From: Steve Oberg <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 2017 21:40:52 +0000

Tony,

Yours is an interesting thesis, worth considering and discussing. But
building that off of my reply to Jim's original post is to misconstrue
what I wrote. My response focused only on Jim's choice of words about
the OPAC and do not reflect any bias against promoting a particular
resource in any particular way, or any reluctance on my part as a
librarian to editorialize. In fact as someone else pointed out in a
more recent post, we do this all the time as part of interacting with
our users informally or formally, steering them to good sources and
away from sketchy ones. We routinely evaluate and assess and then
promote what we think is best to satisfy a particular information
need. Even better, we try to model that so that our users learn to do
that for themselves. It's a particularly important skill in this era
of "alternative facts."

Steve

> On Jan 25, 2017, at 5:57 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Tony Sanfilippo <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2017 21:04:57 -0500
>
> This issue fascinates me because it touches on the intersection of
> librarianship and bookselling. In bookselling what you're talking
> about has a name. It's called merchandising. That refers to the
> display of new products in a way that brings attention to them. In
> bookselling it can be controversial because there are monetary rewards
> available for merchandising in the form of a practice called co-op,
> where a publisher pays a bookseller to augment the cost of advertising
> in local media with the bookseller, or the publisher pays for
> prominent placement in the bookseller's store, or on the bookseller's
> website (yes, that website).
>
> What fascinates me about this issue is the reluctance of librarians to
> take on an editorial role. In the case of the bookseller, they can
> choose whether the promotion of a title is ultimately in the best
> interest of the store and if they're willing to make the Faustian
> bargain behind a co-op agreement because they ultimately feel that
> what they're promoting is in sync with what the store is saying about
> its stock.This economic dilemma, taking money from the supplier, isn't
> an issue for the librarian.
>
> For librarians, it's an entirely different matter and the ethics of
> librarianship seem to frown on the kind of editorial and marketing
> decisions that bring attention to its collections' foci. Librarians
> seem to value objective discovery over their own informed
> recommendations.
>
> While this might seem like a leap, I think that ethos (which I find
> librarians also bring to their publishing efforts,) doesn't serve them
> well. They have long been wise and trusted gatekeepers. Why is it when
> the rubber hits the road they take a step back and defer to the patron
> and insist the patron is best served by offering a largely unedited
> variety of choices rather than also offering an opinion on the quality
> of the options? That is what a good bookseller is doing when he
> merchandises. Why is that so antithetical to the mission of the
> library? Isn't the inability to discern what's worth paying attention
> to how we got where we are today? Shouldn't those of us who can
> discern the difference between the wheat and the chaff being doing
> more to promote the wheat?
>
> Best,
> Tony
>
> Tony Sanfilippo, Director
> Ohio State University Press
> 180 Pressey Hall
> 1070 Carmack Road
> Columbus, OH 43210-1002
> ohiostatepress.org
> (614) 292-7818