Author: rdlankes

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Announcing the Radical’s Guide to New Librarianship

I have just signed a contract with MIT Press for the publication of The Radical’s Guide to New Librarianship, a follow up to The Atlas of new Librarianship. Over the next few weeks and months I will be reaching out to you for help in ensuring the Radical’s Guide helps you to better serve our communities, become better librarians, and transform librarianship into a profession of radical positive change.

I am not doing this alone. To help make the Radical’s Guide a reality Kimberly Silk, Wendy Newman, and Lauren Britton have joined me in a self-titled group calling itself the “New Librarianship Collaborative.” Together we’ll be reaching out to look for stories, ideas, and contributions (and yes, we are always looking for more members).

What will the new book offer (besides being paper back, lighter, and also have an ebook version)? I have three major goals:

  • Expand the ideas of the Atlas into libraries as institutions and a deeper look at communities
  • Provide a curricular view of New Librarianship for easy incorporation into classes and continuing education
  • Provide hands on tools for implementing New Librarianship in your community.

This is not another edition of the Atlas. Rather it focuses on making things happen by building upon the Atlas’ focus on deep theory and concepts.

Because of the new effort you will see a few changes in the very near future:

  • I have set up a page on New Librarianship and a sub-page specifically for the Radical’s Guide that includes ongoing information on the new effort, and New Librarianship in general. The new page will include calls for feedback and polls on topics in the new book.
  • The existing Atlas website is being folded into my personal site (over time). This will make the incorporation of new materials from the Radical’s Guide will be easier to maintain and update. Eventually the domain newlibrarianship.org will point to this site. So if you want to keep up with developments, you are int eh right place.

I am thrilled to say MIT Press is again the publisher of this new effort. Our goal is to make a book that is immediately useful, as well as easily accessible in content and form. In that light we are hoping for a final book that is portable and very affordable (seriously, like plus or minus 20 bucks).

I hope you will join Kim, Wendy, Lauren and myself in creating a tool for radical positive change agents seeking to unleash the potential and knowledge of their communities.

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Moving Forward 42 Steps at a Time

Three weeks back I gave an ending talk at the ILEAD U project. It was about overcoming fear and resistance, and the importance of building a team that will encourage you to move on. A few folks told me how that message was important outside of the context of librarianship and the project. Upon request, I have written down my thoughts for a more general audience. If you would like to read more about my journey with cancer, please consider my book, The Boring Patient.

The Parable of the 42 Steps

IMG_1530The stories we tell help us make sense of events in our lives, as well as helping others learn from our experiences. Many have asked me what my journey with cancer taught me. They comment on hard it must have been, or how scared I must have been, or how reflective I must have been. My reaction is normally to minimize the difficulty of my treatment, preferring humor and looking forward rather than focusing on a dark chapter in my life. However, recent events have shown me that in the darkness I can find something to share for those who are struggling in their own lives: be it in work, in a relationship, or simply to continue forward in the face of a creeping push to simply stop, lie down, and give up. For me, one of the key lessons I learned happened in 42 steps.

What many people do not talk about when they recount life in chemo, is how small your world becomes. In the years before cancer I traveled to Austria, Rome, Amsterdam, Australia and China. I spent a fair amount of my time in the air going from talk to talk as a professor. When my illness first appeared as a set of seizures, and then as a diagnosis with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, my world shrank. What had been moving from home to work to the world became moving between work, home, and the hospital.

After six months of treatment, work, home and hospital came the devastating news that the cancer was still there. Still there and growing again. Still there and killing me. Still there and requiring another, more extreme treatment. As one doctor put it: where the first round of chemo was hitting me with a hammer, I needed one that would hit me with a sledgehammer.

My life shrank again from the work to home to the hospital. Eventually as the toxins took their toll, my world became simply the hospital for treatment, and home to recover. The end of this process was a bone marrow transplant that meant my world shrank from home and the hospital to just a hospital ward 42 steps long; locked away from the world, my friends, and my children.

IMG_4983The process began by checking into the hospital and being hooked up to a rolling metal pole that held a pump that shot a steady stream of chemo into my blood stream. That was day -9. On day -1 nurses fed me a steady stream of ice chips to slow the circulation in my mouth. The last toxin, Melphalan, would tear through my digestive system from entrance to exit. Ice hips slowed circulation in my mouth and would minimize open sores in my cheeks and gums. On day 0, my stem cells were injected, and the transplant process began

As the days rolled on my blood cells died with no marrow to replace them. My body’s vital system of feeding and repairing itself began to falter and fail. I was tired, every swallow felt like shards of glass and barbed wire being dragged down my throat and into my chest. At night, nerve damage lead to uncontrollable twitching, robbing me of sleep.

The nurses told me that one key to a successful transplant was to walk. So every day I would walk. Every day consisted of 42 steps up the ward, and 42 steps down, up and down, over and over. As my blood counts dropped, I walked. The nurses would feed me painkillers, and anti-nausea drugs and tell me to walk. 42 steps up, 42 steps down.

As day 0 become day 3 and then day 5, it became harder and harder to get out of bed, but my wife would come into my room and tell me to walk: 42 steps up, 42 steps down. As my muscles cried out for oxygen from a crashing red cell count, and the remaining toxins tore up my gut, my mother would visit, and tell me to walk. 42 steps up, 42 steps back, 42 steps up, 42 steps down. Ativan for the twitching, 42 steps. Oxycodone for the pain, 42 steps.

IMG_4993My white blood count went to 0. My children couldn’t visit because a stray infection picked up from school could kill me and I couldn’t bear the thought of them feeling responsible for my death. I would try to sleep as every hour the nurses checked my temperature, pulse, and blood pressure. So at 1 in the morning I was awake. 42 steps up, 42 steps down. 42 steps up, 42 steps down. On day 9 I couldn’t get out of bed. I hurt, and was tired, and even the drugs couldn’t prevent me from wanting to give up. To stop the walking, and eating, and caring. All I could do was lie in bed and feel sorry for myself, and just want it to end…and the nurses and the doctors checked me, and tried to reassure me it would get better. And my wife? She made me walk “just 42 steps.”

Day 10 and 11 were better. My counts got better. My body began to repair itself. So I walked and I walked, and by day 14 they told me I could go home. I had walked 33 miles on that ward – 42 steps at a time.

I could end the story there: I go home, I’ve made it through. But that is not the moral of this story. You see, the real effort – the real work – was not in the transplant, but in the struggle to cope with a world that had to grow again

Leaving the hospital was not easy. People would say how relieved I must have been to go home. But to me it was one of the most frightening things I had ever done. I was leaving behind the doctors. I was leaving behind the nurses, and the drugs, and the HEPA filter, and the safety of an isolation ward. I was going home in the middle of cold and flu season, and a stray virus could kill me. Forcing my world to expand from a hospital ward to home and then to work was as much effort as getting out of bed on day 9.

Expanding my world was effort I never imagined would be so great. It was having a panic attack in the lobby of a library; my chest feeling like it was going to burst. All I wanted to do was run home or collapse into a fetal position on the floor. I called my wife: “go outside” she said ” go outside and just walk. Just start with 42 steps.

IMG_0189Expanding my world was getting on my first plane in over a year. I had to get through security – 42 steps through the line. I had to get to my gate – 42 steps to the gate. I had to get on the plane with a surgical mask and worried glances…42 steps down the jetway; 42 steps down the aisle.

And there it is – there is the point of the parable. We all have times when our world shrinks by choice or apathy. Maybe it’s going back to school where your world has collapsed into courses and textbooks. Maybe it’s a job that has become routine. It is natural to look at a bigger world with fear and anticipations of failure, it is natural to want to stay in bed: to say no more; to give up. That’s when you need to force yourself to take those steps. That’s when we all need a team to push us and say “just 42 steps.”

We all face challenges, we all have times of depression, or failure, or where we simply want to stop. These challenges are not minor or unimportant – you have every right and every reason to simply stay in bed, to simply stay where you are and give up. But you can move forward, even if just a little bit, even if it is only 42 steps.

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Last Man Standing: How to Kill Public Libraries

IMG_0056I don’t normally talk about library types. For me all libraries (really librarians in all contexts) serve a community, be that a community of citizens, students, faculty, lawyers or what have you. There is more that binds librarians together than separates them. That said, I have heard of a special set of concerns surrounding public libraries recently and it got me thinking. The conclusions I’ve come to, I believe, relate to libraries and librarians in just about every setting. But let me start with public libraries.

The two big concerns I’ve heard about are “what happens when public libraries are the last civic service agency standing,” and “as libraries expand services to include everything from tax help to maker spaces, how am I supposed to know it all?!” These two concerns are related.

To save money, government agency after government agency are closing local offices and moving “services” to the web. The quotes are there because while agencies often post documents online, they rarely provide sufficient human help to support functions. If I have a question about filling out a form, simply having access to the form online is not helping. Librarians realized this a long time ago (a collection of stuff is insufficient to educate or serve…we need librarians). However, the net effect from receding governmental services is that librarians are often left holding the bag in terms of support.

In today’s America, the public library is left standing virtually alone in the civic sphere. People don’t hang out in the police station. Parents are only welcome in the schools after they go through security and sign in. Social services and DMVs hardly create a sense of community.

In many ways this retreat of mediated social and civic services has pushed public libraries to reach out to their communities. It has, for the time being, provided an opportunity for libraries to re-center themselves in communities and become a more vital service to citizens. Where libraries could once confine their mission to literacy and assume a wider social safety net existed to handle issues of homelessness, democratic participation, education, even food support and adult literacy this is no longer the case.

While some of the publically funded safety net has been replaced by volunteer and religious organizations, the mission and functions of the library are being expanded. This is a good thing – the library has the opportunity to become more central in the lives of citizens. However, an expansion of services without a matching expansion of resources (budget, personnel, authority, training) is a recipe for disaster.

The apocalyptic vision for tomorrow’s public libraries is not obsolescence, but rather an over expanded shell doing a million things poorly. Like a balloon, libraries expand in mandates without support, creating an ever thinning membrane and an empty core. Rather than working to shore up the democratic process, libraries become the latest target of a citizenry looking for examples of failure in government. The question shall become not why we have libraries, but why my tax dollars support substandard service. It could feed directly into the ideological narrative that government can’t do anything right.

So how do librarians avoid this expansion to irrelevance? Some call for a retrenchment. Get back to core literacy (reading), refocus on collections, and sell the value of libraries as safe havens from the nasty world of ideology. I think this is an equally bad formula for failure. Rather than inviting claims of too little service in too many areas, we get cast as too narrow to be of use (if all we want is access to books, we’ll pay for city-wide/state-wide/country-wide access to Amazon). No, we need a plan to take hold of this opportunity and grow to meet the needs of our communities.

This plan for a new civic reality requires two major efforts. The first is obvious and many have started down this road: advocacy for more resources. We must mobilize citizens and government to resource the public library as the public face of the community – a market place of ideas and services where the private and public seamlessly intermingle. It is working in Chattanooga, Cuyahoga County, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and other places. It is the raison d’être for ALA’s push towards communities, and much of my own work.

However, and I need to be very clear here, it is not enough. If all libraries do is elect themselves the next great bureaucracy, we will lose as well. Librarians will lose their special status as the library is forced to hire more and more folks from other domains like social services, education, and the like. If the expansion of public libraries becomes simply a public service bucket where services exist as strove pipes side by side, we fail. Instead we must prepare librarians to do it all…sort of (please read the next paragraphs before you fire off that angry email).

There is a very real and legitimate worry that librarians of all stripes are being called to do too much. Can any one professional really be librarian, programmer, maker, social worker, and employment consultant? No. Librarians can’t do it all…but librarians can help a community do it all.

This ideal was put beautifully by a talented group of librarians behind the Robot Test Kitchen. Librarians have to move from sitting across the desk from their communities, to sitting beside them. Rather than looking at every new service/program offered by a library as a new set of skills that must be learned by a librarian, think of it as an opportunity for a librarian to empower a community member. With all due respect to Steve Thomas, we need to change his tag line from:

“Librarians don’t know everything. They just know how to find out everything.”

To

“Librarians don’t know everything, but they can empower everyone to share what they know.”

Admittedly this is not as catchy (don’t change the T-Shirts Steve), but it begins to encompass the most important change librarians need to make. From storing and organizing things for a community, to facilitating a community in sharing expertise and ideas.

You see, that is the big change and opportunity in librarianship. Stop looking at those who walk into your buildings or those who visit your web services as consumers and users who require help from an all-knowing bookworm. We gave up the idea that after Desk Set. It’s ok, we thought, the collection can still be comprehensive. But if we leave it to the collection then we are making the same mistake those government agencies are making…retreating to the town hall leaving pamphlets and forms to fill the void when people want service and opportunity.

Librarians have the ability (with resources) to form teams of experts on the payroll, but especially in the community, to educate, and improve that community. Librarians value in this equation is a little of the tools we bring (spaces, standards, collections), and A LOT in the expertise we bring. Librarians can help truly define community needs and gaps. Librarians can identify experts, and work with them to provide expertise to everyone (in lectures, hands-on skills, consulting, production, new publishing efforts). All the while knitting together the community in a tight fabric of knowing…that is the value of the librarian. Do librarians need to know everything? No! They need to know how to unlock the knowledge of the community and set it free while imbuing the entire community with the values of learning, openness, intellectual honesty, and intellectual safety.

So that’s that right…a public library problem. Except, of course, it isn’t. Faculty need research and support, students need motivation and to be valued. Lawyers need in trial support, doctors, oh God help me, doctors need the humanity of librarians working with people in crisis. Do librarians become doctors, lawyers, and faculty? In some special cases, yes. However, more generally, we become, as Stuart Sutton would put it, the connective tissue that binds the community together. Librarians become engineers in the social infrastructure of greatness that could be our communities.

This is our opportunity and challenge. The potential reward is not in dollars or square feet, but in better communities and improved lives. This is a vision worth fighting for, and that others will join. Right now, today, your communities are looking around to see which institution of democratic participation, which institution of learning, which principled corps of professionals can see them through a particularly scary moment in history. For all the promise of progress seen in every new iPhone there is the crippling poverty spreading like a cancer to fill the wage inequity of the land. For every new medical miracle cure there is an ebola shining the reality that nature is not simply controlled. For every fair and free election there is a brutal Islamic State showing us that freedom and participation is not in our genes, but in our constant mortal struggle to rise above our animal nature.

Our communities need us. In colleges and universities they need us to span the vaulted towers of disciplines. In schools they need us to shatter the isolating walls of the classroom to bring students and teachers into the light of inquiry. In our states and our towns they need librarians to provide safe shelter for the bodies and the minds of the frightened – we must embolden them with the armor of knowledge and the defense of their neighbors. If libraries are to be the last civic institution standing, then we shall stand tall, and together, locked arm in arm with our patrons, and students, and faculty, and principles, and congressmen, and all those who value the society we live in. We will not be so arrogant as to believe we can know it all, or that any one person, regardless of rank or title, can be alone in all the knowledge they ever need.

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Remembering My Father

youngdadandkids_116 years ago today my father died. I think of him often, and miss his wit and guidance. It is also not lost on me that he was just about 10 years older than me now when he died. As I grow older, I remember him and our time together differently. There is a nuance where I am either understanding our time together differently, or I am simply projecting my own time as a father into his actions.

As a bit of a remembrance of dad, I’m posting another excerpt from my new book The Boring Patient. It is the first time that I have really written about my dad and his passing. I also think that my father, as the consummate salesmen, would appreciate me using his memory to drum up sales.

The Family

Once my medical team suspected cancer my wife called my mother to tell her the news. My mother, who lives in Ohio, was in a car in Tennessee on her way to Florida when she got the call. She found the closest airport and flew to Syracuse the next day to be with me and help out at home.

It took me a few days to truly understand the depth of my mother’s concern. Somehow in my 40s I had forgotten that I was still her son. If my son was diagnosed with cancer you better believe I would be in that hospital room. My mom was there for the first chemo, and she was there when we had to tell my two sons what was going on. In a way my father was there too, even though he had died over 15 years ago at just 55 years old.

I was at my father’s bedside when he died. He had gone to the hospital complaining of abdominal pain. He had a gallstone (thanks genetics). Normally, as I have said, this is painful, but not dangerous. Your liver makes bile, a soup to help you digest fats, and stores it in the gallbladder, which spits it into your small intestines via the bile duct when you eat. A gallstone is when some of this soup hardens sitting around in the gallbladder. If that “stone” finds its way to the bile duct and gets stuck? Ouch!

momdaddaveIn a small part of the population the bile duct joins up with something called the pancreatic duct before it joins the intestines. The pancreatic duct delivers digestive juices (technical term) into the small intestines. The problem is if a gallstone stops up a joint duct like this, particularly just after you have eaten: not only do you get the pain of a backed-up gallbladder, the pancreatic juices also back up into the pancreas, causing acute pancreatitis. There is no elegant way to put this: the pancreas begins to digest itself. If this can’t be controlled, these juices begin leaking out of the pancreas and this leads to organ failure. My father was part of that unlucky population.

I was 28 when this happened. I still think about my father every day. By the time I got home to be with him the doctors had put my father into an induced coma for the pain. He never woke up. He died surrounded by my mother and me and some friends. As we told stories and laughed celebrating his life his vital functions slowed. At the moment his heart stopped a doctor and nurse rushed into the room to revive him. However, he wanted no “heroic measures,” and his doctors had made it very clear that they had done everything that could be done and there was no chance for recovery. So my mother, with a strength I cannot fathom, stayed the hands of the doctor.

hatondavidI would note, however, that his heart, an organ that he had struggled with (a quadruple bypass, multiple stents, and endless battles over smoking and a bad diet) was the last thing to go. “Listen son, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow,” he would say as he downed a fried baloney sandwich. After his bypass he had me bring Kentucky Fried Chicken to his hospital room. I believe it was my father’s final “screw you” to the doctors that the heart went last. He was a man with a great sense of humor so I wouldn’t put it past him.

My father’s death made me (and still makes me) think a lot about my kids and being left fatherless. I have two sons that my dad never got to meet. Riley was 12 when I was diagnosed. Andrew was 9.

There was not much debate between my wife and me when it came to informing the kids. Be open and honest and ready to answer all their questions. I don’t think the idea of hiding my condition from my kids ever really occurred to us. Yet, I have had several folks tell me about having a parent die of cancer, and never being told what was going on. They told me they are still dealing with that as an adult. We didn’t want that.

For Andrew the talk was relatively easy. Daddy is sick. He has cancer. He will be tired and probably lose his hair. Andrew didn’t really have a grasp on death and such, so to him, it was just some more information. “Can I get ice cream now?”

Riley’s talk was tougher. There are way too many ways in which my eldest son is like me. One way that was evident during this conversation was using humor to mask our emotions and/or break the stress. With every bit of information he made a joke while clearly tearing up. Finally, at the end he said, “Yeah, but it’s not like you’re going to die.”

“Actually son, yes, I could die.” May you never have to say those words to your child.

The only thing that saved me from breaking down at that point was having my wife and mom in the room. “But grandma had cancer, and she’s fine. Uncle Joe had cancer, and he’s fine.” Never mind that he remembered Joanne who had died from cancer, and his good friend’s mother. Riley is smart. Riley knew the possibilities. Later, however, Riley would also be the first to make jokes about my lack of eyebrows and hair. All of Riley is smart, including his ass.

You can read more about my family and our trip through cancer in The Boring Patient, now on sale.

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Burn the Libraries and Free the Librarians

“Burn the Libraries and Free the Librarians” University of Maryland iSchool Talk. College Park, MD.

Abstract: The days when there was a single model for a library, if they ever existed, are gone. The idea that the library is a storehouse of books and materials is gone. The notion that a library can serve off to the side of the mission of a community is gone. What’s left: the centrality of librarians in meeting the needs and aspirations of the community. This presentation presents a librarianship unencumbered by buildings or a fealty to traditions. It talks about librarians as facilitators of knowledge creation in libraries, and offices, and schools, and classrooms, and the wide reaches of the Internet.
Slides: https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/Presentations/2014/UMD.pdf
Audio: https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/pod/2014/UMD.mp3

Screencast:

Burn the Libraries and Free the Librarians from R. David Lankes on Vimeo.

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Re-Envisioning the MLS: Burn the Libraries and Free the Librarians

Join us as the iSchool and the Information Policy & Access Center Re-Envision the MLS with our thought leader speakers series. We are pleased to present Dr. R. David (Dave) Lankes as our first speaker on November 6, 2014. Please join us in-person or online! Details are below.

Burn the Libraries and Free the Librarians
Dr. R. David Lankes discusses: The days when there was a single model for a library, if they ever existed, are gone. The idea that the library is a storehouse of books and materials is gone. The notion that a library can serve off to the side of the mission of a community is gone. What’s left: the centrality of librarians in meeting the needs and aspirations of the community. This presentation presents a librarianship unencumbered by buildings or a fealty to traditions. It talks about librarians as facilitators of knowledge creation in libraries, and offices, and schools, and classrooms, and the wide reaches of the Internet.

When: Thursday, November 6, 4:30-5:30pm (EST; reception to follow)
Where: McKeldin Special Events Room, 6137 or online via Adobe Connect at http://umdischool.adobeconnect.com/lankes/
RSVP: Please RSVP at http://ter.ps/rsvpNov6

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Publisher of the Community: We’re All Doomed

“Publisher of the Community: We’re All Doomed” Closing keynote for the NISO Workshop on “Using the Web as an E-Content Distribution Platform: Challenges and Opportunities.”

Abstract: We need to build platforms for scholarship and knowledge development, not information and content delivery. These platforms are not about APIs and eContent, but about people and content. We need to strive not for discovery, but epiphanies.

A special thank you to SAGE for supporting this keynote and the workshop.
Slides: https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/Presentations/2014/NISO-Lankes.pdf
Audio: https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/pod/2014/NISO.mp3

Screencast:

Publisher of the Community: We’re All Doomed from R. David Lankes on Vimeo.

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Mapping the Community

“Mapping the Community” South Central Regional Library Council Annual Meeting. Cortland, NY.

Abstract: Libraries are changing. From a focus on collections to a focus on communities; from spaces of librarians to spaces of students, parents, faculty, and teachers. Of course all of this is just rhetoric. Real change requires tools to define the spate of services (new and old) that are needed to meet the needs of towns, college, and schools.

This session will explore the rhetoric of the new librarianship through a hands on exercise that maps the community you serve. The focus is on demonstrating real skills in the light of a new relationship between librarians and those they serve.
Slides: https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/Presentations/2014/SCRLC.pdf
Audio: https://davidlankes.org/rdlankes/pod/2014/SCRLC.mp3

Screencast:

Mapping Conversations from R. David Lankes on Vimeo.