Traumatic Brain Injury Centers

As a card-carrying nerd, I’ve often heard people talk about the difference between Book Smarts and Street Smarts. Often invoked as a “Sour Grapes” remedy against poor school performance, the idea retains a grain of truth: often those who focus their efforts on mastering intellectual pursuits lose out on common sense savvy. If ever a group was vulnerable to that kind of thinking, its librarians!

From the NY Times:

Trying to build popularity, many public libraries across the country have been looking more like big chain bookstores, offering comfortable easy chairs, coffee bars and displays of the latest best sellers.

But the new library in this growing Phoenix suburb has gone a step further. It is one of the first in the nation to have abandoned the Dewey Decimal System of classifying books, in favor of an approach similar to that at Barnes & Noble, say, where books are shelved in “neighborhoods” based on subject matter.

So the librarians are learning something new! That’s great and speaks well. Why would bookstores be better at appealing to the public than libraries? A library that fails to appeal wins less work by way of fewer visitors, but a bookstore that fails to appeal goes out of business.

The Dewey Decimal System served us well as a means of organizing tomes, but is no longer needed thanks to computer search-power. Plus, it’s boring, old-fashioned and doesn’t mesh with the needs and desires of library patrons.

But the attraction is hardly universal. On Web sites where librarians frequently post, the abandonment of Dewey has not been welcome. One blogger titled her entry “Heresy!” Another called the Perry Branch’s approach “idiotic.”

So of course set-in-their-ways bureaucrats, who are probably loaded with book-smarts, but a little short on street-smarts, aren’t happy. They’ve spent a good chunk of their lives mastering the Dewey system, and don’t want to lose their advantage. That’s kind of like mastering an abacus…you can do it, but why bother?

To me, the irony here is that many of these librarians started out as bright, innovative, ambitious and energetic. But stick someone into a hierarchical bureaucracy long enough and even the most individualistic, talented and innovative person can have the soul sucked out of them just as if they’d set the world record for French kissing a Dementor.

Good luck!
Allen Dobkin