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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
The work of James P. Danky, longtime librarian at the Wisconsin Historical Society, is situated within the intellectual context of collection-development practices. Danky's belief in the value of alternative periodicals--and the lengths that he went to identify and acquire them--may be interpreted as a rejection of increasingly mechanical and generic ways to develop library collections. Reliance on centralized selection procedures, approval plans, and serials vendors was not only tantamount to the "disintegration of librarians as sources of expertise," but also structurally privileged books and serials from mainstream publishers. The biennial Alternative Library Literature (1982-2001), which Danky coedited with Sanford Berman, is compared with the annual Library Lit.--The Best of(1970-1990) to illuminate the way in which contrasting philosophical approaches to the selection of anthology articles may be interpreted as a microcosm of larger issues in collection development.
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In the middle and late 1960s, three structurally intertwined events altered the practice of collection development in public and academic libraries in the United States. Taken together, these events moved collection development away from the realm of what could be described as item "selection" on a title-by-title basis by subject specialists into the realm of item "purchasing" (Harris, 1970, p. 53). First, many large and midsized public libraries with multiple branches instituted the practice of centralized selection, whereby relatively low-paid paraprofessionals in consolidated acquisitions departments adhered to a demand-driven philosophy embodied in the phrase "Give 'Em What They Want," which had its origins at the Baltimore County (Maryland) Public Library (BCPL). Second, many academic libraries outsourced their monograph purchases to vendors who provided them with books through approval plans, defined as "an acquisitions method under which a library receives regular shipments of new titles selected by a dealer, based on a profile of library collection interests, with the right to return what it decides not to buy" (Nardini, 2003, p. 133). Third, academic and public libraries increasingly entrusted their periodical purchases to serials vendors or subscription agents, thus avoiding direct contact with publishers of journals and magazines. As these changes became normative throughout the last three decades of the twentieth century, they contributed to a situation whereby alternative books and periodicals from small presses were not easily found in many American libraries.
Throughout his more than thirty-year career (1973-2007) at the Wisconsin Historical Society as an Order Librarian; Newspapers and Periodicals Librarian; Assistant Librarian for Research and Development; and founding codirector of the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America, James P. Danky looked askance at the philosophies associated with serials vendors, monographic approval plans, and the "Give 'Em What They Want" approach, believing that they significantly impoverished the cumulated written record available at the nation's libraries by overlooking material that was not readily available through convenient channels. Danky's academic interests were primarily historical--an effort to extend, deepen, and thus problematize the public's awareness of neglected historical sources that told a story that ran counter to received wisdom in many fields. As coeditor of volumes such as Women in Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Danky & Wiegand, 2006) ; African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography (Danky & Hady, 1998); The German-American Radical Press: The Shaping of a Left Political Culture, 1850-1940 (Shore, Fones-Wolf, & Danky, 1992); and Native American Periodicals and Newspapers, 1828-1982: Bibliography, Publishing Record, and Holdings (Danky & Hady, 1984), he displayed meticulous scholarship and an abiding passion for opening new perspectives on American life and culture. But underlying his historical pursuits was the recognition that collecting contemporary alternative and small-press publications was key to providing an in-depth picture of current social, cultural, and political issues and debates (e.g., Campbell, Bowles, & Danky, 1984a, 1984b; Danky, 1974, 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1996a; Danky & Hennessy, 1986; Danky & Shore, 1982; Hady & Danky, 1979; Hunter & Danky, 1986). For him, these publications represented not only the cornerstone of any informed historical portrait of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century written in the future, but also the essence of librarianship, since they alone were capable of interrogating mainstream publications that comprised the bulk of materials available at libraries. In short, collecting alternative materials was the responsibility of all librarians if they wanted to give full meaning to concepts such as equality, diversity, and substantive neutrality. If only mainstream publications were collected, Danky felt, substantive neutrality was impossible because, while such publications ventured to the left or the right of conventional wisdom on any given topic, they never went beyond a safe middle range of opinion that represented a consensus status quo. Collecting alternative materials--those on the margins of accepted contemporary discourse--was therefore a necessary part of librarianship's commitment to substantive neutrality. It was difficult work that obligated librarians to look beyond serials vendors, approval plans, and BCPL-inspired rhetoric.
DEBATES IN LIBRARIANSHIP ABOUT COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT
Danky's views about collection development were grounded in the social activism of the 1960s and early 1970s. It was a time when "hundreds of American librarians and library school students became involved in championing socially related change in librarianship ... and in so doing brought the library profession into the social protest movements of the time" (Bundy & Stielow, 1987, p. 1). Discouraged with what they perceived as an ossified American Library Association (ALA) and with library leaders who retained "comfortable illusions" about the profession, many practitioners worked "to make good [librarianship's] intellectual freedom and other ethical commitments, to recognize and do something about the inequalities in [library] services, to withhold ... support from still segregated library associations, and to take a position on ... the war in Vietnam and police repression at home" (Bundy & Stielow, 1987, p. 5). One area of concerted effort was women's rights: 'Women librarians became aware of the wide spectrum of ideas being addressed by the women's movement and began to discuss such issues as salaries, promotional opportunities, and sexism in library materials" (Cassell, 1987, p. 21). Other areas of focus were: serving minority populations and the disadvantaged; heightening the relevancy of library education; and integrating library schools and the profession as a whole (Axam, 1987; Haro, 1987; Josey, 1987; Owens, 1987; Williams, 1987).
Some of these concerns were summarized in the "Friday the 13th Manifesto," an outgrowth of the 1969 Institute on Library Service to the Black and Urban Poor, which stated that the priorities of public libraries were skewed toward "the articulated needs and demands of the power structure and have not extended to the unarticulated needs of those outside the power structure" (qtd. in Bundy & Stielow, 1987, pp. 186-187). Librarians therefore needed to engage in "a philosophy of advocacy" on behalf of the excluded (qtd. in Bundy & Stielow, 1987, pp. 186-187). This mindset animated the founders of the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT), which from its inception in 1969 saw itself as "the 'conscience of ALA' and as a pressure group within ALA" whose mission it was to engage the ALA in "intellectual confrontations" so as "to define the role of the library in society" (qtd. in Bundy & Stielow, 1987, p. 193). As Toni Samek (2001) shows, SRRT soon became "the largest ALA round table with 1013 members," an indication of widespread frustration with current practices of the ALA (p. 70).
Perhaps the most searing confrontation was about intellectual freedom. If libraries were to better serve individuals outside the power structure, they should collect materials that reflected those hitherto excluded voices. Libraries could no longer afford to be neutral in a "hands-off liberalism" sort of way, since such neutrality was not substantive neutrality (Samek, 2001, p. 46). Intellectual freedom was therefore a collection-development issue. As Sanford Berman (1976) argued, if libraries wanted to be venues for "liberation"--the "single keyword or rubric [that] encompasses the multitude of overlapping movements and ideas that within the past decade have forcefully emerged among blacks, students, Jews, teachers, Chicanos, women, the young, Asian-Americans, servicemen, Indians, ecophiliacs, still-colonized peoples, workers, the impoverished, homosexuals, and even some psychiatrists, athletes, retirees, sociologists, and librarians"--it was incumbent that collection-development specialists acquire materials that spoke to the various impulses for "liberation" (pp. 345-346).
Moreover, once acquired, these alternative materials should not fall prey to the traditional "condescending, curator-like, rubber-gloves-and-forceps-mentality" that consigned them to "glass cases" and "padlocked vaults," effectively relegating them to archival status in the same way that "intriguing cadavers [were] gathered and then pickled and frozen for later study by anatomists" (Berman, 1976, p. 346). Instead, they should be placed on "open shelves" because the "articles in Radical America, Women, and Tricontinental Magazine are just as fitting and citable for term papers and dissertations as material culled from Foreign Affairs, Time, and Business Week" (Berman, 1976, p. 346). Finally, libraries should avoid relying on the "pathetic" bibliographic data supplied by the Library of Congress or the Online Computer Library Center to catalog purchased alternative materials, since this data lacked "sufficient subject headings and other added entries"; failed "to adequately and helpfully indicate special features or content-elements not discernible from the title alone"; and omitted "subject terms that faithfully and precisely express the content of the work in familiar, unbiased language" (Berman, 1982, p. 31).
Properly understood, collection development was a multifaceted concept that included the selection of items, their display, and appropriate cataloging. All these elements needed to be approached from a "dynamic, responsive" (Berman, 1976, p. 349) perspective the goal of which was substantive neutrality, which would meaningfully expand the conformist boundaries of what Alan Nadel (1995) referred to as "containment culture" (p. 4). Only in this way could libraries show that they had "opt[ed] for people, participation, compassion, and engagement" (Berman, 1976, p. 344)--the kind of values that informed Synergy, one of the first North American publications devoted to alerting librarians about alternative-press books and magazines. Founded in 1967, Synergy not only excoriated librarians for being "passive" and soporific consumers in an "information marketplace" controlled by "big publishers" who only paid attention to "alternative press related topics" when they "sensed profit," but also informed them about how the tools that they ordinarily used to select books and magazines were "rear-view mirrors" that had little connection with actual user interests (Samek, 2001, p. 47).
But the call for what Berman (1976) identified as "dynamic, responsive" libraries that gave priority "to the people" (p. 349) was interpreted by others in the 1960s in an entirely different way. This was particularly true when it came to collection development. For the BCPL, responsiveness was conceptualized as a "Give 'Em What They Want" approach, a philosophy that at first glance appeared to have much in common with Berman's prioritization of "the people," but when all was said and done turned out to be its antithesis. As described by BCPL's senior administrators, Charlie Robinson and Jean-Barry Molz, "Give 'Em What They Want" dispensed with attempting to create a "good" library--"We soon saw that [trying to do so] was ridiculous. It was insane"--in favor of buying multiple copies of bestsellers (Pearl, 1996, p. 136). For the BCPL, responsiveness meant being "the best seller library, or the bookstore library" (Pearl, 1996, p. 136). Making circulation statistics the main criteria by which to judge a book's value, Robinson spoke caustically...
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