Happy Birthday Archibald MacLeish!

Today is former Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish’s birthday, or so the Paris Review informs me in this post about him.  I decided to go to his essay , “The Librarianand the Democratic Process,” published in 1940 and available at the Library of Congress website, and what I found was quite interesting.  It seems that librarians have long been in an identity crisis, and the latest iteration of this is no less a question of purpose than the one about which Mr. MacLeish so eloquently writes.  In 1940, MacLeish saw librarians as lacking a defining purpose to give the profession a unified goal.  He proposed that what librarians ought to see as their purpose is the guarding of democracy by not only safe guarding our heritage, but providing access to the information, in an organized way, that the people need to make informed decisions.  Harkening to the prevalent propaganda in Europe of the late thirties, he proposes that for democracy to work as a system, the people need to be able to tell the difference between facts and wishful thinking/opinion/fiction.  

I find this essay refreshing.  It is nice to see that the more things change, the more they remain the same.  The discussion about the professionalization of librarians is neither new nor settled.  Librarians are still looking for that grand purpose; something to define them as a profession.  Sometimes we forget that we ought to have one.  Sometimes, to use a popular expression, we go off into the weeds.  These weeds can be anything from maker-spaces to craft sessions, to coffee bars.  It is not that these things are inherently bad, but if they are not serving our purpose, they are weeds.  School librarians can find a noble purpose in the teaching of information literacy and the promotion of literacy in general.  There are many ways in which we can serve our twin purposes, and as MacLeish does in his essay, I will decline to list them here, or predict what shape they may take in the future.  I do know that by fulfilling these purposes, we will assist in the grander vision that MacLeish lays out—we will serve democracy, which is serving the people.

Let’s try to stay out of the weeds.  We don’t want to get lost.