Collection Bias for Conservative and Liberal Materials

jimbo says:

Re:Research? Bias?
I think he was also working with limited comprehension and/or intellectual honesty.

Tomeboy equates criticism of the current administration with “liberal bias”. A tactic he may have learned by watching FOX News. He demonstrates this with his comment about the ratio of librarians who donated to Kerry vs those who donated to Bush. He further demonstrates this with his “random” list of books. To Tomeboy, these books are obvious in their leanings which gives us some insight into how deeply he thinks about such things.

He uses his numbers to say exactly what he wanted them to say (a deeper look, I suspect, would show that they don’t really say much at all). No consideration is given to what else they could mean. “No special reason” why he chose the year 2000 as a stopping point, Tomeboy claims, though it happens to be when Bush was (s)elected.

He seems to think that one book is as good as another the only pertinent difference being the perceived partisan leanings. No thought given to considerations of the quality of content. Librarians read book reviews, and some even read the books they buy for their collections (*Gasp!*). Some librarians even understand what real journalism is, which could be why Bob Woodward’s book is found in more libraries than books by Hannity or O’Reilly (even despite the criticism the Woodward book has received for the quality of journalism it demonstrated, I might add). I’m sure the new Seymour Hersh book will provide you with more numbers to prop up your claims. But I guess you can chalk that up to those darn biased librarians.

There is no reason library holdings should correlate to best-sellers lists. In fact, I would consider a strong correlation possible evidence that librarians weren’t practicing good collection development. Libraries constitute one kind of information provider in a larger marketplace of information, this needs to be considered in collection development and any investigation of so-called bias in collection development.

In closing, biases in collections certainly exist and whether that is a good or bad thing is debatable on a case by case basis. This article, however, offers no useful insight into the issue and is designed to support an ideology to which the author happens to subscribe.

jimbo

jimbo says:

Re:Research? Bias?
Your comments seem as spiteful as his.

Not so much spite towards him personally as contempt for what he was trying to accomplish.

So why don’t you put some numbers together and show us what results you come up with. Clearly Tomeboy’s study is not up to the scientific standards of a double blind drug study but I believe it raises some interesting questions. Instead of critisizing his methods why don’t you do your own study and discuss your results. It would be hard I admit but Tomeboy got past that difficulty.

Far from being up to the “scientific standards of a double blind drug study”, Tomeboy’s effort and purpose is the opposite of a scientific study. Rather than uncovering truth, his purpose was to obscure truth. Maybe I am assuming too much, like Tomeboy does in his article. Is Tomeboy a librarian? Is he experienced with scientific inquiry? Has he even taken a logic class? What I can do is totally irrelevant, what Tomeboy has done is what is in question here. Not only does his article provide no useful insight, it is detrimental to the overall discussion.

jimbo