The murky debate around Shades of Grey - should we buy?

Margaret Bass

For many years, because I am the Literature Librarian and because I have a strong interest, it has been my task to buy fiction firstly for the Pietermaritzburg main library and now, more recently, for the E.G.M. Library at Howard College. You would be right in thinking that this is a simple task as it is guided by clearish library guidelines - but it remains controversial and I often find myself questioning the role of the library in providing leisure reading to its users and more often than not, defending my choices.

According to our guidelines, fiction of 'literary merit' should be bought. This is in itself is fraught and while this is spelt out in some detail - I often find myself defining and defending (to myself and others) what in fact this entails. In addition, we are supposed to be guided by the following:

• winners of prestigious literary prizes (and those on the short lists)
• writers attracting positive attention in quality review journals
• established writers with strong literary reputations
• most South African fiction
• no genre or pulp fiction

Then the whole debate arises as to why we keep fiction at all. We are a university library and shouldn't we be offering leisure reading to extend and educate? Or,  knowing the parlous state of reading levels in our country shouldn't we be luring them in by all the means at our disposal? I no longer have the answers....
Light or popular fiction can and should be borrowed from the public library and the drastic cuts in our budgets makes me look carefully at every title I buy. I have to strongly motivate for monies to be put aside for fiction every year - this year Howard College got none, but I managed to make some money from moonlighting activities (before I am fired, these were library-related!) and I used this.

This whole argument once again raised its head when I was asked by a bunch of students how they can get their hands on 'Fifty Shades Darker' the second title in the 'Fifty Shades of Grey' trilogy. This title, ordered by another campus library, has not even arrived in the library but users had already heard about it. By the way, this book has already proved its worth - the students had to be given a tutorial on how to use our online catalogue (OPAC) in order to find the book.

For anyone who doesn't yet know - the trilogy, described by the New York Times as 'mommy porn' has broken all publishing records both electronically and in its print format, flies out of bookshops (in South Africa it keeps getting sold out), and is being read by anybody and everybody. Public libraries are limiting borrowing times on the books and are having to order extra copies, yet even so, there are long waiting lists.

Of course it flouts every single one of our guidelines; it has absolutely zero literary merit, its plot is formulaic, it has certainly won no literary prizes (does the fastest selling published item of 2012 count?) and it fits right smack into its specific genre. If you dont believe the literary merit part, examples of the standard of writing abound on the internet - see
http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/the-15-bestworst-lines-from-erotic-bestseller-fif
or
http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/15732562-fifty-shades-of-grey


I am so tempted to spend my hard won fiction allocation on a couple of sets of the trilogy for the Howard College library. The thought of a constant stream of users coming into the library to borrow, reserve or read the books is too attractive to dismiss (the turnover will be quick - they are fast reads - apparently you can't put them down). On the way to to the issue desk they might notice that the library is quite congenial, has other great books in it, and has librarians who also like to have fun.

Once begun on this path who knows where it will end? Readers may move on to Mills and Boon, and then on to the Twilight Saga and then? - instead of  E.L. James, Henry James?

Librarians' lament

 

by Margaret Bass

Why are Academics so resistant to integrating the library into their academic programmes? This is a question I ask everyday as I meet hordes of students who are given assignments and tasks and who do not have the faintest clue how to start with the information retrieval process.

I do not understand how lecturers cannot see that a few basic sessions explaining what journals and books are and how to find them can have a direct impact on the quality of the assignments returned to them.  This would also go a long way in alleviating the reliance on Google and Wikipedia that students are so invested in.

There is a continuous stream of students at my door who do not understand the most basic concepts of a library, let alone finding material in it. I wonder sometimes if academic staff have any notion of the reality of working with students with these limitations. Some examples of the most common questions I am asked are:

•  I have the number – where do I find the book?
•  The computer says that the book is ‘on loan’ but I can’t find it on the shelf.
•  I can’t find the green book on Industrial Relations.
•  Where can I find the textbook on Criminology?
•  I have my book – now what?
•  I am a 3^rd year student, I have been told use journals and I don’t know what these are and how to find them - and I’ve never been in the library…..

Do you know that many students are unable to find a book even if they have the shelf number?  The logic of the numerical sequence defeats them totally.

I am supposed to be a ‘research librarian’, trained to help users find resource materials in the bewildering world of information available in the 21^st century and help them hone their research methods and strategies - yet most of my time is spent doing stuff that students should already be familiar with.  The fact that they aren’t library/information literate, we librarians are very congnisant of and have taken remedial action to rectify, by offering all kinds of interventions at different levels to attract users. However, I question whether we have the support of the academic staff  who seem  not  to understand the link between academic success and information literacy.

Please don’t get me started on post graduates! Many are totally unaware of the subscription journal databases and are quite happy to be dependent on Google for their sources. I can only think that the quality of these dissertations must be seriously compromised…

After they have spent time with librarians who show  them what is available to them in the world of information and give them the skills to use bibliographic reference managers (which by the way they love and adore as it saves them fortunes of time…) – their most common lament is “why weren’t we shown this as undergraduates?”

From my side, it feels that I am banging on about the importance of information literacy and no-one is listening. I often feel like a gate crasher when attending any discipline related activities - the perennial outsider. This is so de-motivating!  We should be working together with academic staff as a team and should not always be the afterthoughts in the academic endeavour!