Librarianship--Quo Vadis? Opportunities and Dangers as We Face the New Millennium (review)

"It will not surprise readers to know that, while both my views and my professional activities made me highly visible within ALA [American Library Association], they did not make me universally popular. . . . [I]t began to occur to me, after a few years of modest waiting, that despite my visibility no Nominating Committee would ever select me for anything, because my selection might offend somebody" (xxxiii). So comments Professor Herbert S. White in his introduction to Librarianship—Quo Vadis?—librarianship, where are you going? He also sets the tone for this compilation and his views, promising to offend someone somewhere in the profession, be they librarians, library associations, or library administrators. In fact, White brands librarians as their own worst enemies and hopes to get a reaction from them so that they change their current suicidal strategies and priorities.

If you are a "difficult" subordinate or a "wild duck," you will appreciate this volume tremendously. If you are in library school, you'll find the book provides a refreshing foil to much of what you encounter in current library literature. Without regard to political correctness and with a forthrightness that allows for no dilution of the truth, White examines the profession of librarianship and the issues that dominate it in a series of journalistic essays.

Herbert S. White is a well-known name in library management and has been involved with librarianship for over fifty years. Now retired, he served as a professor and dean at the Indiana University School of Library and Information Science for twenty-five years. Prior to that he worked for several major special and corporate libraries in operations management.

This volume follows two similar publications: Librarians and the Awakening from Innocence (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989) and At the Crossroads: Librarians on the Information Superhighway (Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1995). All three books are concerned primarily with library management, since it is in the management arena, White attests, that librarians need to make the most change. Other, more general issues are addressed in terms of management or library education. White feels that the needs of practitioners and the needs of educators should be brought together because neither can succeed without the other. As of this writing, White laments that this is not being accomplished. White frequently cites the theories of Peter Drucker as the expert in management science from whom we can all learn.

This volume, like its predecessors, is made up of Library Journal "White Paper" columns, a few book reviews, and talks and speeches from professional conferences and symposia dating from 1993 through 1999. During those five years, White described and dissected library culture. This four-hundred-page volume could have benefited from some additional editing, as some points become repetitious.

White's general conclusions are that librarians are just plain bad at politics, have no self-respect or pride, and go out of their way to be self-effacing if not downright obsequious. In other words, librarians don't promote themselves properly. "We hide the problem of inadequate reference staffs by adapting it to the budget. In that way, and since there are no huge lines of waiting patrons at the reference desk, no one knows what reference service could have been and what reference staffing should have been" (66).

This collection is best sampled in bits and pieces. Most of the essays are broken down into small chunks, making them easily digestible as well as usable for library classes. The index is rather limited, but the table of contents is very detailed.

You may not always agree with White's conclusions, but his observations are sound, and he does encourage thought.