The Girl Who Cried She-Wolf

I'm sure I'm not going to make any friends with this post, but here it goes anyway. I'm tired of reading articles that try to make excuses out of women vs. men in the job market. Roma Harris's "Information technology and the de-skilling of librarians; or the erosion of a woman's profession" is just one such article, that makes a few valid arguments about library jobs, or the "de-skilling" of such jobs, as she establishes in her title. The title of this article itself has implications regarding the content of the article: she had to use two titles in one, just as she wrote two articles in one! One of the articles dealt with the de-skilling of library jobs and another one that actually detracted from her main article, railing against men who choose to work in tech jobs and as such happen to take jobs in libraries.

Now, I chose the title for this blog post for a reason: as a student in a private liberal arts college for undergrad with a plurality of feminist professor, I frequently had to read similar articles about women earning less than men and holding lower positions than men. We even "fondly" dubbed our Foundations of Liberal Arts (freshmen writing) course "Hate yourself for being a straight, white, middle-classed male 101", because we could easily split the course into four units, one featuring articles about men oppressing women, another about gays not having the same rights as straights, a third about middle-class privilege, and a fourth about whites' oppression of blacks. We read SO many of those articles that I began to get information overload and ultimately have become almost completely desensitized to the arguments. It's a classic case of the boy who cried wolf, or in this case, a girl crying she-wolf.

Don't get me wrong, I fully understand the fact that women do indeed earn less money than men. That men tend to hold higher positions than women. But the journals are absolutely flooded with articles about it! They begin to lose their oomph! Journal articles in general don't get published unless they have some new viewpoint to bring to the table or new information to publish. Therein, to me, appears to be the reason Harris managed to get this article published: she did indeed draw together some good information about the "de-skilling" of the librarian profession, but she unfortunately didn't bother to give complete or even, sometimes, good arguments as to why these positions are becoming de-skilled or why men are holding some of the better positions.

I think my best example of a case in which she gives a complete lack of argument is in her section on "New Labels for Library Work". In her sixth paragraph, she cites Cimbala (1987), who claimed that one of the impediments to uniting university libraries and computing centers was the resistance of male computing staff members "to be labelled [as] librarians". REALLY?!? The whole reason something can't happen is that people are resisting a job title!?!? I highly doubt that any good dean or university president would be willing to let "resistance" to a job title be a reason not to combine two sectors. I am highly skeptical of Cimbala's research, and would really love to read the article to see if Cimbala indeed made these assertions, or whether Harris was extracting just a tiny bit of information out of a much more comprehensive study.

I have a few other reasons I dislike this article, which I'd be more than happy to share if anyone cares to listen. The article did have a few good points, which I would also be happy to share, but I feel like the good points were overwhelmingly drowned in the irrelevant points about men and how they claim all the good jobs.

Now, for your entertainment, a video to complement my title:
She Wolf

Readings for 9-15-10

I had a few thoughts about this week's readings, and I suppose I'll start with the most over-arching. I think I read these articles in the wrong order. The Saracevic article was definitely the most general, and background-like, of all the articles we read for today. I felt like it addressed a lot of the issues that we addressed in 451 last year, while also adding further insight into many more aspects of "information science". While I didn't completely like her style (I've never heard the word leitmotif, and she used it twice), she definitely presented some good information.

But anyway, about reading in the wrong order. I think after reading Saracevic, I think it would have been useful to read Pawley and Rusch-Feja, and then lastly (if at all), read McKemmish. Which this brings me to a point that I wanted to make about McKemmish: I was lacking context. Her article was published in an archives journal, apparently one that relates to everyday life/society, but that still doesn't really give me much context for the article. Perhaps an amusing anecdote, wouldn't that mean that this article wasn't given the fourth dimension of records keeping, because it wasn't brought into a framework for me? Lastly, even within the article, I felt like the author was scrounging to find any real relevance between the topics she chose, those of archiving and of the "Children Overboard". Clearly the removal of the captions from the photographs made things less clear, but I don't believe I've ever heard of an archivist purposely removing information from an item; and in fact, we had eyewitnesses who properly could put the photograph back in context, even if the information had become separated from it at some point.

So enough about the article I felt was completely out of place and out of context for this week; more about the others. I had a strange revelation as I was reading Pawley's article: what would have been different for me if I had had interlibrary loan and the ability to search and access all the libraries in my area or even around the world available to me as a child reader? As it was, I only had access to a very small public library in rural West Virginia (and a school library, but the books there were probably from the original collection when the town was founded in the 1930s as the first New Deal Colony and were of very little interest to a child of the '90s), with a decent children's and young adults' section, but with many of my favorite series missing books or only small selections by my favorite authors. I was required to branch out, to read books by a wide range of authors, on a wide range of young adult topics. But if I had had access to interlibrary loan, I doubt I would have tried most of those new authors! I would have been dead-set on finishing all the series I started (I was successful in the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Goosebumps, but my library only had spotty coverage on the Boxcar Children and a few others), which would have limited the amount of reading I did out of my local library.

I realize that the last paragraph was mostly unrelated to this week's readings, but it really gave me some perspective regarding the awe I feel these days that I have access to anything, anywhere, almost anytime. I was amazed a few months ago to find out that UW-Platteville had a copy of a book that my great-uncle wrote as a semi-autobiographical book about hobos, but I readily took the opportunity to borrow it and read it. I receive journal articles within two days of requesting them, often sooner. Perhaps it leads a little to information overload, a term that seems to be thrown around a lot these days, but moreover I think it leads me to miss some of the great things available to me in my local library, be that Madison Public Library or even Memorial Library (which it turns out has almost the complete series following a book I discovered in seventh grade, The Scarlet Pimpernel, which is well worth the read even now as an adult), something that I was fortunate not to have happen to me as a child.