004. Collaboration Nation

How many monkeys at how many typewriters?

The internet (I’d argue) was built on collaboration. So was librarianship: a gathering and sharing of free and accessible knowledge. The two together would theoretically become a perfect breeding ground for collaboration, thriving and vibrant. Still, there are flaws in this utopia. The internet may have been built on collaboration, but it’s also come to serve the purpose of providing an individual platform: who wants somebody else encroaching on their fifteen minutes? Even social media has a sense of one-sidedness to it … unlike in the fluid pattern of conversation, which moves from person to person, social media requires a solitary act of saying something and then letting it stand, either gathering awkward silence like dust or else drawing opinions to itself bit by bit. The sustained “stand alone” quality of interactions online places a slight but important focus on individuality, I think. The hierarchy of online conversations is more fixed and visible than the transitory, unstructured quality of in-person interactions, too: vying for “likes,” for more responses, for more followers and friends, or for more controversy in some cases.

Librarianship, too, although it is a service-based profession for the most part, has an element of aloofness and privacy to it, with librarians as the guardians of knowledge, speaking their secret tongue and wielding power over the success of your research paper, working in austere dusty privacy to create the codes and standards that will organize this vast knowledge network, physical and intangible alike. The image of the stern-lipped librarian with her constant, imperious quest for silence is outmoded, but has a kernel of truth, and personally, I think plenty of librarians still enjoy that sense of secrecy, power, and individuality. Anecdotally, all my MLIS professors so far have required some element of collaboration: but anecdotally, too, they all apologize profusely for “forcing” it on us.

I would hold that collaboration in its best form, however, doesn’t submerge individuality or erase it, so much as connect one individual mind to another. The only analogy I can think of is a slightly improbable one, but I keep visualizing water being poured from one glass to another. With positive and intelligent collaboration, the catch is that the water level stays the same for both glasses: they can only add to each other, not take away, and at the end of the day each glass still remains separate and distinct. Ideas left on their own are necessary and thrilling, and the individual spark of creation is something I’ll always cherish. But it takes courage to expose your idea, to allow it to take on a life of its own. Maybe I still have a (sort of) decent analogy left in me, after all: as with most aspects of life, you, as a thinker, have the choice between safety and growth. Do you refuse to expose your idea to strangers’ curious gazes, refuse to let it collect thumbprints, forbid it from eating dirt or taking public transportation, force it to wear a safety helmet at all times, and therefore wind up with a sense of safety but also with an idea that has a fragile immune system and cries at the sight of strangers? Or do you let your idea run wild, learning how to evaluate praise and rejection, learning how to stand up for itself and make itself known, how to be diplomatic, how to choose its battles, and as a result wind up independent, unexpected, and bold, influenced by the ideas of other minds?

Of course, I say this with the assumption that collaboration is only one part of a librarian’s job, not a full-on replacement for individual efforts. I think collaboration is a natural extension of our willingness to share ideas, our recognition that an idea without exposure to other minds is only an idea in the most technical and solitary sense. Libraries and social media have overlap in that they both encourage individual intellectual efforts and welcome the contributions of private endeavors, but also encourage the infinite combinations and alterations and new forms that can occur when ideas are merged together collectively.