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ALA President Not Fond of Bloggers
Phil Shapiro writes "American Library Association president Michael Gorman is not too fond of bloggers and blogging. '[The] Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief... Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs.'"
Think of your photo collection and music collection. It's just another extension of that (think DIARY).
Caution: this post contains generalizations. Most of which are, unfortunately, true.
Bloggers think they're going to be the revolution of the press, and that they'll take the place of the New York Times and Washinton Post, and Newscorp will crumble at their feet.
Not with the half-assed misinformation and melodrama on the vast majority of the political and "news" blogs I've seen (to say nothing of the wild spitting and sputtering in the comments).
Not as long as they have no problem with their complete and utter lack of accountability of any type, and the vicious, one-sided partisan nature designed solely to incite vitriol in their groupthink audiences.
Not while they do nothing more than constantly pat each other on their virtual backs and reinforce their own worldviews and twisted near-conspiracy theories, ignoring any and all other sides of the story while simultaneously thinking of themselves as "open minded" and the only revealers of "the truth".
Blogs have a place in the world of information. And, like all sources of information, I'll concede that some can, in general, build a reputation for trust and accuracy. But many, particularly political blogs, have no regard for anything but the furtherance of their own agendas, taking things wildly out of context, and going on vindictive missions to build a one-sided case to paint the target of their ire in the worst possible light, without any consideration for any other motivations or other sides of the stories.
And they think they're the future of the media?
No fucking thanks.
I'm very sorry to see that the ALA Prez (an org I respect) cannot see past his dead trees. Yes, blogspace is hard to archive, and much of it low quality -- because it hasn't been selected [censored] by printing press owners. There are also some gems. He's a librarian, he should go look.
Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs.
Frankly, this assessment doesn't sound too far off to me. A major portion of understanding a field in depth is categorizing the raw data one has compiled in order to turn it into information. Blogs just aren't capable of doing something like this without sinking to the lowest common political bias.
A major strength of having access to a large library is actually having a librarian point out where to find a large body of information on the field you're interested in. But once you get there, the sheer volume of information precludes the possibility of a librarian introducing a political bias, though there might be a systematic bias in the publishing world.
After all, I am strangely colored.
As boring as it might sound...to me at least...my mom started from the ground up a yellow pages for librarians which was freely distrubuted and stayed afloat by librarian vendors paying to advertise in her free publication. She started it 14 years ago and She is selling it within the next two weeks because the market has run dry. The point of all this? Her buisness did just fine until google came along. Why do you need to go to a library and support them when you have a wealth of information at your fingertips? What is closer your pc which resides in your room, or the closest library? You do the math. This is just a case of someone who is bitter towards the "google" generation because it steals his buisness. Just ask my mom =|
In the case of bloggers: "First they don't read your blog, then they laugh at your blog, then that's pretty much it."
Comparing the "blogging phenomena" to the Indian independence movement is a fine way to illustrate your massive sense of self-importance, though.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen
Yeah, he does have a point:
Besides, I don't think we can trust the guy. Of course he sounds official. Er. Officious. He uses a lot of big words, like "antidigitalist" and "progressives" and "hubris" and "neologism" and "pillory"...
If he is opposed to "inefficient search" then the Dewey Decimal system must infuriate him. Google is great for getting a rough idea of what is out there, occasionally it may lead you to something really worthwhile - but most of the time it only cuts down on the early legwork, something very worth doing.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
I hope he realizes that while most blogs aren't worth the bytes they are printed on in terms of content, there are enough gems that one can't write the entire concept off as a bad idea. In any case, judging bloggers by the quality of their writing largely misses the point--blogs aren't supposed to be a regulated, edited, meticulously researched medium of writing--they are a means of sharing thoughts with the world without having to jump through hoops. Whether the world listens, complains, enjoys the blog, takes offense to it, or feels that the author should have gingerly lucubrated every detail as if each entry were a Nobel Prize acceptance speech is beside the point entirely.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Haven't we all been in a social situation (out to dinner or a bar, for example) where a serious conversation starts up about a serious topic and what ends up happening is that the folks with the least informed opinions do much of the talking, whereas the ones with a more enlightened view say very little? There must be some facet to the human condition that predicates that ignorance breeds arrogance, and wisdom breeds restraint.
Our current U.S. political climate bears this out.
There are plenty of articulate and educated bloggers, certainly. But there are many many more who aren't. We should slow down and think more about the quality of our information, not just the quantity.
But seriously, who thinks blogs are where great literatire is to be found anyway? The best blogs-with-a-purpose seem to be the ones that report news stories the mainstream media won't cover. The blurring of the Tinfoil Hat as it were. Anyway, when I want good literature I usually turn to a book. For example in the wake of last weekend's suicide by one of my favorite writers, Hunter S. Thompson, I decided to finally crack open a copy of Hey Rube given to me last year which I had not gotten around to reading. I found this in the Author's Note at the very beginning:
You don't need to wear a Tinfoil Hat these days to see that the plutocracy now in power in the U.S. controls the message and the media. Bloggers who attempt the lost art of Journalism can become a powerful force for truth and justice, keeping the old-guard media whores honest (if that's even possible anymore). But I don't think the ALA has to worry about dumbing down Americans' interest in literature. For 90% of the masses television finished that off decades ago.
I'm no blogging cheerleader, but the patronizing tone he uses is bound to alienate a less enthusiastic booster of the blogosphere than I. He comes across as an arrogant prig who's using his (extremely limited) bully pulpit to bash those about whom he admittedly (and rather proudly) knows little. I have nothing but regard for the ALA and love my local libraries, but this mocking, snobbish attitude isn't going to win anyone over to his side.
What I got out of it is that the president of the ALA is afraid that his way of life and his preferred methods af acquiring information are becoming less relevant, and rather than changing the way he and his association do business, he figures he'll stand up and mock the people who are changing things in hope that others wil listen. Nice try, man.
...trying to convince anyone about a news groups' impartiality. First of all, it's simply not true - EVERY news group has some degree of filtering going on.
The basic problem many on the Left have with Fox is that it's not the party line that is CNN/NBC/ABC/CBS. Ask them what the real difference is between THOSE networks and they really can't tell you. That's because they are, and have always been left-leaning.
Then when one network comes along and at least PRETENDS to present another side, these guys go ape. The reason why Fox News is KILLING the others is because of the obvious difference in reporting. And if you can't understand that mindset, then you're probably still in shock over the election too.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
It seems to me that blogs help people develop an understanding of the links between information. For that matter, I think the main value of blogs and homepages is the building of links between the blog and world at large. A well linked blog becomes a discussion with the world.
In someways, blogs are a welcome relief from published literature which can be a bit too introspective or polished. I do agree with the librarian who is dismayed at the hype given blogs. Everything in computers gets overhyped. Individual blogs like mine really mean nothing. In aggregation, they provide an interesting topology of the concerns of our culture.
They're both true, of course, but it's silly to forget either one in a debate.
I have on several occasions tried to find a book that covers some particular detail of something, and failed, only to later find it by accident in a different book that I wouldn't have expected to cover it. Mr. Gorman must never have had this experience, or he would welcome new tools to help him find relevant books.
I suspect that this is what the bloggers understand and have not been successful in conveying to him. But since I don't know specifically which blogs and bloggers he's referring to, it's hard to say.
If the head of the ALA were a publisher, he would know that the overall quality of bloggers' work is no worse than the output of the vast majority of so-called "writers" who submit manuscripts. The fact that some people have talent and others don't is a trivial and uninteresting observation. His reaction sounds more like resentment that mediocre authors, whose work otherwise wouldn't be published, are able to attract large audiences on the web. Maybe he thinks they don't deserve it. Or maybe there's a crumpled up rejection slip in his wastebasket.
If you honestly believe that CNN is left-leaning, I think you need to seriously re-examine your definition of left. American media has always been right-leaning. If you think otherwise, you need to do long-term comparisons of what stories were covered in the American media and the language that was used to cover them. You will find that the liberal media myth is completely false and that the standards of journalism have been pulled to the right by reactionary "journalists" like Bill O'Reilly.
Just because you're less right wing than Bill O'Reilly doesn't mean you're leftist.
What Future?
Blogs fill the same purpose that his little rant does. It lets people just say what they want, and people naturally gravitate towards blogs they find interesting. He may not call it a blog, and it lacks a feedback system, but he's essentially criticizing exactly what he's doing himself.
Blogs are glorified message boards and people like them because it's like having an auto+5 post. It's essentially reality TV for the Internet...so I guess it's reality internet.
It will not replace modern journalisim because modern journalisim will replace itself. At best it could make editorial pages less read.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
I think what he fails to realize is that the benefit of blogs over mainstream press is that the amount of noise present directly equates to more information from which to sift.
In the sense of traditional information theory, noise is information (to simplify a bit). Without noise there is homogenization of signal equating to a lack of movement toward chaos or entropy. Information therefore is created by breaking down communication channels, altering the signal (in this case news) between source and destination. The creation of noise hence creates a dynamic system of information in which all elements are going toward a state of complexity.
Complexity = good.
When extrapolated toward blog vs. popular press, blogs present a situation in which subjective filtering and emergence from it creates the content, rather than content coming from one source.
It is a distributed publishing model which puts the onus of interpretation, use and distillation upon the reader rather than the propagator of said content.
So taking information theory and applying it to blogs, blogs create more dynamic states from which useful information can be gleaned, but it changes the practice of information dispersal to the extent that the hierarchy which typified the dissemination of information pre-Internet has been flattened and in some sense elimnated. No longer is there a differentiation between the reductive properties of grass-roots press and large press.
The issue I see with this guy is not that he is a Luddite, but that he is threatened by the breakdown of the hegemony imposed previously be the hiearchy created by movable type and the publishing industry.
Having read TFA, I find myself struck by nothing so much as how very much like a blog entry this alleged "article" reads...
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Most of the bloggers I know (ie, my livejournal friends) are in fact voracious readers. What they write in their diary is no indication of how much reading they do, how good they are at writing, or their level of education.
The worst offender on my friends list is in fact an English student in her third year of college. She works in a library and takes every advantage of her unlimited access to it. The serious writing she does is very good and she gets high marks for it in class.
But the fact of the matter is that a livejournal is just a diary you share with your friends. Historically, diary entries have been kept short in no small part because to do otherwise is very time consuming. The fact that you are keeping a diary at all is an indication that you are embarking on some kind of adventure and actually going about living your life. As such, you don't have a lot of time at the end of the day to write much, unless your living is made as a writer.
I encourage Mr. Gorman to read the diaries of others and stop passing judgement on those who write them. He might stumble upon the plain fact that diaries usually aren't written by professional writers, but have their own worth anyway.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
"Ask them what the real difference is between THOSE networks and they really can't tell you."
No, it's actually rather easy to spot the difference between Fox News and the rest of the networks.
The reason I find Fox News offensive is not simply because of any leanings in political spectrum (although I do think it is a right-leaning group); the reason I find Fox News so abhorrent is because it reduces complex issues into single-phrase arguments pundits can shout at each other on TV. I agree that CNN and other shows have these kind of things too - the earliest one I can remember is the McLaughlin Group on PBS I think (not sure). However, Fox News takes it to a new extreme.
Watch Hannity & Colmes sometimes; it makes your stomach turn to see issues that the American people need to see all nuanced facets of reduced to a Left vs. Right shouting match. Guess what, not all issues are as simple as that, and it's a travesty to the public to make it so. Listen to NPR news or the BBC sometimes, and tell me their careful, measured, discussions of the economics of the Social Security problem aren't far more informative and stimulating.
Fox hypes news using constant flag waving and important-sounding music while stripping the public discourse of any semblance of reason. THAT is why I dislike Fox News.
SMS, instant messaging, E-mail, message boards and blogs are all from time to time trashed by professional writters for not containing the same standard of writting as the traditional media, like (paper) letters, newspaper letter columns, and diaries (by grown-ups).
That is probably true if you look at average numbers. Well, apart from newspaper letter columns, which I find slightly below Usenet posts in quality. And we don't really know about the private media, we tend only to see written diaries and letters from famous people.
However, they also mean that a lot more people are writting than ever used the old media. Honestly, how many in here would ever consider writting to a newspaper letter column? And would you write long, carefully formulated letters to friends and family if you could not use SMS, IM or email? And how many of the bloggers among you would write a diary instead?
What the professional writters are really complaing about is that they no longer have a virtual monopoly on writting. It is now for everyone. And of course, we are getting better at it. Much of the communication (like here) is done in public, and we can see which formulations get the point across and which doesn't. So while the writting may not become beautiful, it slowly becomes effective. At least for those who have anything at all to contribute.
The other part of it is that we become less impressed by the written word, now that it has become a daily tool of our own. We are much less likely to believe in something because it is written (in a a paper or book) than our parents were. Since we know no special skills are required to write and publish, we intuitively know that the written word is no more trsutworthy than the spoken word.
This also annoyes the professional writters, even if they don't know it.
Correct. Everytime I hear the ignorant claim of "the liberal media" I politely ask the person who said this to tell my how Judith Miller got all those NYTimes (you know the big gay liberal paper) front page pieces about Iraq's WMD from anonymous sources. If they plead ignorance I then ask them to show me ANYWHERE in say, Harpers or The Nation, where those liberal stories intersect at all with what's presented on CNN et al. If they again plead ignorance then I ask them to debunk the propaganda model of media as described, with many examples, in Manufacturing Consent.
The "liberal media" is a nice meme that helps right-wing politicians get their way and keeps their supportoers from experiencing too much cognitive dissonance. its also completely and utterly false. Bias for all commercial media outlets can be traced to the ownership of that media outlet, profitability, nationalism, and fads.
I don't see the two options as mutually exclusive. As things stand, traditional bound books still maintain a host of advantages over newer electronic delivery media (including portable e-book readers/tablet PCs) primarily in terms of superior resolution, lower power requirements, and a highly intuitive, tactile user interface which enables easier random-access than any software mechanism yet devised. On the other hand, digitized works offer other advantages, including complete-text searchability (though one might argue that a well-compiled index can sometimes provide more meaningful search capabilities than simple text-matching) and remote access to vast bodies of written material with minimal storage-space requirements. In a perfect world, I'd have equal access to both.
(And yes, people who "don't read classic literature" are, perforce, less completely educated -- or at the very least, less cultured. I make no claims regarding intelligence, however.)
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
but this mocking, snobbish attitude isn't going to win anyone over to his side.
It won me over. At least, upon reading it I found that my personal view of blogs and bloggers was much closer to that of the ALA president than that held by many bloggers themselves, and that the ALA president had expressed his view in a way that both indicated he understood the situation and was in itself well stated.
So it comes down to what, exactly, the goal of this piece was. If the point was to express something, it was a success. If the point was to express something and have readers finding they agreed with it, it was a success in that at least one person (me) was "won over" by it.
If the point was to impress self-identified "bloggers", it probably failed, but then I personally begin to suspect it's impossible to impress anyone who self-identifies as a "blogger" except by directly stoking their ego.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The difference between a dinner conversation & a web conversation is that here you can tune in whoever you want; it's not possible to drown someone out. A hundred thousand ignorant bloggers screaming at the top of their lungs won't stop you from reading whoever you want to read, exactly as if everyone else wasn't there.
<3
If you were my sig, you'd be reading yourself right now.
Making vague accusations about people's intelligence is intellectually equivalent to calling them idiots. The entire piece is the academic equivalent of an escalation of a "no, you're stupid" playground taunt. Frankly, he should be embarassed about the immaturity of the whole thing, and he likely will be when those who he considers to be his peers call him on it. You know you're an important troll when your trollish screeds get posted to the Slashdot front page.
There are a lot of EDUCATED people (nationality is not important) that just like to think they are right.
Like just about everyone. The 'Confirmation Bias' is a characteristic of human psychology.
That said, my problem w/Fox "news" isn't that I disagree with the politics, it's the cheap pandering to the masses.
Example: Just before the invasion of Iraq, most news channels were, reasonably enough (given that most americans at the time, when polled, were against an invasion) discussing the 'should we/shouldn't we' issue. I flipped over to fox news and every commercial break ended with a big animated flag / F-16 / eagle montage and big shiny "Freedom on the March!" banner. C'mon guys... let's try for a semblance of restaint.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
"It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs."
... like journalists?
You mean
There is much more to librarians and scholarly writing than card catalogs. I suspect that many librarians see the class of librarians as social structure charged with selecting filtering that ideas that will seep into the culture at large.
A great example of this filtering can be seen at University Libraries. A researcher pointed out to me that my local universities had almost two full bookcases dedicated to studies of Marx, and not a full shelve concerned with Benjamin Franklin. The researcher thought this odd for a library in the United States. Librarians take their filtering responsibilities seriously. Blogs, forums, online bookstores and whatnot pose the threat of democratizing the great filters librarians put in place.
The librarian article seems concerned with blogs v. the press. I never had the illusion that blogs would lead to the elimination of main stream press. Hell, a good third of all the blog posts in this world reference published article. Very few mainstream press articles point to blogs. This assymetry will always favor the press.
Blogs pose no threat to the press. They do pose a great threat to the cultural filters put in place by librarians.
I can understand why people have trouble groking this. It's hard to wrap your mind around. But the internet is VERY VERY large. By even the most conservative estimates, there are many millions of blogs, with many more starting by the second.
There are numerous blogs about any subject imaginable. There are at least three dozen blogs written by emergency medics. Are these "good"? They're just "what [they] do for a living," it's true, but what they do for a living is emergency medicine.
(Come on, you know you're curious.)
There are blogs by Senators, blogs by censored Nepali reporters, blogs by angsty teenagers in countries that you know little about.
Reading a few blogs at random & then dissing the whole concept is like skimming a cereal box, a drug store receipt, a toothpaste ad & a bookjacket blurb & then pronouncing: This "written word" stuff is useless crap!
<3
If you were my sig, you'd be reading yourself right now.
Talking about the content of "blogs" is as ridiculous as talking about the content of "books"-- as if there is something meaningful that can be generalized about the group. There's a boatload of bad writing on blogs just as there are in the pages of the journals in Gorman's hallowed halls of periodicals. There's also a lot of great writing to be found in both places.
Gorman is responding to a select group of bloggers who chose to attack him because he doesn't think Google should be nominated for sainthood. I think he underestimates the power of searching and random access...
But the real sadness here for those of us who love libraries (I do, and I support them by using them and contributing financially) is that he unfortunately represents a very real and powerful part of the administrative apparatus of most libraries. These people don't understand that the roles of libraries, repositories, and librarians are radically changing. I don't mind the whining of the fossils-- I even appreciate a bit of the productive tension between the white-gloved, shhhh-ing blue-hairs and the stinking rabble of the Internet-- but I feel for the younger set getting their relatively useless Library Science education at institutions run by the traditionalists. They might as well get a degree in phrenology or alchemy...
99% of everything is crap. Blog are no different. This is their only problem. Could everyone please now shut the fuck up about blogs? Thanks.
To quote his rationale:
Blogging can spread the word, but references to printed material carry a lot more weight [no pun] than an html page full of supportive links.
Anyone interested in how this free speach thing corrupts society on a wider scale through disinformation, should go to Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park in London.
There you will see the Evangelicals preaching to their convverted congregation who turn up to support and cry Hallelulejah at the orchestrated time. You will also see a drunkard with a small footladder arguing that "G-d is a Lesbian". There are people listening. Ruin of society does not result.
Note, actual Speakers' Corner content may vary.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
It has happened to me a number of times that I've been searching for information on a problem, like hot pixels on my digital camera or solutions to obsecure software problems, and come across the answer on someone's blog.
Frankly, I'm pretty happy that blogs exist, since the whole CMS thing lowers the threshold of Web publishing enough to allow people who can't be arsed with HTML to write stuff like that up. It takes a bored kind of person to bother designing a web page entirely around a five minute cure to a software problem, whereas a person with a blog will often just cut and paste a few lines. Untidy, ok, but sometimes handy.
first of all, a library has to filter. thats the wohle point. u cant store everything thats ever been written everywhere. even if you could, what you store, you have to organize and make it searchable. in doing that, you are filtering it.
google is filtering. slashdot is filtering. everything is filtering.
throwing your garbage in the trash can is 'filtering'.
second of all, not everyone in the library thinks they are gods gift to protecting 'important ideas'. many of them would rather have more input from the public. but guess what? the public is intellectually lazy. they are perfectly happy leaving the autocratic bureaucracy of libraries unchallenged. sure bring democracy to iraq for 80 billion. but god forbid someone say that educational regents should be elected by the people.
third of all, your local university library might have had a department that just studies 20th century russian politics or 19th century european philosophy. there are other reasons to explain a shelf full of marx besides 'librarians are a bunch of unamerican commies'.
your statements are bigoted and ignorant. something that libraries strive to eradicate every day within our populace.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Oh no, the bishop in the cathedral doesn't like the unwashed masses ignoring him.
Some of the most insightful, life changing works that I have read are among some of the essays that I have found on blogs. The bishop is irrelevant.
Blogs brought down the lies of 60 minutes. That's good enough for me.
As they say, information wants to be free. How much more free can you get? So what if 99% is crap. I'll read and decide what to keep. I don't need the ALA to do that for me...
Phil Shapiro writes "American Library Association president Michael Gorman is not too fond of bloggers and blogging. '[The] Blog People (or their subclass who are interested in computers and the glorification of information) have a fanatical belief in the transforming power of digitization and a consequent horror of, and contempt for, heretics who do not share that belief... Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs.'"
First of all, let's see how well Mr. Gorman and his ilk do solving a quadratic equation.
Try this:
Given the quality of the mathematics used by your cronies, it is unlikely that many of the Gorman Gang are in the habit of sustained computation. It is entirely possible that your analytic needs are met by an accumulation of sloppy analysis and poor numbers.
Interesting, isn't it?
Blogs are not a threat. Gorman's elitism is. Expecting all people to write like Heinlan, Joyce, Homer, etc. is illogical. Furthermore, many grammatical errors do not affect meaning of the words (not a excuse for bad writing). This is because the English language is 50% redundant. You'd know this if you'd step outside your narrow view. Of course, this (50% English language redundancy) was discovered by Claude Shannon, the daddy of information theory. One of those infotech fanatics!
I wander what would happen if the Gorman Gang's math and programming skills were held to the same level as Slashdot members. I can hear it now:
I think a preference for Marx represents thinly veiled anti-Americanism, or at least American liberal guilt.
Or maybe you're a little paranoid?
I think the "preference" for Marx coverage over Franklin coverage in university libraries has to do with the fact that Marx is covered in a lot more college courses. He's in history courses, philosophy courses, economics courses, poli sci courses...
Yes, Franklin was influential in the founding of the USA, but his impact on the world as a whole was not as great as that of Marx. Marx's ideas inspired whole movements and political shifts, revolutions, demonstrations, literature, and a lot of pot smoking uni students.
We're not discussing who is more worthy here. We're discussing how the world today was shaped by ideas, and Marx is one of the absolute biggest names out there. He's rightfully discussed in a lot of college courses and a lot of differing sources on him are necessary.
If you'd like, compare the number of items in a public library. The one I work for has 47 items on Benjamin Franklin and 4 on Karl Marx. Why is this? (I'll give you a hint: I don't think it represents thinly veiled anti-European sentiments.) It's because a lot more members of the American public want to read about Ben Franklin's life, and a lot more elementary and high school kids do reports on Ben Franklin.
A good library's contents are driven by the needs and desires of its patrons. Treating coverage of Marx and Franklin as indicative of the beliefs of librarians is laughable.