The Elements of Marvin
By Karen G. Schneider
American Libraries Columnist
Director of the Garfield Library in Brunswick, New York, and author of A Practical Guide to Internet Filters (Neal-Schuman, 1997)
kgs@bluehighways.com
Column for April 1999
Two years ago I had the privilege of interviewing Marvin Scilken for a column (“Desperately Seeking Marvin,” June/July 1997, p. 116). Among his many claims to fame, Marvin, during and after his long career as a public library director, was the editor of The U*N*A*B*A*S*H*E*D Librarian, a small, homespun newsletter of practical advice subtitled The How I Run My Library Good Letter.
Polly Scilken, Marvin's widow and faithful editorial assistant for all these years, is publishing the next two issues on her own; the future of U*N*A*B*A*S*H*E*D is then uncertain, but Polly knows she wants it to continue, and so do many of us in Libraryland. A couple of people suggested to me that we don't need UL any more because we have Internet discussion groups such as PUBLIB and Stumpers. But I again measured the entire Internet against one Marvin Scilken, and I again came up short by the barrelful.
The beauty of tangibility
The U*N*A*B*A*S*H*E*D Librarian had the beauty of tangibility. You could touch it, feel it, shove it in a backpack, prop it on a treadmill, circle good ideas and stuff it in a colleague's mailbox in a way you simply cannot do with our electronic forums such as PUBLIB.
The (irregular, always late) arrival of U*N*A*B*A*S*H*E*D was a silent rebuke to all things digital (and hence intangible). Marvin wrote it—literally, in longhand, while Polly typed out the columns (I don't mean keyboarded, I mean typed). It was “cut and paste" in the old-fashioned sense. If you looked closely enough, you could see the evidence of its analog origins: a slight skewing here and there, the faint shadow of paper pasted on paper, or a font change. Even the asterisks between the letters -- borrowed from The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, Leo Rosten's achingly funny book about a postwar immigrant's struggle to learn English—were humorous in part because they were a product of a real typewriter. Like watching your breath spiral from your mouth on a cold winter's day, U*N*A*B*A*S*H*E*D was evidence itself of the beautifully concrete world that Marvin knew was our first, our only real inhabitance.
The comfort of closure
Internet discussion groups are just that—ongoing discussions. Like a Robert Altman movie, we chatter and chatter. Go away for a few weeks and sign on again, and we are all still chattering, unfettered by page length, editorial deadlines, or, for that matter, editors. This has its advantages. But we are also creatures of habit who seek patterns and closure in our lives, and the arrival of a new issue of a magazine, with its beginning, middle and end, its specificity, its limits, is a small but noticeable ceremony in our lives—one we should consider carefully before abandoning it to an endlessly gurgling stream of digitized information.
Our library district now has access to the Ebscohost database, a commercial Internet database with hundreds of full-text magazine articles. While we all find it useful and fun, Ebscohost isn't really designed for browsing by issue. One patron commented, “I guess I'm being old-fashioned—I want to read a magazine." I said I knew exactly what he meant, and we talked about the joy of “the latest issue": the ceremonial inspection of the cover, the quick glance at the table of contents, the rapid assessment of one's calendar to determine how soon you can hunker down and without interruption enjoy your treat. Marvin, the cagey old press man, knew that librarians wanted to read a real, finite magazine—especially a magazine about them.
Since I am known to respond, instantly and at luxurious length, to any stray idea I happen to encounter on the Internet, you may well raise your eyebrows when I say that the advantage of U*N*A*B*A*S*H*E*D over a discussion group was that it was highly selective. Discussion groups are wonderful because they are all over the map: posting guidelines usually ask only that you don't break laws or cause fights. But U*N*A*B*A*S*H*E*D was the distillation of Marvin's review of many, many newsletters, talks he had with people, and “reporting assignments" he sent people on.
As Sue Kamm, librarian at Los Angeles Public and erstwhile U*N*A*B*A*S*H*E*D stringer, put it, the publication was a careful selection of “nuggets of wisdom"—bibliographies, bookmarks, programming ideas—that if nothing else would be difficult to ferret out from the flotsam of most discussion lists. Terrific graphics often accompanied the discussion. Michael Golrick of the Southern Connecticut Library Council said, “I recently had occasion to look through the last eight or so issues. In every one, there was some very clear graphic 'cut and paste' of a library's great idea." You can't get that from discussion lists.
Marvin skimmed the cream of the very best of current library practice and shared it in his coarse little cut-and-paste magazine, and we are all the worse for its loss. We don't have to close the door on “that type" of library newsletter, though. Rory Litwin is the editor of a little library e-mail newsletter called Library Juice -- not a library management newsletter, but a compilation of current issues and news. Through Rory's lens, you see an alternative view of librarianship—maybe not one you agree with, but an interesting view all the same. Despite its electronic format, it has a feeling very similar to U*N*A*B*A*S*H*E*D—homey and very human. (Where else can you learn about bellydancing librarians?) We need more Marvins and Rorys, and we need to continue our tradition of the little newsletters that could. They feed our need for all that is tangible, finite, and selective, and bring us back to earth.
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