One of the things I love about language is how inexact it is. I went through a phase of bemoaning that very quality (“Life would be so much simpler if language were more more exact,” or even “Life would be so much simpler if all the rest of you people would use language more precisely”). When this seemed like it could become one of those fruitless grudges that I could harbor for the rest of my life, I decided to like it instead, and then discovered that I’d always liked it. I love learning what words mean to other people and comparing that to what they mean to me.

I apparently also like digressions.

On Sunday, Lori Reed asked the denizens of the LSW FriendFeed room whether they preferred the term Patron or Customer. People expressed preferences, some gave reasons for these preferences, and some proposed alternatives to both terms (with “user” being the most often mentioned).

Most of the time, I talk about “students” or “faculty,” but every once in a while, I need a good collective term. When that happens, I prefer “patron.” I appreciate the mutual respect that it implies, with my services being worthy of patronage and with patrons making the whole existence of the library possible. It may be a rather elderly term (the OED says it originated in the 12th century, after all), but the term “cottage” is even more hoary and hasn’t lost its vigor yet.

I tend not to like “customer” and “user.” When I worked in a bookstore, I sold things to customers, and I don’t enjoy selling stuff. For me, it muddies the waters, and makes me worry that the people I’m working with wonder if I’d even care if they didn’t have money. And while “user” is part of my library vocabulary (“user needs assessment” being a familiar and meaningful phrase for me), if I had to chose one term to the exclusion of all others, I’d stick with patron over user. Aside from sounding like “user” could mean “drug addict,” I mostly prefer my environment to feel less one-sided. A user is one who uses the library’s collections and services. I am one of the library’s services. A user uses me. Two of my favorite things about the work that we do is that it’s so collaborative with other members of our campus community and how much I get out of our interactions, and so I rarely think of our faculty and staff as using me.

For me, “patron” means mutual respect, and so every time I use it, I remind myself that I respect our faculty and students, and that they (ideally) respect me. If “patron” feels like disrespect to you, please don’t use it, but please don’t assume I mean disrespect when I use it.

A few weeks ago, while attending ACRL, I heard a question that nagged at my imagination: “If we define a doctor as ‘one who practices the art of healing,’ what is the analogous one-sentence definition of a librarian?”

Yes, I know that boiling everything down we do into one sentence is a little bit absurd, and that the given definition for a doctor is similarly circumscribed. But to the extent that we use such questions to focus and motivate our thinking, I think they can help us to step out of our own day-to-day existences (full of tasks and politics and committees and budgets and “where is the bathroom”) and gaze out at the broad, breathtaking, and inspiring vista of our profession as a whole.

This is exactly what Kathryn Greenhill, John Blyberg, and Cindi Trainor have done in their Darien Statements on the Library and Librarians.

So what happens when you make “grand, optimistic, obvious, and thankful” statements about The Library-with-a-capital-L? So far, it seems that people take a deep breath, let the statements sink in, feel them, taste them, and then start comparing them to everything we do and have done and hope to do in this profession, trying to see how the statements stack up against reality. This strikes me as a beautiful response. Even most of the responses that contend that “Your Library-with-a-capital-L doesn’t pertain to my library” or that “saying that ‘The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization’ is far too ambiguous” are evidence of this kind of productive, stimulative thinking.

Today I’ve been thinking about the relationship of The Library to individual libraries, asking myself “What is the one-sentence definition of a library?” and wondering if it’s similar to asking “what is poetry?” Is it like porn, where you’ll “know it if you see it?” And what do we learn by theorizing a Platonic Library? In what ways does this focus our thoughts and motivate our futures regardless of our individual circumstances?

T. S. Eliot theorized about the art of great poets in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” A great piece of criticism in itself, I have always particularly appreciated the way he positions the best poets as those who display their individual talent through grounding in the poetic tradition rather than in opposition to it. He explicitly does not say that the best poetry is “traditional” or copy-cat-ish or anything like that. Quite the opposite. He writes that “tradition is a matter of much wider significance [than "blind adherence" to past forms]. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour” (Eliot, paragraph 3). In his view, writing from a sense of tradition requires that poets step outside of their own location in time and space, “write not merely with his own generation in his bones” (Eliot, paragraph 3), and become the catalyst that will make the particular and the general spark into art. In the same way, being a librarian in a particular library is rendered meaningful and significant not solely based on our own individual missions and actions. We have the fundamentals of The Library that bolster our efforts and define our innovations.

The beautiful part of Eliot’s essay, though, comes in the 4th paragraph in which he explains the ramifications of having all of poetry tied together by Tradition. “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone,” he writes. Everything written must be valued and appreciated in relationship to everything else that has been written, but this influence is not unidirectional. “The existing order is complete before the new work arrives,” he says, “For order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered” (Eliot, paragraph 4). If we accept the theory of the Platonic Library, the Tradition that allows for poetic creativity, then we are also accepting that as each of us effects change, we fundamentally affect The Library as a whole. This strikes me as a daunting, inspiring, thought provoking, somewhat terrifying, but empowering outcome of theorizing a Platonic Library even for the many individual libraries that may not feel included in the Darien Statements.

This post has gone on over-long and is really just a sketch, just my first attempt to figure out what about the idea of a Library-with-a-capital-L resonates with me so strongly. I hope some of you will speak up and help me figure out what I’m saying, where I’ve gone wrong, and what makes sense to you. I don’t fully understand my own stance at the moment, but like Steve, I know which conversation I want to be having.

I was busy recruiting ACRL attendees for the Library Society of the World this past week, which involved several conversations about how it got started (a funny story that can be told with more or less snark depending on the situation… I love snark-flexible stories). My favorite part to tell, though, is the “you are here” part. If you decide to take up with this crew, you’ll find yourself surrounded by smart, thoughtful, innovative, energetic, inspiring, and just plain wonderful library people.

There have always been anecdotes of useful conversations and interesting ideas to share when trying to explain why I think the group does good work, but as the group and individuals within it continue to work hard to improve the profession, it’s getting easier and easier to point to things that non-LSW members will have heard of and say “Look at this, and this, and this. See? These people really are cool!” Take, for example, yesterday’s announcement of the Library Journal’s list of Movers and Shakers. That list includes so many people that I know from LSW: Dorothea Salo, Jenica Rogers-Urbanek, Jason Griffey, Karen Coombs, Michael Porter, Rachel Walden, Dave Pattern, Lauren Pressley. Then there are a few other people listed that I know but am not quite sure if they’ve declared themselves LSW members (one of the fun things about the LSW is that there is no comprehensive roster of members): Chad Boeninger, Melissa Rethlefsen, Sarah Houghton-Jan, and the “Dutch Boys” (Erik Boekesteijn, Jaap van de Geer, and Geert van den Boogaard). That’s a quarter of the LJ list, folks. That’s nothing to sneeze at!

On top of that, there are all the other cool things that LSW members play huge roles in, like LCOW, Library Camp Kansas, the ALA unconference, the Lib2.0 Unconference (in Australia, since this is “of the world,” remember), BIGWIG programming, setting up all kinds of conversation spaces online (the LSW Meebo room, the LSW forum, the LSW LinkedIn group, the LSW FriendFeed room)… the list goes on and on and on. And now, the LSW is coming up with a way to recognize all the amazing things that its members do day in and day out. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the Shover & Maker award site which appears to be gearing up for something big.

What started as a joke has become an actual force in the library world, and I, for one, am honored to bask in the glow of these truly inspiring people