Outline for a book I will never write

I was thinking the other day about how cool mdBook is. Indeed, whilst Pressbooks has been getting all the love lately in Open Textbooks world, as usual I'm more drawn to something using clear structural text systems like markdown. Also I hate PHP and am drawn to Rust.

mdBook

Pressbooks

Anyway, naturally my thoughts turned to what sort of book *I* might write. I've had this vague idea in the back of my head for a while, about a "DIY Library School" resource. A moment when the number of official library schools in Australia is rapidly converging on "1" seems as good a time as any. On the other hand, it's not as if I am any particular authority on everything there is to know about librarianship. It's possible that the fact that I am increasingly less sure I have any idea what I'm doing as time goes on might indicate that I've gained some kind of expertise, it's equally possible that I feel like that because ...I have no idea what I'm doing. Anyway, I wrote some notes down about this on the train the other day, so here's my outline.

Essentially, I was thinking of an online "book" broken into eight sections, with the content being a general overview of what the topic heading means and what sorts of things need to be thought about, with a heap of links out to various other resources that go into detail about various aspects. Obviously if I was actually going to do this it would require more thinking.

Custodianship

This sets the scene by describing the role of librarians as that of temporary custodians of community knowledge. It positions us as people with a responsibility for keeping culture and knowledge alive and available to the next generation. It posits that we are more than caretakers, and only "gatekeepers" where this is culturally appropriate and facilitates ongoing maintenance of cultural knowledge and practices.

Organisation

This is all the classics - how do we organise information, what ramifications there are for organising in particular ways and so on. It's classification yo.

Description

Ah yes, one of the two hard problems of programming ("Naming things") except this is librarianship (but YES, let's talk about why librarians should stop being intimidated by Computer Men). It's metadata and cataloguing and also why things always have context and description is for users.

Guidance

People expect librarians to know shit. It's all very well to organise and describe things, but a lot of people need help understanding how the system works, and also a lot of people just want a *recommendation*. This applies equally to any kind of library. In a public library we might think of "readers advising": what's the perfect book for this 14 year old boy who is bored with chapter books about spies? In academic libraries this might be suggesting a good OER for an academic to use as their primary textbook.

Retrieval

So you organised and described your collection, but what happens when somebody wants to download the PDF or collect the hardcopy book? In fact, let's go back a step, we're getting ahead of ourselves. How do they *find shit*? I initially called this "Access" but I've always felt uncomfortable using that term in this context, for reasons I've always found hard to articulate even to myself. I think I prefer the idea of retrieval because "access" implies that the text is somehow locked up (deliberately?) whereas usually the problem is that it's lost in a pile of other stuff. I think this maybe entered my brain via the book "The Filing Cabinet". BUT also this includes the situations where retrieval is rightly restricted or controlled - something Western librarianship is still trying to navigate.

Care

This chapter is primarily about "maintenance", but in a broad sense. So it's about caring for physical collections, caring for digital collections, caring for digitised collections (which is a little different), and also caring *about* our collections, our communities, our work, our colleagues. The thing I've always liked about the idea of libraries (though this is often not the reality) is the sense that they are institutions for the long term. Things that are expected to last in perpetuity need to be cared for, that's part of the deal.

Sharing

The Sharing chapter talks about everything related to managing "circulation". But it also wades into questions around copyright, citing sources, and all the ethics around that. Here we also explain and have opinions about cooperation amongst libraries: union catalogues, shared discovery indexes, cooperated cataloguing, and international standards. What do we gain by sharing rules of description and individual catalogue records ...and what do we lose?

Power

To wrap it all up, we talk about power. Who has it, who claims it, and how not to be naive about where it really lies in a given situation. We will have talked about this in earlier chapters so this is probably more of a summarising and pointing at things. So we can talk about international capitalism, but also about class dynamics in the reference interview, about "library anxiety" and what it really is, about institutions, about the privileging of written knowledge ...about a lot of things.

So there you go - there is my poorly-articulated thumbnail sketch of a book I'll never write, and if I did it certainly couldn't be done alone. Thanks for indulging me.