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’. Completely by 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 libraries, 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 some sort of knightly order assembled to promote curiosity and to defend against ignorance and propaganda.

Michael Gorman’s reputation as a traditionalist is sometimes seen as something like 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 tends to 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, in this view, 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 girlfriend 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 simple 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 innane 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 and libraries (perhaps more than anyone) are best off out of it.

Gorman is sometimes accused of being brusque, sarcastic and elitist but the truth is that his ideas are warm, generous and inclusive. His eight principles of librarianship are informed by Buddhist wisdom for goodness sake. Even if rumours of brusque elitism were true, are such traits any worse that the culture of passive aggression that dogs 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. mg.csufresno.edu

Rob Westwood is Librarian at University Hospital of Staffordshire and Honorary Committee Secretary of CILIP’s Library and Information History Group. www.robwestwood.co.uk

I recently went to London to be measured for a new suit. My librarian salary doesn’t quite run to Savile Row but I have a very nice tailor in the city all the same.

Taking my inside leg measurement, my tailor complains about the pressures of his trade. During a global financial crisis, many people don’t choose luxury goods. The Internet and the high street offer stiff competition.

To Savile Row tailors, however, the money still flies in. They don’t even fear the Abercrombie & Fitch flagship store that opened on the Row earlier this year. Savile Row customers are loyal and abundant and they’re not put off by high prices.

It’s fashionable for libraries to emulate business and to learn from our friends in the retail sector. We think of readers as customers. We worry about competition, revenue and brand-awareness. It is partly a response to a perceived rise in leisure industries, and partly due to those institutes upon whose funding we depend: local councils, universities and the health service understandably demand quantitative results to justify library expenditure, and this means we have to come up with ways to increase issue figures and library traffic.

And so we assemble marketing strategies: we adopt canny new corporate identities, stock popular leisure materials, install plasma screens with rolling news to signify how on the ball we are, lease space to coffee shops and launch viral marketing campaigns with YouTube and Twitter and Facebook. They are all reasonable ideas and part of a natural reaction: to adapt or risk extinction.

The tailors of Savile Row, however, do not do this. Ever stubborn, they adhere to tradition. They don’t dabble with the Internet. They don’t try to move with the times. They never advertise. Ever. They simply tailor. They offer an unparalleled service based upon timelessness, quality and expertise. What it all boils down to is: they play to their strengths.

I worry that the adoption of retail models by libraries is harming our reputation. By emulating those we perceive as competitors – retailers, cinemas, television, the web – we risk entering their domain too completely. If they truly are our competitors, we cannot fight them on their turf: they are experts at marketing, adept at providing cutting-edge products and inescapably appealing to the young. Better instead, I argue, to draw a neat but clear line between libraries and retail. We need to play to our strengths: excellent book stock, knowledgeable librarians and an environment conducive to learning.

Computers, the Internet, audio-visual materials and modern leisure stock all have a place in libraries. Contemporary forms of information retrieval are wonderful things and libraries need them. What we don’t need, however, are the noise, the Playstations, the corporate identity and the gradual elimination of the word ‘library’. Libraries have hundreds of years – thousands even – of gathering a reputation as impartial, horizon-expanding embassies of knowledge. That’s one hell of an asset.

When I hear library managers boast of their new coffee shop or podcast download station, I think of a BBC comedy series called Monkeydust (available to borrow in your public library) in which the Fire Brigade is rebranded as ‘Icarus’ and focuses on selling burgers because that’s what’s fashionable and lucrative. Meanwhile, presumably, London incinerates around them.

A SWOT analysis hangs over our heads. The threats column is filled with retail outlets and search engines. That much is real. The threats exist. A mistake has been made, however, in perceiving these threats as models for opportunities. We don’t need to be like HMV. The best possible outcome of competing in this way is turning the library system into another HMV: something the world doesn’t need.

The tailors of Savile Row understand that they cannot compete with vendors of cheap suits by making cheaper suits. The cheap suit market it catered for by experts. Savile Row caters for something else, and the result is lucrative. Similarly, the demand for cheap music and exciting retail space is catered for. Less catered for are quiet, elegant study spaces with expert human help and great access to quality information. Let’s focus on those things.

If it takes a retail model for us to compete with other industries and to satisfy our financiers, I propose we look to those fusty but fabulously successful tailors of Savile Row. The key is to play to our strengths.

In way of marking this, here follows the slightly controvertial article which may have played a part in my being picked up by the group. This was published in the 11-24 July edition of CILIP’s Library + Information Gazette:

Should Library History make a return to the prospectus?

In 2006 I presented my MSc. Dissertation to the University of Strathclyde. It was boldly titled The Nature of Librarianship and took a deeply historical approach to literature review. I wanted to challenge the idea that we live in a time of excessive change by showing that the history of librarianship is riddled with such periods; that we are constantly in a state of developmental flux; but that a thread of intrinsic values has been present from the libraries of antiquity to the modern day service. Some of these values were practical while others were moral or intellectual. With our hands on this balustrade we would see that there is no particular threat from a rise of “leisure industries” and that HTML should be no more feared or adored than the scroll, the codex, the videotape or anything else one might label as a “paradigm shift”. In recognising these lessons from history, we would have a moral and practical guide to which to turn when change really does occur.

When constructing the initial proposal, I wasn’t sure I would be able to run with this at all. Library History wasn’t listed as a research interest by any of the departmental staff. One ray of hope lay in Dr. Paul Burton’s interest in “Social effects and impacts of ICT”. I pitched it to him and he caught it. But it was a lucky catch and I was glad for it: I really didn’t want to spend three months distributing questionnaires about the benefits of installing coffee machines in public libraries or wondering why SPSS hates me.

After a bit of research, it appears that Library History is largely dispensed with in the modern library school. Vestiges of the subject survive among academics who once lectured in it and are still ready to engage with it at the dissertation or PhD level; it also seems to have survived in some slides accompanying ‘Introduction to Librarianship’ modules. But looking for Library History in the modern library school is much akin to the cultural archaeology practiced by Library History itself. History, if you’ll indulge a silly joke, is a thing of the past. Perhaps this is due to the shifted perspective that Library Studies now constitute science rather than art. Or perhaps it is due to a perception that Library History is no longer relevant.

Let us not dwell on the science versus art debate and turn to the problem of relevance. “Our ignorance of history,” writes Goethe, “causes us to slander our own times”. History is always relevant and what history could be more relevant than that of one’s own discipline? We want to know about family histories; the histories of nations and the comparatively short histories of our favourite bands or television shows so why not that of our profession? One could posit that it transcends mere relevance and heads into the territory of the essential: the history of libraries takes on the war against censorship, the proliferation of science, the changing of formats, the rise of open access, the need for social inclusion, the politics of change and the rise of consumer society.

The marketing process and the installation of plasma screens are not what make librarianship an exciting discipline. A knowledge of Library History makes librarianship exciting and consequently contributes to the dynamism and importance of our services.

Bring Library History back to Library School. It disserves its own module and not to be crowbarred into existing classes. A healthy understanding of our history can only lead to a healthy design for our future.