Just another idiot

Sarah Houghton at Librarian in Black blogged a speech by Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and most famous in the biblioblogosphere for uninformed comments on blogs, search engines, and modern music. The gem of his speech in California was: Any idiot can create a webpage.

Sarah has a great response:

Yes, any idiot can. Hell, a robot can. But an idiot cannot create a good usable webpage for a library that is well-organized and utilizes some of those principles of traditional librarianship he mentioned--it takes someone who is both a techie and a librarian.

My objection to Gorman's presentation of the issue is that it actually bears discussion, but his way of stating it makes it nearly impossible to make the leap over the insult and the lack of understanding to the substance.

We need librarians who can design well-organized, usable, complex web sites. But does it make sense for future librarians to take web development classes for graduate credit and at graduate school prices? My library school offers those classes; I chose not to take them. In part, that's because my computer science background gives me credibility in this area and a foundation that lets me learn most computer related technologies easily from a good book and a long weekend. But it was also because I knew that if I decide I would prefer to learn the information in a class, I could take similar classes for a lot less money at my community college. I wanted my library school classes to be directly related to libraries, because I can't get that at my local community college.

I suspect, at the core, I agree with Michael Gorman on the major thrust of his presidency, librarian education (I wrote about required coursework last month). But it's hard to be supportive of someone who dismisses me as an idiot.     #

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