Bitchy book review

When I first saw the pile of copies of Marilyn Johnson's book This Book is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All at ALA Midwinter, I was naturally very excited. Not so excited that it didn't get in line behind a lot of other books, but still. Anyway, now that I've finished the book, I have very conflicted feelings about it. A librarian writing on her blog about a book that's about librarians and blogs and books is either very meta or very insular. I can't decide.

In any case. Around the halfway point of the book, I was feeling really irritated with the whole thing. I wasn't sure why Johnson was choosing to concentrate on things that I personally find sort of useless, like Second Life and book cart drill teams. Eventually I accepted that Johnson wasn't writing a comprehensive or focused book. She was following the random threads and paths that research often takes.

And she's narrating her personal experience the whole time. I think part of why I reacted to the book so personally was because her tone is so personal. (I also reacted personally because I'm a librarian, but I'll get to that later.) I just occasionally found her tone (well-meaning, enthusiastic) a little irritating. One manifestation of this is the generalizing about librarians as a group. She refers to cupcakes as the "official snack of young librarians" (211). "The silver-haired librarians who got their library degrees way back in the twentieth century came from backgrounds in history and literature" (26). The word visionary pops up about every five pages.

Of course, I am a member of the profession being written about here, so naturally I want to correct what I see as generalizations or inconsistencies. Johnson, for example, dismisses cataloging near the end of the book as one of the more "bloodless" parts of librarianship, but is impressed by how archivists and librarians organize and describe information, both online and in paper. Which IS cataloging. And most librarians I know thought this New York Times article about "hip librarians" (which makes an appearance in the book) was cringe-inducing. It's now become a stereotype to think of librarians as stereotypes (old, shushing, blah blah). And those librarians are hip(ster) because they live in Brooklyn.

Okay, I don't want this to become a total jeremiad, because I do appreciate where Johnson is coming from. I enjoyed many of the interviews she did, and I think librarians need all the positive publicity we can get. There were a couple of chapters that lived up to the book's subtitle, about Radical Reference, the librarians who challenged the Patriot Act, and librarian "missionaries" training students from developing countries. I wish the whole book had been like that. Johnson does get across, for the most part, that librarians are far from being obsolete, and that we want to help people escape "information sickness" and discover the best information for their needs. And she cites her sources, too.

Quotations from This Book is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson. New York: HarperCollins, 2010.