special powers when it comes to discerning facts. The aforementioned James LaRue, a rather prominent librarian, can’t even make an argument without ad hominem, a red herring, or whataboutism, let alone keep his facts straight. Once you cut through the jargon and wade through the self-righteous academic articles on the topic, “information literacy” is little more than a desperate attempt to prove that the library, and the librarians, are still relevant in the information age.
But according to the presenters of this talk on “A.I.,” software like Perplexity will finally–finally–bring our patrons back to us. Now, at last, everyone will need librarians again: After all, how could anyone figure out how to use the new software without Dear Librarian to show him? How could he type a question into a prompt without a librarian looking over his shoulder and suggesting better keywords?
This claim was baffling, and it was made all the more baffling by the impenetrable jargon it was couched in (librarians, we were told, will become “conveners of communities of practice”). But it reached the heights of absurdity when the presenters displayed a new program they had “designed” and “written” without knowing how to compose a single line of code: They simply asked ChatGPT to write the program for them, and–ta da!–it worked.
You read that right: People who cannot write a single line of code believe they will be the new A.I. experts. This prophecy will no doubt prove as prescient as the prediction, back when the internet was new, that everyone would need librarians to catalog it. If these fellows did not hold their profession in such inflated esteem, they might have soberly realized the real implications of the A.I. software they were showing us: “Information literacy” can be automated. Librarians went all in on information literacy as proof that people will always need them, but now machines can do that, too.
Tragically, our librarians could have retained their relevance if they had only known their place. Despite all the recent misguided attempts to redefine it, what the library is, at its heart, is something everyone will always want or at least want to know is there: It is a warehouse for all the books that people want to have access to but do not want to buy. By extension, the librarian is a glorified book shelver. That’s it. Everything else is hubris.
But I have a master’s degree! a librarian might object. Yes, I have one too. That degree is worthless. It is nothing but an expensive piece of paper that serves as a magic pass for getting a library job. Librarianship was one of the earliest casualties of American credentialism, the mindset that has wrecked our universities and turned them into overpriced extensions of high school. If we librarians are honest with ourselves for a change, we will admit that any reasonably intelligent person could take over our jobs tomorrow and do them as well as we do within a month. Perhaps he could do our jobs better than we since he would do them without writing any faux academic papers about convening communities of practice.
But because librarians have refused to know their place, they have not only made grandiose claims about their importance but have alienated their natural allies–that is, engaged parents who want to impart early literacy to their children. Keeping the parents around should have been simple, but for at least two decades now, or perhaps more, librarians have treated parents as their sworn enemies. Oh, they don’t say that outright, of course; they couch it in diplomatic language. But even a cursory familiarity with the literature on such subjects as children’s libraries or book challenges will leave a reader with the strong impression that librarians view parents as little more than a hostile force to be circumvented. This underlying hostility has finally broken out and become explicit in the absurdity of “drag queen story hours,” which are an overt, no longer subtle, effort to defy parents and corrupt children. And this is not guesswork on my part, either: There are academic papers specifically describing drag queen story hours as having that purpose.
Of course, this open hostility from the librarians has met with an equally open hostility from parents. Still, the librarians will learn nothing from the encounter because their gigantic egos make self-reflection impossible. In fact, James LaRue was there at the conference to complain about (and misrepresent) those angry parents. His conclusion, at the end of his hour-and-a-half speech, was that we need to groom their children even harder.
Those angry parents would be gone tomorrow if the librarians would take just one drop of humility and go back to sleepily cataloging their books and shushing their noisy patrons. But they won’t because, to an egomaniac, that one drop looks like poison.
