The chained libraries of the Middle Ages are often cited as a metaphor for conservative librarianship. Before chains, however, libraries were even more orthodox: books would be retrieved from stacks by a librarian and the reader would usually be supervised. With the chained system, the reader was able to locate and consult her text with minimal supervision. Far from mean-spirited over-protection, the chained book was an important and highly liberal step towards open access and automation.

I bring this up, not because I want to see a return to Medieval ways, but to illustrate that a seemingly conservative library policy can be more liberal and generous than it may appear at first glance.

I first discovered traditionalist Michael Gorman when reading for my dissertation. As a means of steadying myself in a new career, I wanted to boil down a literature review into a shortlist of guiding principles of librarianship. I wanted to learn what the cataloguing, reader development and marketing all really meant. By useful accident, some of the books I’d picked up were written by Michael Gorman. I found that he is excellent at monitoring trends in the profession and comparing those trends with our founding and evolving principles.

Much of his writing is about the overall purpose of the library system, about providing direction and questioning the nature of our profession and our institutes. More noble even than that, his ideas come to a view that libraries exist to serve humanity: something we should remember when grovelling to our funding bodies. We shouldn’t have to fret constantly about circulation statistics and twopenny-halfpenny ways of raising revenue to justify what we’re doing: we’re serving humanity. Reading Gorman confirmed my personal feeling that librarianship isn’t so much a profession as a calling. To me, it is a secular priesthood or a knightly order assembled to promote curiosity and defend against ignorance and propaganda.

Michael Gorman’s traditionalist reputation is sometimes seen as professional xenophobia. On the contrary, he is dedicated to the ALA’s almost internationalist motto: ‘The best reading, for the largest number, at the least cost’. He has also defended library users’ personal information against government monitoring and includes intellectual freedom, equity of access and democracy in his eight cornerstone principles of librarianship.

A controversy arises because he seems to abhor Google, blog culture and the digitisation of books. While I don’t agree completely, there is something sage about his ‘if-it’s-not-broken-don’t-fix-it line of thinking. In a now-famous essay called Google and God’s Mind, he posits that online information retrieval will focus on speed and access to facts, where the books in our libraries are “designed to be read sequentially and cumulatively, so that the reader gains knowledge in the reading”. Books offer full submersion into the culture and grammar of real learning and real pleasure, while the Web simply cannot.

My personal view of electronic information retrieval is not so staunch. I adore the Web and spend a lot of personal time consuming and producing digital racket. I make most of my money online and I met my current partner through Livejournal. But after years of working simultaneously with emerging technologies and traditional services, I can’t help but be aware of the value of books (a technology which has evolved over thousands of years before reaching the pinnacle of the commercial paperback) and the extremely tedious problems involved in electronic information provision: poor quality retrieval systems, never-resolved bugs, slow servers, garish design, unpleasant political restrictions, invasive advertising and inane Tweetery. Quality electronic services (databases and e-libraries) are inarguably the way forward for reference-style information retrieval but the best the library world can hope for from the likes of Twitter and Facebook is a kind of product placement: by positioning ourselves next to something cool, we can appear on-the-ball, but social networking sites have no real, practical advantage to Library services no matter how many pundits and technophiles insist upon it. Twitter is undoubtedly ‘where it’s at’ and nobody likes to feel divorced from the party, but the bottom line is that users of Twitter and Facebook are the victims of a massive global advertising scam. Libraries, perhaps more than anyone, are best off out of it.

Gorman is sometimes accused of being brusque, sarcastic and elitist but I find his ideas warm, generous and inclusive. His eight principles of librarianship are informed by Buddhist wisdom. Even if rumours of brusque elitism were true, is such a trait any worse that the culture of passive aggression around the library blogs? His views are considered extreme but I think that’s what the library world needs. It needs a voice in favour of humanity in the same way that society needs radical Feminism and political correctness: to compensate for the enormous drag factor of reactionary bandwaggoning.

Michael Gorman has been the president of the American Library Association, is the first editor of the AACR2 and has written such inspiring books as The Enduring Library and Our Singular Strengths: Meditations for Librarians.

Rob Westwood is Librarian at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire and Honorary Secretary of CILIP’s Library and Information History Group.