Collection Development for My Random Life.

I am a long time fan of Cormac McCarthy and just recently finished his latest book The Road. If you don’t know, the book is about a father and son traveling across a post-apocalyptic landscape. It is pretty bleak. But of course as a librarian the small section that detailed an encounter with a library was of interest to me.

Years later he’d stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He’d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. He let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way into the cold gray light. — The Road p.158

In this vastly changed world in which the characters in The Road operate, libraries are of little value. The main concern of everyone is survival. Survival through the day. Survival through the coming hours. The context is that of the extreme present. In this sense, a room full of books adds little to the equation especially when the world of the past they talk about is no longer relevant to the current situation.

This idea of survival got me thinking about a recent presentation I had the opportunity to attend at the Acquisitions Institute that was held at the Timberline Lodge in Oregon. The presentation was: Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking: The Impact of Information Literacy on Teaching and Learning by Bill Fisher a professor at San Jose State University. The talk basically traced the history of information literacy from its origins in the late 1800′s (yes 1800′s!) to its present day incarnation. A side discussion generated from this presentation noted the “short-term memory” students who only seem to remember small pieces of information from class to class and not in an overall holistic way. In a sense, students seem only interested in “surviving” from class to class / semester to semester and therefore only use those tools which will aid in this survival (the first full-text article they find vs. the best article).

Obviously student survival is not as desperate as that described in The Road. Yet, the idea of survival simply in the present context, (to get through this class, this homework assignment), as opposed to the long term (information literacy, choosing library databases over Google, etc.) is what we as librarians encounter many times in the library. I think many students don’t see the value in learning tools (such as all the search features in a database interface, the value in using peer-reviewed journals etc.) which will not necessarily be applicable (from their viewpoint) to the “next world” of getting a job, raising a family, etc.

Perhaps acknowledging the “survival instinct” of students when encountering library resources will allow us to better meet students needs. But this makes me wonder in what context the library should be viewing itself? Are we focusing too much on the convenience of the present (access) vs. the long-term survival of the library in the future (collection building?)? Who knows? I guess libraries will travel down that road when they come to it.