Home January 2002 Vol 63 No 1 Gorman book review

College and Research Libraries
January 2002, Vol. 63, No. 1

Book Review

Gorman, Michael. Our Enduring Values: Librarianship in the 21st Century. Chicago: ALA, 2000. 188p. $28, alk. paper (ISBN 0838907857). LC 00-27127.

Michael Gorman’s published contributions to librarianship must total several hundred by now. Nearly all are sprightly, thoughtful, provocative, and many downright argumentative. Already a prominent expert, Gorman first achieved status as a cataloging and technical services “guru” after serving as joint editor of the second edition of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (ALA, 1978). His administrative and/or cataloging colleagues labeled AACR2 either as “genius” or as “a self-inflicted wound,” to quote two of them.

Now dean of library services at the California State University, Fresno, Gorman is carving out guru status in what we’ve been calling the “core values” of librarianship. His forays into library values gained wide attention when the guru bravely promulgated “Five New Laws of Librarianship” in the September 1995 American Libraries. Publishing the laws in the “official organ” of the ALA gave them the protective cover and imprimatur of the world’s largest library organization. He also has argued for and enumerated the profession’s values in Library Journal (“Technostress and Library Values,” April 15, 2001, 48–50).

Gorman served on an ALA task force that grappled its way to a draft “core values statement” that was, fortunately, scuttled by the ALA Council. No blame should accrue to Gorman for either the content of the draft statement or its fate. Suffering from committee compromise, it lacked the guru’s fine turn of phrase and intelligent argument.

Synthesizing his own take on four of the profession’s great thinkers (Ranganathan, Shera, Rothstein, and Finks), Gorman has again dared to enumerate, if not codify, our “enduring” core values. Again, the guru gets the ALA imprint, but this time he has substantially more success than he did in the official organ, and the book truly towers over the task force draft.

The eight values, though innocuous and agreeable enough, are each given a fourteen- to sixteen-page chapter in the book. Written in his unique, readable style and mercifully brief, some chapters are surprisingly argumentative and some contain pure invective. They suggest that core values give the profession much more to debate than we expected.

Gorman picks fights with any who see digitization replacing print on paper for nearly any purpose. Early on, the digitizers are accused of publishing “incomprehensible papers about digital libraries” and holding “conferences that float on an abundant supply of hot air.” Later on, he dispenses with the discipline of information science (IS), asserting that “there is really no such thing,” but “this bogus discipline has a stranglehold on many of our library schools.” The legitimacy of IS was settled on many decades ago. (Then, of course, there’s “library science.”)

Give the guru credit, he puts his values to work on current issues in the profession, from filtering the Internet to instruction in library use (read the delightful essay on bibliographic instruction on pages 106–109), and much more.

Should you buy and even read the book? Absolutely! You’ll enjoy the guru’s witty anger, even at those times when it is reduced to pedantic condescension. You’ll even cheer him on when he scores direct hits on those old straw targets and twirling windmills against which he has tilted so consistently and bravely all these years.—John Berry, Library Journal.