The invitation to join the ranks of Janet Doe lecturers comes as a profound and humbling honor. In 1968, Frank Bradway Rogers delivered the second Doe lecture [1]. At the time, he was director of the Denison Memorial Library at the University of Colorado, a position in which I now have the privilege to serve. He spoke in detail about the annual changes to the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings and the impact of those changes on a typical academic health sciences library. Rogers reported spending six weeks of his full-time effort to update subject entries in the card catalog, followed by seventeen weeks for a library assistant to complete all the physical corrections to the cards.
I remember coming to Colorado in 1985 and feeling some trepidation about meeting the man, then retired, who had such a profound impact on subject retrieval and the programs of the National Library of Medicine. Being himself, he did not hide his opinions or waste any time before trying to influence my work and decisions at Denison. I marvel at the huge differences between how he spent his time as director and my own priorities more than thirty-five years later, and yet our common objectives evidence the underlying values that bind together our profession.
In reading past Doe lectures, I observe four fairly consistent themes. First, the talk by its nature derives from the personal values, passions, and unique experience of the lecturer. To a significant degree it is a self disclosure, an intimate exposure of how one thinks, what one believes is important, and what are the innermost musings that may have been shared with a small circle of colleagues and friends, but that rarely are presented so publicly.
The second evident pattern is the intent of many lecturers to incite the audience or reader to take some specific action. As the 1994 Doe lecturer, Nina Matheson urged us to “seize the day,” because librarians must be agents of change [2]. Judith Messerle decried meekness and passivity, calling on us to take action to uphold our professional values [3]. In 2002, Jacqueline Donaldson Doyle noted this lecture constitutes one's opportunity to mount the soapbox [4]. The theme of our 2004 annual meeting is “Seize the Power,” hence the reader should expect to encounter some haranguing in this lecture as well. I believe that we find ourselves at a critical period of combined peril and opportunity, both in the natural world and in scholarly communication. In these circumstances, the meek will not inherit the earth, or it may no longer be worth inheriting. Below I will outline why I fear this is the case.
Each Doe lecturer is asked to address either the history or philosophy of health sciences librarianship. The third pattern I noted in past lectures is that while some speakers revel in historical analysis of the field, others disclaim any bent in that direction and acknowledge they have taken a philosophical approach by default. I consider myself neither a historian nor a philosopher. Consequently, as is typical of me, I have chosen to bend the assignment a bit to suit my own peculiar view of the world. I will talk at some length from the perspective of natural history and the ways that suggests parallels in nature, the work of librarians, and our choices for the future.
In fact, this reference to biological models follows a thread that runs through a number of Doe lectures, from Martha Jane K. Zachert [5], who spoke in 1978 about “books and other endangered species,” to Robert G. Cheshier [6], who described the challenges and opportunities of working in the environment of a flood tide. In his 1996 lecture, Robert Braude (incidentally, another of my predecessors as director at the University of Colorado) used the natural selection of the finch as an apt metaphor for discussing the emergence of our specialized branch of the field from the general species of librarian [7]. Where Braude emphasized the role of education as a force for differentiation, I will focus on a truly biological model, the complex interdependency of a community of organisms.
My chosen approach stems from my days as an undergraduate studying biology and working in the botany department at Colorado State University, where I became imprinted with the concept of ecosystems. My approach is greatly influenced by the rampant wanderlust that runs in my family and the enriching experience of pursuing scuba diving as a personal hobby. In the fourth century, St. Augustine said, “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” In keeping with his observation, I hope to read many books in my lifetime. Between my biology background and my scuba trips, I tend to see the world from a systems perspective, one with a strong ecological and behavioral framework.
As evidenced by a show of hands at the 2004 annual meeting, a preponderance of Medical Library Association (MLA) members grew up watching the television action series Sea Hunt, in which Lloyd Bridges portrayed fictional scuba diver Mike Nelson. This series played an important part in my life as well. Upon turning thirty-nine, I realized that I had always wanted to see up close the amazing colors and textures underwater and that if I did not progress beyond snorkeling, I would die with a large and disappointing hole in my life. By good fortune, I received personal scuba diving lessons from Werner Lissauer, a retired cardiologist who is in some ways Denver's Germanic equivalent to Jacques Cousteau. Werner learned to dive in 1941, as a young member of the Israeli navy. He learned to dive in the Mediterranean Sea at a time when life was still there to see, before we turned it into the present barren wasteland. Thanks to Werner, and often in his company, I have repeatedly sampled the world's oceans and amazing marine diversity, from the Bahamas to the Barrier Reef of Australia, from Cozumel to Cuba, from Tahiti to Tobago to Thailand.
Because I have listened to many a Doe lecture, I tried to keep in mind those unyielding conference hall chairs as I prepared my talk and audiovisuals. One model I drew on in particular was a study from the University of London that described the blueprint for the perfect box office hit. Based on a painstaking analysis of every frame in a sampling of successful films, academic researcher Sue Clayton recommended combining the following elements to ensure a winner:
- start with 30% action
- mix in 17% comedy
- add 13% good versus evil
- thrust in 12% sex, with variant exposure of body parts
- then add 10% special effects
- use a mere 10% plot and
- finally, add 8% music [8]
The typical movie-goer wants distraction and entertainment, hence the limited need to supply a strong plot. An MLA audience, however, desires and deserves more than flash. Still, hoping for maximum impact, I confess to having followed the above formula quite closely, although I abandoned the music, because I could not see how to include that in the printed Journal of the Medical Library Association.
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