A couple of follow-ups to yesterday’s class.
The first is that a couple of folks in emails and journals were put off by the discussion of neutrality. Fair enough. However, keep in mind that (1) we can all recognize that some library service will be better than other service. (2) Wiegand, Pawley, and Mussman all provide some reasons to think that libraries in the past (Mussman), near past (Wiegand), and immediate past (Pawley) have provided service that was worse than it could have been, insofar as that service reflects mostly the views, norms, and interests of a narrow slice of the community. (3) We need some criteria by which to determine whether library service now is better or worse along the lines of serving the needs of, and comporting with the values and interests of, all segments of the community served.
“Neutrality” is simply a stand-in for that, and I think it’s plausible that there is some sense of neutrality that can capture best service and comportment with the values and interests of a community. That’s the metaphysical sense of neutrality. BUT, our ability to determine precisely what that is will always be constrained. We’ll always have difficulty determining what’s best; that’s the epistemic problem with neutrality. The hope is that by thinking about this academically (e.g., recognizing how different aspects of library management are racialized, per Pawley; recognizing how historic debates have shaped libraries and user experiences, per Wiegand) we can get closer.
Ted makes a fair point that librarians on the ground do more for African Americans than do articles about racial neutrality and so forth. But there’s a question about how those services came to be valued. Also related to Ted’s post is how it came to be that some libraries now contains urban, “street,” fiction, written by black authors for black audiences, when other libraries at other times did not. That may come from thinking about how best to serve, and how to best reflect the values and interests of, all segments of the community. It doesn’t happen automatically. Rather, it’s a deliberate decision to provide stuff that’s of interest, based on the recognition that what’s of interest to members of a community will likely differ from what librarians think is interesting, good, important, or valuable.
