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Libraries, Automation, and Jobs

I observed at a meeting of our local library system recently that the 40,000 foot financial view of our library system is 70% of expenditures on personnel, 10% on collection (buying books), and the remaining 20% keeps the lights on, which includes computer systems, the cost of transporting books from branch to branch, office supplies, furniture maintenance, and all the other minor expenses that go with any business. I spent a few minutes researching and found that this distribution is fairly typical nationwide.

Dealing cards at Harper Reserve on the South Side

I worked in a library for the first time in about 1970, working part time on the desk at Harper Reserve in the University of Chicago library system checking out books and other documents that instructors had placed on reserve for students in their classes. In those days, record keeping was all manual. As I remember, each book had two cards in a little pocket pasted to the inside back cover. Patrons entered their name and borrower number on each card for each book they checked out. Part of the checkout process was to verify that a legible borrower number on the card matched the number on the patron’s library card. One card was filed by call number (the equivalent of author, title, and edition), the other was filed by due date. I may not remember all of this exactly, but I think we were able to determine who checked out each book, and the books due on a given date, but it was nearly impossible to provide a patron with a list of books they had checked out. If they didn’t know what they had, they would not find out until we nailed them with an overdue fine.

After a few months experience, library workers learned to handle three-by-five cards like Las Vegas black jack dealers and put a stack of cards in alphabetic or call number order without thinking about it. Does anyone besides me remember the sorting gizmos with A-Z plastic flaps?

It isn’t nostalgia

I haven’t gone into detail on these obsolete practices for nostalgia. I want to compare it to present practice. Almost all the work of the circulation desk of those days has been eliminated. Accurate alphabetization while thinking about what to say to the girl who sits across the table in Western Civ class is no longer a bankable skill. The activities that most of my cohort were hired to perform are now part of a computerized integrated library system. The checkout station scanner scoops up the bar code on the patron’s card and the bar codes on each item to be borrowed. The computer system takes it from there. In our library system today, a patron can check out a book at our “Express Library” with no human contact or touch. Only a few tasks I was paid to do at Harper Reserve in 1970 are still performed by human beings today: getting books for patrons from the shelves, re-shelving them from the return bin, and shelf-reading (checking for miss-shelved materials), all tasks that involve physically handling the books.

Integrated library systems

The system does a better job than we did in 1970. It’s faster and more accurate (the computer is never distracted by thoughts of the girl across the table in Western Civ), and the computer tells the patron which books they have checked out, when they are due, and offers them an opportunity to renew, all on a web site pleasantly decorated by a skilled graphic designer, instead of talking to a bored student who smells like wet wool.

The integrated system does it all, and does a much better job than we did in 1970. You would expect that personnel costs as a share in the budget would have shrunk significantly, since much of the work done by personnel in 1970 has been shifted to computer systems, which are funded as overhead, not personnel or content.

Library personnel today

This takes us back to the 70-10-20 split in library expenditures. I find it surprising that libraries still invest 70% of their revenues in staff. Investing in human beings is good, but I have to understand how it works for libraries. Today, we worry that digitization is eliminating jobs and making decent livelihoods a prerogative of a privileged few. I have no idea what the present equivalent of “Harper Reserve” is like at the University of Chicago today, but I do know a little about what happens today in our local public library branches.

I have not been able to find reports on the distribution of public library budgets in the 1970s, but I am willing to guess that they have stayed about the same because it simply feels the same to me. I notice that libraries today focus much more on hands on customer service as opposed to the rote work that took up time in the past. I argue that automation has freed up library workers for more productive purposes instead of eliminating jobs. Checking for legible checkout forms, shuffling cards, and poring over bins of paper slips to fish out circulation records is not good use of a human resource. Humans are better used in helping a patron find the book they need or want, by speaking to them and leading them to the resource, putting out informative displays, directing useful programs, and any number of tasks only humans can perform well.

Jobs and unemployment

Can this model be applied to other endeavors? Sometimes yes, but it’s hard for me to imagine finding a more human task in a factory for a punch press operator who has been replaced by a robot. Certainly, their are better uses for people outside of factories, but that is cold comfort for workers who have earned their living from their patience and diligence rather than special skills. Patience and diligence have always been, and still are, honorable human traits, but they are exactly what automation supplies cheaply and abundantly. Hence, they are devalued in many settings.

This, I think, is sad.

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Genres, Conflict, and Cartesian Spaces

I have been thinking hard about what I like about the books I like because, lately, I have found myself reading a lot of current books I don’t particularly care for and I wonder what is happening.

I published Fifty-Third and Dorchester earlier this year. I have been immersing myself in writing and the meta-world of the craft of writing. These days, everyone has a theory or method for writing a sure-fire hit. I read and listen to several websites and podcasts a week on writing craft. I have shelves of books on every aspect of the craft. Like me, every aspiring writer these days is flooded with advice. MFAs in creative writing abound. Compared to a decade ago, writers are much better educated on craft.

But I have to ask, why don’t I care much for the recently written books I read? My poor choices? A bad attitude? Out of step with the times? Or has political air pollution put a permanent sour taste in my mouth? Chronic dysphoria?

All of those are plausible, but I think it is something else because there are authors whose books continue to bring me pleasure. For example, I reread Dorothy Sayers first Peter Whimsey story last week and enjoyed it immensely. I saw flaws and superficialities that I did not notice the last time I read it, probably twenty years ago, but these are minor hypersensitivities that come from sweating over the imperfections in my own work. The issues highlight the many things that Ms. Sayers got right rather than detract.

My guess, which I intend to explore, is that current writers have lost sight of some sensibilities that older writers took for granted. Current literary crafters are painfully aware of a certain kind of conflict. The craft books almost all say that every scene, paragraph, and word must convey the striving of the character toward some goal or the reader will lose interest. The entire text must be plotted in a polar coordinate system that points to whatever it is that the character wants. This is robust underpinning. But has a bit of ennui slipped in? Is this the only story that can captures a reader’s fancy? Is it possible that a multidimensional cartesian space can be equally or more compelling?

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Violent Culture

This week, the senate report on “enhanced interrogation” was released. I don’t want to comment on the report or enhanced interrogation techniques. The accusations, denials, finger pointing, and bloviation will have to settle down before I’m ready. For the time being, I prefer to look at the wider context.

Citizens of the United States like violence. Look at the local news. In my neighborhood, there are four main local television stations. When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, the same stations were broadcasting. Each station had a half hour of local news followed by a half hour of national news in the early evening. Another broadcast at ten or eleven, and an early morning half hour. Altogether, two hours, if that. Today, I would not care to count the number of hours of news the same stations broadcast, but it is much more than hour to two hours of fifty years ago.

And what have they filled it with? Murders, rapes, sexual abuse, beatings, robberies punctuated with an occasional lachrymose piece about recovery from adversity. Careful reporting on difficult to comprehend, and therefore boring, issues like statistical trends, financial reports, policies, planning, and the details of government—the stuff that citizens in a democracy must know—are rare.

Mayhem has become entertainment. Schadenfreude reigns. We love to see our neighbor’s houses fall over cliffs, lives ruined by scammers, families torn apart by abuse and violence, and then solace ourselves by throwing in a few bucks when the hat is passed.

I don’t blame anyone or anything, certainly not the television producers trying to make a living by giving people what they want. I am just sad. It is pointless to try to find who is responsible. It is everyone’s fault. It’s no one’s fault. Choose your favorite scapegoat. Maybe it is the aftermath of the Holocaust, or WWII. Or the pill. Maybe the hippies. Or Dr. Spock. Capital gains taxes. Or structural anthropology. The metric system. Or the new math. Maybe there is something in the water.

The consequence is violence everywhere. Folks want to buy guns so they can get in on the action and shoot each other .We watch violence on the news. We watch it in the movies. For the first time in my life, I felt a passing twinge of sympathy for the government of North Korea when I heard Sony was planning a movie in which the head of their sitting leader explodes.

The great literature of the past was violent. Read the Iliad or the Odyssey, War and Peace, Moby Dick, Bleak House. There is plenty of killing and violence. The past was violent. There is evidence that the murder rate has been decreasing for the last ten centuries. The difference I notice is fascination with the details of violence rather than the consequences of violence. In the Iliad, and Shakespeare, the violence is off stage. The motives, repercussions, ethics, and morality of violence are the subject, not the acts themselves.

There is no lack of principled conduct among the people and institutions I know, but in our cultural life, for every sincere politician, there are three murderers. For every honest and engaged citizen, a dozen grasping and greedy trolls refuse to support the common good and and only want to get rich. Why? I don’t know, but I hope it changes.