Thursday, October 11, 2007

I love white women.

AL is on a tear about ALA Pres. Loriene Roy. I'm sure I have an opinion on this, having read some of the Diversity Counts report a while back:

Though the institutional charge of the library historically has been to meet the information needs of users efficiently and equitably, contemporary library and information science (LIS) research provides compelling evidence that services to some user groups are greatly impeded by socio-cultural divides.

There is something inherently wrong with a statement like that.
If I provide a service, and you do not want me to serve you because of our "socio-cultural divides," then you have a problem because you have a prejudice. But unfortunately, this is America, so in reality, I'm the one with the problem.

AL says:

This time we learn more than that librarians are mostly white women and that
this is a bad thing.

When the message is that there are too many white women in the profession, do you think white women are going to feel confident about becoming librarians? I'm glad for white women. I don't think there were ever enough men interested in becoming librarians to fill all the libraries that we have today. So without these women to fill all these jobs, would I have even had a local public library in my neighborhood when I was growing up?

I'm happy when I hear that anyone wants to be a librarian. And if the future of libraries is online services like chat and email reference, why should anyone care what I look like? (But for the record, I am totally hot. Yeah, totally.)