I have spoken before about the Dreaded Monthly Meetings and how much I hate to go to them. Today's news is that they seem to have put out the schedule of this year's meetings, and I did not receive one. Apparently, my presence at said meetings is no longer required.
Hmmm.
Now, maybe it's an oversight, and maybe the schedule isn't actually out, and maybe the Big Cheese is simply discontinuing these meetings altogether. All things are possible. And it's not as if I ever picked up anything useful in a library way at them, at least, not at all during last school year. (Whatever I find out, I hear it through the grapevine, as it were.) But my sense is that these meetings have been going on for 60 years or so, and that the head librarian has always been included. On top of everything else that's been going on, I really am starting to feel that there's some personal aspect to it. That may not be the case at all, because I still can't imagine that I'm a big enough blip on anyone's radar to be screwed over. For awhile today, I was seriously considering dropping into his office one day -- Mr. "My Door is Always Open" -- and asking him if I've done something to offend him. That would not be a good idea, really. I guess I just need to keep my head down for the next three or four years and then retire. Let's see how that one works out, shall we?
A few years ago -- okay, maybe like ten or fifteen -- I had this conversation with one of my colleagues that has always stuck with me. His father had had some good factory job, and as he got into his forties, industry began to move out of the area and he lost what he had always believed would be a secure job. So his son, my colleague, who was just going off to college, vowed that this would never happen to him. He would be a teacher, and have a secure job, always. He became an industrial arts teacher, a shop teacher. He taught mechanical drawing. And then, these years ago, the sickening realization dawned on him that he was becoming obsolete, that what he knew and loved and taught was being phased out of existence by technology. He learned Computer Assisted .... Drawing, whatever it's called, CADD, and he taught that for a few years. But he saw the writing on the wall, and he became a guidance counselor, a very good one, in fact.
But the realization is dawning on me that libraries are becoming obsolete, at least school libraries, and the school librarians who work in them. Do you know how long there have been libraries, and librarians? Can anyone say ANCIENT EGYPT? ANCIENT GREECE? Can it be possible that librarians are a thing of the past?
It's not the information, or even the reading, that's going. It's the centralized depositories of print material, and the people needed to manage them. In twenty years, when I tell my grandchildren that I used to be a librarian, they'll say "What's that?" Everything will be online. I'm not opposed to information being online, but when people, especially school administrators, don't understand that someone needs to teach children how to access and use that information, I get worried. And the people in my district aren't even that sophisticated, really. They just built three new media centers in elementary schools, too (because they had to to get the state funding for the additions they put up), but they're neither properly staffed nor properly automated. They bought new card catalogs, for god's sake, but they had to get them used someplace because they aren't even made any more. But they found them, rather than spend the money to automate the libraries. Someone, I guess, is teaching those childrenn to use the card catalog. There's an essential 21st century skill for you. I wonder if they also teach them how to keep their quill pens sharpened.
I blame Laura Bush. She, of all people, should have said something.
