The School of Library and Information Science hosts a hooding for those graduating in the Fall and Spring semesters. It is an important small gathering of graduates and family. I take the opportunity to give “one final lesson.” Here are remarks for this hooding.
Welcome to the last graduating class of the decade. I fear you’re not quite done yet. There is only time for one last lecture.
As I was preparing my remarks, I found myself thinking about global issues. Divided politics, monetizing privacy, the growing specter of artificial intelligence developed outside of social responsibility, growing economic disparity, dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria. A little Ghostbusters humor for you there.
I started to write the now formulaic doom and gloom and your job is to save it message. But, as I learned in a very personal way this semester, this is not how I need to send you into the world. Our communities don’t need you to save them – they need you to inspire them. Our students in the poorest and richest school need an ally to accept them as they are, lift what burdens you can, and let them know they are worthy and important. Our neighbors need a partner and a friend to learn and dream with them. The doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, and public servants need an expert that not only serves but makes them better. Our elected officials need role models in integrity and trustworthiness.
Just as you don’t need to be reminded that the world can seem overwhelming, neither do our communities. They need a light to shine a way forward, not spotlight challenges.
So here then is my final lesson for you. Fight injustice, fight inequity, fight apathy, but do not be consumed in that fight. No one is served by a librarian lost in despair.
In a recent interview Paul Bloom a Yale psychology professor made a distinction between empathy and compassion. Empathy, he pointed out, is taking on other’s emotions as our own. To be empathetic is to feel the pain of others as our own. Empathy can be exhausting and depleting. It can also be debilitating. Imagine, he pointed out, the oncologist that has to constantly feel the fear of her patients, or the social worker lost in feelings of hopelessness of his clients.
Bloom argues that that doctor and that social work, need to be compassionate, not empathetic. You need to be compassionate and understand the struggles of those we serve but not be debilitated by it. Preserve your optimism and use it to lift up those around you. Your professional responsibility is not to suffer, but to prevent suffering. Your professional responsibility is not to despair, but to bring hope to the despondent. Seek out those in need and remember that what they need is assistance and support and celebration in addition to service and dedication.
Every great librarian I know has a story – a moment when they made a difference in someone’s lives. For some it is the glow in a child who has been shown the best book ever. For some it is the student who passed a class, or their part in a scientific breakthrough. They can be large moments or intimate connections, but they are all anchors. They anchor us to why we do this and an appreciation of the good we do.
“Never Neutral, Never Alone.” Transforming LIS education for professionals in a global information world: digital inclusion, social inclusion and lifelong learning IFLA Satellite Conference. Vatican City (via video).
Abstract: Library science is getting harder to teach. The variety in libraries of all types is increasing as more and more mold themselves to their communities rather than field-wide norms. How can library science education change to meet the new variety, and the variety in a post-neutrality world.
It is time to have a frank conversation about LIS education. The problems with how we prepare librarians are often phrased as a gap between theory and practice. The argument goes that library schools are not producing graduates with a real-world practical skills; instead focusing on generalities and theory. This is a perennial argument, and if there was a library school in ancient Greece, I’m sure Dewey’s Socratic equivalent would be criticized for not preparing students to argue effectively in a marble building as opposed to a brick one.
This theory/practice gap, however, is not the real problem. The real problem is that no one knows what new librarians need in the second year of their career, much less their 25th. There is no common entry point, because there are fewer and fewer commonalities between libraries. As libraries of all types are organizing themselves around the local needs of a community – be it a town or a university or a school or a hospital, the differences in working environments for librarians is changing not only quickly, but diversely. What once was applying a standard set of reference skills to an owned set of databases, or applying cataloging skills to local classes and codes, is now about community outreach librarians knowing the unique culture of a city, or a user-experience librarian learning the realities of undergraduates in a particular school at a particular time.
The libraries that we hold out as global exemplars like Dokk1 in Aarhus, or LocHal in Tilberg, or San Giorgio in Pistoia, or the libraries at University of Michigan or there at the Vatican with its petabyte data center and global digitization initiatives are as diverse as they are impressive. No one school can prepare all starting librarians for all libraries. This doesn’t even consider the inclusion of archives, special collections and research services that are not even connected to traditional library institutions.
The standards and competencies we develop will continue to become more general, and more focused on lifelong learning and community engagement areas. Where once we could define cataloging skills down to the standard, we now must recognize that information organization can take the form of MARC, RDA, FRBR, Dublin Core, or just general concepts of the semantic web. Theories of classification still apply, and still must be taught, but the specific skills that accompany these skills are now purely illustrative. Where once we taught reference as a series of genres like atlases, and encyclopedias, today we teach learning theory and pedagogy. These are important areas to teach, but they will never meet the mark of first year practical skill.
Before I jump into thoughts on addressing this situation, let me say these are good problems to have. The reason there is no canon of skills is that librarianship is a vital and dynamic profession. The reason there is so much diversity in the field is because the need for librarianship is growing. The communities we seek to serve are becoming more diverse and varied because we are at least attempting to go beyond real barriers of class and race. If all we were doing was preparing spare parts for a handful of libraries that hadn’t changed in decades, our stable and satisfying curriculum would be the surest sign of the impending death of libraries.
No, the answer is not to try and develop a single standard for all, but to create continuous systems of learning that are agile, connected, and embedded. The library education of tomorrow, and increasingly, today, must smash the divide between the “real world” and the “academic.” It must also break the idea that one degree at the outset of a career is sufficient preparation for an entire lifetime of serving a community. Lastly, it must also fully embrace that we are preparing librarians, not library workers. And accept that librarians are not neutral, and must develop skills that are as much about resilience and self-examination as they are about how to run an organization.
Let me take these ideas in turn. I’ll begin with agility. What is an agile system of library education? It is one that is constantly seeking out not only best practices in librarianship, but innovative ones. It develops a curriculum and means of delivering that curriculum that are flexible and can be deployed quickly. One example of this is in Norway where the Akershus University College of Applied Science’s Department of Archivistics, Library and Information Science holds a biannual conference for its alumni and other librarians. It is a chance to not only bring in the latest thinking from the field, but to connect and listen to graduates and what they need.
At the University of South Carolina, we are pairing every library science degree with a specialized certificate that documents areas of focus such as data science, health information and so on. However, we have structured the certificate so that the specialties can change from year to year. We see students getting certificates in artificial intelligence and librarianship, library construction and design, and service to refugee populations. The list of specialties will be long and change year to year, student to student, as the world these librarians seek to serve changes.
Which brings me to my second new “standard” for library science education – connected. I would love to say my faculty represented hundreds of specialists all expert in the latest develops in the field. They do not. They are scholars with specialties and a broad view of the field, with an ability to connect practice with larger concepts. However, our alumni and the institutions they work for, and that we partner with, do represent hundreds of specialists developing and deploying innovative services in communities across the globe. Library schools must be a part of creating a network of libraries directly engaged in the education of new librarians.
This goes well beyond a set of adjuncts who teach a few classes, or internships, or field trips. We must develop a network of libraries that share both in the responsibilities of education and the funding of such systems. The library science school of tomorrow is truly a hub that delivers a core of library concepts and research skills, and then connects students with developing innovations in the field. Your faculty may be on the tenure track or working the reference desk. Your mentor may have the tile of professor, or librarian, or archivist, or programmer. The hub ensures rigor in the learning, but more importantly ensures cohesion in a student’s degree.
The dynamism in the library profession can be clearly seen in the enormous offerings of professional development. A librarian could spend a week just sitting in webinars and online workshops in just about any aspect of the library profession. Our library associations, our vendors, our universities, our publishers, our libraries are in the midst of an amazing creative rush of developing online education. However, there are no real attempts to coordinate and link all of these together into a coherent understanding of the field. Faculty in the library school of the future will spend as much, if not more time evaluating portfolios of these diverse online resources as they do teaching classes. The days when the expertise of a field was contained within a single library school are gone. The days when the totality of library expertise could be represented in a single faculty are gone.
We must look to other models of how we prepare professionals, hence, “embedded.” That network of libraries and expertise we build must also be seen as places for residencies where we embed students for direct, contextualized learning. The advent of online education has made place irrelevant in many of our programs. You no longer have to move to Columbia to get our degree. However, in making this shift, we have also lost the power of place. We must now join the power of place with the flexibility of online.
Students will no longer move to Columbia because that’s where the faculty are, they will move to Aarhus, and the Hague, and Taiwan, and Charleston because that’s where innovative practices are being formed. Taking a page from the medical residence, we are turning our network of partners into residency opportunities for our students. Libraries can use these residencies to attract the best new librarians to job openings, and the students gain authentic specialized knowledge on top of the core we provide. And hosting these residencies is an opportunity to expand the learning of the students to the learning of the whole organization.
In Charleston South Carolina, the local school district pays for 10 in-classroom teachers to get their master’s degrees and become school librarians. The funds for these cohorts are then re-invested in the school district. The tuition of the students pays for national speakers, onsite workshops, even open course development that are provided to the entire district. This creates a sustainable means of continuous library education well beyond the granting of a degree. By enrolling 10 teachers, the district enrolls the whole district in library school.
And what are these students learning in their residencies and in the network? They are learning to be librarians. Not people who work in a library, but a set of values, research skills, and a mission they will take with them to jobs in libraries, or the technology sector, or the banking sector, or government. They will be going into these libraries, and businesses and governments a point of view. They are not neutral deployers of skills, they are professionals on a quest to improve communities through learning. They will go not as parts of a system, but as advocates for inclusion, privacy, access, and openness.
In order to prepare these librarians, we must develop a curriculum of self-reflection and analysis. We must address, in the curriculum, self-care, vocational awe, resiliency, and self-awareness. These are not soft skills, but techniques that allow our librarians to assess, engage, and adapt to community needs and realities. It is no longer acceptable that we send out librarians into communities prepared to answer reference questions, but unable to process the poverty they may find there. It is no longer acceptable to train academic librarians to recognize gaps in the collection, but not to recognize student homelessness. It is no longer acceptable to train archivists who do not understand the politics inherent in controlling the memory of a community.
Analysis cannot be limited to the individual and introspection, however. Methods of analysis – of research- are necessary. No matter the environment our new librarians find themselves, they will need to know how to understand a community, how to assess services, how to collect, analyze, and protect data. Participation is a goal, and we shall never know how well we are matching that goal without instruction in research methods – instruction that is embedded in real communities with real questions, and contextualized methodologies.
And so these are my new metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of a library science program:
Agility – what ongoing methods are in place to identify, evaluate, and prepare students for developments in a rapidly changing profession?
Connectedness – who are the partners networked with the program and its faculty to ensure direct connection of the classroom to the field?
Embeddedness – what are the program’s ability to deliver authentic field experiences to students that allow them to contextualize theory and research methods?
Resiliency – how prepared are librarians to face, understand- that is analyze-and solve the problems in a community in line with the professional mission and values of librarianship?
Today the librarians we prepare are building makerspaces, they are crunching masses of data in civic redevelopment projects, they are saving tweets for posterity, and housing masses of research data. Our graduates are delivering knowledge and food to rural communities left behind in an information economy. They are supporting the research of Nobel laureates and citizen scientists fighting for clean drinking water. They are fighting for access to the world’s knowledge in developing economies and bring dignity to marginalized communities. They need a strong platform to prepare them for this work and then support them throughout that work. Library science programs can be that foundation, but not alone. We must connect the innovative librarian stifled in a large bureaucratic library with an innovative librarian revolutionizing a small town a continent away. And connect them both to scholars and the means for continuous learning.
Library schools are a vital part of the reinvigorated library profession. Yet, just as we have seen the road to success for libraries is in adapting to and including the community, so too must our schools become open platforms orchestrating participation and adapting to the community of our alumni.
Posted below you will find a copy of a letter from Dr. Fred Roper, Jack Bryan, and myself requesting input on a new name for the School of Library and Information Science. Many of you will be receiving this letter in the mail, but I wanted to make sure it was distributed as broadly as possible.
“The Knowledge School: or Why Teaching Library Science is Getting Harder.” École de bibliothéconomie et des sciences de l’information, Université de Montréal. Montreal, Canada.
Abstract: A school of thought represents a shared set of approaches, beliefs and values shared by a diverse set of players. A prime example is the Chicago School in architecture that wasn’t a department, but a shared vision of architects, engineers, and city planners. In this presentation, Lankes discusses the merging knowledge school and how it is shaping the field globally.
“Neighbors Not Users, Members not Customers, Partners not Patrons.” Congrès des professionnel.les. de l’information. Montreal, Canada.
Abstract: It would be easy to see the advent of open educational resources, open access publication, and repositories of data sets as a continuation of the traditional mission of a research library. Namely, providing access to the scholarly record including items studied as well as the results of study. It would also be easy to see this as happening in parallel to a pivot of libraries to more community centered models. In this presentation Lankes will show how these developments are deeply intertwined in how we conceptualize scholarly communication and the need for advocacy around data in all aspects of higher education.
“Data, Media, and Society.” University of Maryland Libraries Future of the Research Library Series. College Park, MD.
Abstract: It would be easy to see the advent of open educational resources, open access publication, and repositories of data sets as a continuation of the traditional mission of a research library. Namely, providing access to the scholarly record including items studied as well as the results of study. It would also be easy to see this as happening in parallel to a pivot of libraries to more community centered models. In this presentation Lankes will show how these developments are deeply intertwined in how we conceptualize scholarly communication and the need for advocacy around data in all aspects of higher education.
Greetings friends of the School of Library and Information Science,
I’ll be hosting two virtual town halls to talk about current initiatives in the school. These include a new core curriculum for the MLIS, development of a new graduate program in Data and Strategic Communications, and major revisions to our Certificate of Graduate Study where we are looking for all of our incoming grad students graduating with both an MLIS and a certificate of specialization for no additional tuition or classes.
We also have a BIG birthday coming up. 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of the library science program at the University of South Carolina!
We would like your ideas on celebrating. This includes feedback on the renaming of the school. While the master’s degree will remain the same we are looking for a name to expand upon the fantastic foundation of the school’s half century of innovation to support not only librarians, but the bankers, principals, provosts, and communities librarians serve.
Thank you all who participated in the Town Halls. The recordings of the sessions are below.
SLIS Town Hall 1 Thu, Oct 3, 2019 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT RECORDING
and
SLIS Town Hall 2 Tue, Oct 15, 2019 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM EDT
Every year the Duke Adult Bone Marrow and Transplant Clinic hosts a reunion of transplant recipients. They asked my son (and donor) to speak this year, my first reunion. It was an amazing event, and it was so amazing to meet folks who were celebrating transplants from 25 years ago. Following is the text of my remarks.
How do I say thank you to someone for saving my life? How do I say thank you to my son who spent his first day of college face down on a table as Steel needles extracted bone marrow from his pelvic bone? Or, who years earlier, when he was only thirteen had to help his father up the stairs when I was too weak to make it on my own?
How do I say thank you to my younger son for caring and supporting me when all I could give him for nearly half of his life was worrying about cancer – would it kill his father? Would it return? Why did I have to be without my parents for months? Why did my dad miss my concert? How do I get close to a man when I’m told a virus I got at school could put him in the hospital, or worse? How do I thank my son for not breaking when at 10 after weeks of celebrating the end of chemo, I had to share the news that the cancer was back, the chemo was back, the pain was back, the fear was back?
How do I say thank you to my wife who hourly took my temperature-every hour on the hour-to make sure I was ok, or awoke as I cried out at 3 am convinced I was suffocating during a panic attack? Thank a woman who clearly married me for my good looks, for sweeping up the growing piles of hair on the bathroom floor, and the dinner table, and the car…surprising us both how much hair I actually had to lose? How do you let your soulmate know that the only thing worse than bone shattering pain of Neulasta is knowing her feeling of helplessness watching you hurt? How can you thank her for all the times she crawled into bed to hold you, and let her know her love, her touch, her simple presence was stronger relief than any opioid?
How do I thank a mother and stepfather who uprooted their lives to care for my family when I could not? A mother who would sit by my chemo chair and talk about how as wife and mother she recovered from my father’s death, and how we live a good life. And a new father who financially helped a family linked by love instead of DNA.
How do I say thank you to nurses who cheered me on and an instant later threatened to take away my nausea meds if I didn’t walk every day or who shared stories of soccer and beer, and who never, never, never made me feel any less dignified, or worthy or human? The nurse practitioners who made the first Sunday off from treatment feel like tropical vacation or who, while she wouldn’t promise I would be home for Thanksgiving, made it happen? Thank the physical therapist who came to me on the worst day of the transplant when I hurt, couldn’t keep any food in my body, had just finished another three hour infusion of magnesium and had moved from my resting bitch face to my “I swear I will cut you face” and cheerily asked if I am ready to hop on the bike? Or the doctors who have given me a chance to meet my grandchildren one day- a day far far into the future?
How do I say thank you to those who are no longer with us. To my fellow cancer patients who fought and fought who were worthy and loved and still died. Thank them for sharing their final days with me and who brightened as I improved even as they slipped away.
How do I say thank you for those whom the South invented the phrase “bless their heart.” Folks who earnestly offered healing through crystals or remote regression therapy to right the injuries I received in the womb or who were convinced juicing was the cure. These folks deserve my thanks because while they may offer crystals or essential oils or, and I’m not making this up, beet juice, what they are saying is that you are loved, and you are important and the universe should heal you.
How do I thank the colleague who covered that work trip or the neighbor who brought over the meal or the prayer circles or those who lit the night or those who mowed my lawn or the personal trainer that helped you gain 8lbs of muscle or those that sent me a card every month just to say that I mattered?
Words ring hollow. And though not one of these people ever expected anything in return and were happy to give, guilt rises. Guilt because I can never repay the debt I owe. Even though none of these people ever expected pay back, and rather than seeing it as a debt, saw it as a reward-a chance to fulfill a mission, or took joy in giving, or paid forward a kindness they had received. And still, the guilt rises and I must find a way to give back, to absorb this love and sacrifice and find joy.
And so, I choose as my thank you to see cancer as a gift. I choose to see cancer as a harsh light that shines on the love I have been given. I thank cancer for the pain that cramped my muscles and screamed in my very bones because I now know the relief of a gentle hand and a loving embrace. I thank cancer for the fatigue so deep it trapped me for hours in the dark because when I woke up there was my wife to walk with me in the sun. I thank cancer for the nausea that sought to starve me because I now know what it is to be nourished by a neighbor’s meal. And I thank cancer for seeking to devour me from my marrow because it introduced me to the man my boy had become. A man who without hesitation said, “anything you need dad.”
Stephen Bell wrote a column for Library Journal[1]that has folks talking. I have known Stephen and respect his work and appreciate how he makes me think. I very much disagree with his conclusion, that academic librarians should call folks customers, and that not doing so is somehow a product of elitism. Clearly from social media I am not alone. I, however, don’t believe that challenging ideas means challenging the person with ad hominem attacks. We need to have conflicting ideas to seek out the best ones. If we attack those that share ideas we disagree with, we create a climate of silence.
Because of the topic, I made some posts on Facebook, and folks have pointed to them. However, not everyone is on Facebook, so I’ve expanded them here.
OK, it’s time to talk about them again. Them as in the folks we serve. This is an important and ongoing conversation that bounces back and forth around terms like users, patrons, customers, members, and the like. To some this may seem like a trivial conversation. To me, however, words matter. Our use of them is framed in social and cultural norms. When we use a term, we evoke not only a single definition, but a web of associated meanings and contexts. For example, why not use the word comrades? Or sisters?
Before I jump into my thoughts on those who use the library as customers a few caveats.
The terms we use to interact with the community and the term we use within the profession to talk them can be, even should be different. The term used in our daily interactions in our libraries, be they public, school, academic, or special should be a term negotiated with that community. It should reflect not only how a library interacts with those who seek out our services, but how we are situated in a local context.
Next, I’m going to focus on the predominant terms I hear from this conversation – patron, user, customer- that we can use across the profession from academic to school to public, to law, and so on. So while I love citizen, student, faculty they don’t work in all settings. This is important, because, when I use the word community, it isn’t just referring to a town or place we live, but a group of people who share resources and some means of allocating them. A university is a community. A school is a community, etc.
Lastly, our terminology keeps changing, as it should, since our profession and the institutions we create, are changing. Librarians are pushing our libraries to be more participatory. Libraries are evolving from collections of materials, to service centers, to community hubs, to, as Marie Østergaard says, a movement[2]. The boundaries of those who serve and those who receive service (I refuse to say are serviced) are being broken down. It is the same boundaries that are breaking down between consumers and producers in markets.
So why do I hate the use of customer in the context of librarianship? Why do I think that that using “customer” is so wrong that I fear my head will explode? Ultimately because I believe it leads to transactional thinking where value is defined solely by satisfaction. Folks are our neighbors, fellow citizens, peers, members out of communities, but they are never simply customers. This is true in libraries, and education in general. Students, for example, don’t buy an education. They partner with faculty to explore the world and a discipline. It’s why classes are meant to be rigorous[3]. Also, in education, it is a very slippery slope from seeing students as customers, to seeing them as products. It is also a slippery slope for all types of libraries to see the rest of the community as products.
For example, in these days of monetizing personal data, higher education, primary & secondary education, and government have all either contemplated revenue generation through data aggregation, or have done it. Google knows about our children through school issued Chromebooks. Universities buy data to target recruitment and set up WIFI tracking of freshmen to target behavioral services. Public libraries have adopted third-party services where the third party has targeted ads as part of its business model[4]. To be clear, this adoption of monetized data for revenue isn’t because of the use of customer as a term– it is because of the mindset that thinks of a community as a body of customers.
The problem with viewing our communities as customers is not that we see ourselves as superior, it is that we see them as separate from us and that we have no agency. Librarians must and do shape a community they are in because they are part of the community.
In a public setting folks served are not a buying public, but citizens with rights and responsibilities. If they don’t like the service they receive from their government they can’t shop around for a better one. They must engage in a democratic process for improvement. I get the need to implement techniques and concepts from “customer service,” but a customer/business relationship is NOT the answer. Having all parties feeling a mutual responsibility to improve their community is.
So, if not customer, what do we call them?
Patron? Still a widely used, and frankly useful term. I tend not to use it because it comes from the days when those with resources would support the library, especially to help the library support folks without means. It came from a time of clear class structures that today we are seeking to break down (even though we are failing at this).
User? I don’t like this term because it too has an implication of transactions over relationships, particularly peer relationships. The term comes from computing and has the gloss of technology. However, these days we are more aware than ever how technology comes at a cost. After all we aren’t really the only users of Facebook. Facebook uses us to generate revenue. Nobody wants to be used.
I have to say, after my conversation with Marie in Aarhus[5], I’m starting to come around on user a bit. But only if you use it to describe librarians as part of the community doing the using. In her thinking on the library as movement, the community – citizens, librarians, businesses – are users of the library as a place and set of capabilities. She talked about how architects worked with the term users. In this context, it makes sense. Architects are building a facility that is to be used.
So, I keep coming back to the term member. It was Joan Frye Williams that won me over to this term. It is short for community member. It denotes a sense of ownership and belonging. Some, rightly point out that member can also be seen as exclusionary. To have members, implies there are folks who are not part of the club. Except, of course, there are. People who use a public library that live elsewhere often have to buy membership. Either you are a member of the university community, or you are not.
For me it all comes back to how we think about the communities we serve and our relationship with them. During this most recent discussion I have heard the phrase owner and client. We will probably never have the perfect word, because we are seeking to encapsulate such a broad set of circumstances. Further, at the end of the day, so long as we are working with the community, and we are seeking to make our communities better we are doing it right.
[3]An interesting historical note. Since about the Renaissance, students were very much customers. They paid faculty members directly for lessons and classes. This led to an obvious conflict of interest. It wasn’t until the 19thcentury that most colleges moved to a tuition model removing, at least the most obvious, conflict. This was particularly problematic in medical training, as becoming a doctor could be as much about wealth as knowledge. Check out John Barry’s The Great Influenza for more…also it is one of my favorite books, so check it out anyway.
“Library as Movement.” Victoria Libraries 2019 Planning Summit. Kalorama, Victoria, Australia. (via video conference)
Speech Text:Read Speaker Script Abstract: Is the library a platform that allows communities to build knowledge? Is it a community center? A community hub? The concept of a library is evolving faster than our terms for describing the change. Today the library is being seen as a movement. Not a place, but a community-wide effort to improve the lives of community members through knowledge. This presentation talks about how the continued evolution of librarianship toward a proactive force for good in a community changes the skills of librarians, the responsibilities of the community, how we assess success, and how we determine common services while focusing on local realities.
Greetings! Thank you for having me, albeit via video. I very much wish I was with you in person. Today I’d like to talk about how our changing concept of what a library is directly effects our ability to plan for shared network services. In particular, how a shifting concept of the library as a community hub and emerging social movement requires a different approach to shared services. We have to take on the very real change of a library as a set of resources for a community to access, to the library as a supporter of building knowledge locally.
While I could jump right into my recommendations for shared services for the next decade (hint – its more about people development than collection development), my recommendations might seem pretty arbitrary unless I set up why we need to change in the first place. I promise not to get too abstract here, but we need to start with some pretty basic assumptions. First, what do we mean by the word library anyway.
One could say I have a difficult relationship with words. In particular, I tend to get a bit obsessed on definitions. For example, in 2007 the then dean of Drexel’s ischool David Fenske and I were talking about libraries. He made a comment to the effect of “the field of librarianship will be held back until one can define a librarian without reference to a building.” In essence, what is a librarian without a library.
Four years later the direct result of this comment was the 400 plus page book the Atlas of New Librarianship. I think we can all agree, a bit of an overreaction. But here’s the thing about words like library and librarians. Once created, they rarely lead a stable life. Their definitions and usages evolve.
Fenske’s question about how we define what a librarian is began an intensive investigation about the term library that continues to this day. It began me thinking about how we define and conceptualize libraries and the work of librarians. You and I are on a journey of definition. That doesn’t really surprise you. After all, you keep having this meeting for the simple fact that what we do, and why we do it – our definition – changes. It changes for our communities as well, but they often aren’t aware of it. Our communities haven’t been deeply enmeshed in debates about the “library as a community hub,” or “members versus patrons,” and so the words we use to describe ourselves, our services, and even the terms we for them can be jarring for them, and it is dangerous for us if it is jarring for them.
To have a bit of fun with this let me quickly present the shifting ways of thinking about libraries as a sort of progression through evolutionary eras. To be clear, this is not a rigorous chronology, but rather a way of highlighting how we conceptualize libraries, librarianship, and the services we offer – and therefore the network services we need. For the purposes of this talk, these eras start out as more cartoon and stereotype. However, I believe it is a helpful way of thinking about and planning for shared library service.
I would add some nifty Latin terms to these eras, but, well, I failed Latin. So we’ll begin with the Era of the Book Palace.
The start of the book palace epoch is a bit hard to nail down, but it arguably defined libraries in the western world for well over three centuries from the sixteen hundreds onward. But for our purposes we’ll pick on the Dewey era turn of the 20thcentury.
It was a time when collecting books was vital because they were scarce. The great value of the library was in pulling collections together, and the vast majority of the books gathered were about the rest of the world, not the library’s service community. It was a time of grand architecture. It was also a time of the universalists and documentalists. That is, folks who believed that knowledge could be contained in the pages of a book, and that the knowledge of the world could be sorted into neat categories…ignoring that those categories were developed by and for a culture dominated by white guys. The king of the information world was the book, and libraries were an apex predator in the information ecosystem.
One of the ways you can see how we and others thought about libraries is in looking at the relationship we had with “them.” Them, as in, what did we call the folks we served? This was the golden era of the patron. Patrons supported the library, they received service from the library. They were also nearly anonymous. We didn’t spend a heck of a lot of time defining patrons because we were mostly the only players in town, and our value to our patrons was implicit.
Just as we look at the tools developed to demark epochs of human evolution – the stone age, the bronze age, and so on – we’ll do the same here. What were the defining tools of the book palace, particularly for networks of them? Union catalogs and interlibrary loan. With the dawn of the computer age we could connect our collections together. The work of consortia and library networks was around standardization and efficiency. We sought to use the same cataloging standards; we had closely aligned management structures. We were linking similar to similar. The role of the network was to create standards and to share materials.
So, what brought about the end of the Book Palace Epoch? Networks. Not computers – we’ve been putting up online catalogs since the 70s. No, it was that we could now network not only records, but digital files as well. We needed to get into the full-text business. We needed to get online, we needed to change.
So, libraries became information centers. We were no longer just a place with stuff, we were a gateway to the world. And that world was information. Gone was the quaint Victorian era concept of the patron, in was the modern user – a term freshly taken from computer scientists and drug dealers. Now it wasn’t about having it all, it was about getting to it all.
And it if wasn’t online, then by God it better be. This was the era of mass digitization. Google and libraries hooked up to scan the world. I remember talking with a Harvard librarian at the time who said their main obstacle in digitizing materials was how to get trucks onto Harvard yard to take away the books and turn them into bits flying free.
The scanner and the contract were the defining tools of the information center age. If we couldn’t scan it, we would license it. Database, ebooks, video services – the drive was to expand the collection with resources from around the world. In our drive to provide users access, we also transformed the very nature of collecting. Gone were the days of owned materials being ferried around the countryside in delivery vans (well, not gone, but let’s just say we didn’t put them on the postcards anymore), in were Dublin Core and metadata schemas to build towering virtual libraries.
Gone also were the days of budgets being strained to buy materials one time. Now we had to devote budgets to paying for access to a resource annually – a change that is now once again coming back to haunt us with terms of ebook lending. We also spent a LOT of money on public access computers.
Our collaborative services? Digitization support; shared and state-wide licensing agreements; metadata schema development; and training to build the killer website.
A funny thing happens when you move from patrons to users, and from collecting to accessing. You tend to move from relationships to transactions. Instead of telling the story of the library in outcomes for our communities, we begin to quantify ourselves. Now instead of just counting the volumes in our buildings, we emphasized hits, circulated items, attendance, and of course gate counts.
So what pushed us out of this era of libraries? Simple, we lost our monopoly.
Now to be clear, libraries haven’t been the sole source of information and access since, well, ever. Though we did have a lock in medieval Europe until Gutenberg went and screwed that up. But we at least had a large portion of mind share in our communities. With the advent of ubiquitous networks like the Internet, and the ability to monetize access, mostly through advertising, our portion of the mind share shrank.
We needed a new way of thinking about libraries and librarians and our value to communities. We didn’t just invent these out of thin air, rather we saw non-access and non-collection activities in a new light. We saw that the value we provide to the community was in the community itself. We became the 3rdSpace, and instead of users, we had citizens or members.
Our focus wasn’t on collections alone, but on being a place where community members could come and think and work with, or without, those collections. Our newly emphasized focus was on civic improvement. We helped folks find jobs. We provide vital literacy services to youth and adults. We were a safe place to explore dangerous ideas.
And what tool helped define this epoch? The Library Café. Yes, the café as a literal place to serve coffee, but also the numerous spaces where we pulled down the stacks, or never built them in the first place to allow folks to get together. We called them living rooms, or agora, or simply “the teen space.” Many cities rebuilt or refurbished central libraries to promote economic development. We began hosting co-working spaces
Our consortia still paid for licensed resources and we still shipped materials around. But now, our joint services began to go a bit adrift. How do we collectively support what is by definition a very local thing?
This is also the time when our communities began to get very confused. Sometimes that was phrased inelegantly as “why do we need libraries when we have Google?” It was when our communities began wondering, what is the difference between a library and a community center?
It was also a time when we got very good at posts on Instagram. Because while we had a hard time putting our contributions into words, we had no problem showing the growing number of diverse faces coming into our buildings. Our identity became more diffuse, and more local in nature. But it was the seeking for an identity that lead to our next era, though it’s more a later part of the 3rdspace era. But for now we’ll call it the era of the community hub.
We began to put words and concepts to the third space – but as often happens, we were better at saying what we weren’t as much as what we were. We weren’t a community center as in an open meeting room. We weren’t indoor parks with books. We were a learning center and community hub. Our members became learners, and our focus rested squarely on the community creating its own knowledge and identity. Our tool of preference? The Makerspace.
No not just 3D printers in a room, but the idea that the community could come together and create in a library. For some librariesthe maker space is 3d printers and hand tools. For others it’s a wide-open living room for group chats. Still others it is the marked spike in programs where community members teach fellow community members.
In libraries across the globe video and audio studios began to pop up. Those scanners we once used to digitize the materials of the library were turned loose on family photo albums. Our walls were pulled down for workshops. We looked into the eyes of the Smart City and claimed the smart citizen turf. We loaned out baking pans with our books and even had cooking classes to boot. We not only paid for Kanopy, we created our own YouTube channels. We talked about great libraries building communities and the communities as the true collection of any library.
The Tilburg public library in the Netherlands took over a former train maintenance warehouse and built pop up libraries right next to incubators for new business start-ups. They used these pop ups as places of experimentation and play that ultimately lead to the impressive LocHal. The IP Centre at the British Library moved the business reference books to the side and retrained the librarians as business planning experts.
The era of the community hub was, well, is a reaction to the retreating human interface to government. Our members could no longer talk to a person with questions on taxes or social services. The face of health care went from a doctor or a nurse, to a patient portal. Into this vacuum stood librarians ready to help. And to support them, social workers. And to support them all artists and writers in residence. Instead of giving the books the best views from our new libraries of glass and steel, we created a destination. Our value was now in quality of life.
I would say many of us are living firmly in this Community Hub Epoch. We are, however, already starting to see the need for continued evolution in this approach. In the UK, for example, too many local councils have seen the community well integrated into the workings of the library and made the jump that the community itself can maintain the library in the form of volunteers.
In the Netherlands there are no more library schools because community-centered librarianship is being defined as user experiences and customer service versus librarianship and its values and skills. In Florida they are having theme park experts design libraries as an experience, instead of librarians designing libraries as a service. Don’t get me wrong. We should be designing our libraries with the experiences of people in mind. We should be building organizations that serve. But in doing so we must recognize the unique value librarians bring to this endeavor.
That is also not to say that as professionals we are necessarily where we need to be for our communities. Within the library we have to look at ourselves. Are we best structured to serve as a community hub? If evolution happens to ensure survival of the fittest, are we ready? How much of our preparation for librarians cover event planning? How much focus do we put in skills development on tech and collection building, and how much on community engagement and cultural skills? How open are we to the entire community when all too often we organize ourselves in hierarchical management structures where some positions never have to interact with the public?
Which brings me to an emerging era and my attempt to answer what shared services and resources do we need in today’s library landscape. It is conceptualizing the Library as a Movement. It is taking all of this evolution to the next level. The focus isn’t on collections, or access, or places, it is on mobilizing a community for social action. Instead of calling folks patrons or users, or even my personal favorite members, we don’t have a name at all – because the walls between “them” and “us.” Begin to break down.
Libraries bring together people of diverse, and even clashing perspectives to seek common ground. The greatest asset we have in this era is trust. In a world filled with a cacophony of perspectives, propaganda, and belief, we serve as vital social infrastructure and trusted facilitators working across community divisions to develop a new community narrative. And I know that last sentence borders on buzz word salad, but all it means is we help members of a community find meaning, and power in each other. And in the era of the library as movement, how this happens is going to be different in every library and every community.
In this new era we not only support reading because literacy is a vital skill in making change and democratic participation – we team with the primary schools and the local pizza restaurant to ensure we use common vocabularies and we create a whole culture of reading. In a project for the Hearst Foundation, we created a community literacy initiative. We found that classroom teachers and youth librarians would use the exact same words, with totally different definitions. Literacy for the teachers was skill development for the decoding and understanding of texts. For librarians? It was reading enrichment and the promotion of a love or culture of readers. Parents would take their children from school to library, hear the same words, and not understand the mixed messages they were receiving.
A literacy researcher on the team was demonstrating how story times could be used to both enhance literacy skills and the love of reading. After the session a mother with her infant child came up to the researcher. “What did you say on that page?” she would ask. Then “and what about on this page.” It took the research a moment to realize that the parent couldn’t read. But instilling reading skills in her child was so important she was going to memorize this book so she could share it with her baby.
That story then led to not only local restaurants having library picked books available for kids, but the city council passing a resolution that every town sponsored event had to have a literacy component. The governor of the state not only signed a declaration about the importance of reding, he recorded a video to be used in all of the schools.
My point is that the community-the schools, the libraries, the businesses, the parents – came together to create change, to create a movement. And the library was part of that movement and could never have done it on its own. And here is the most important part. What worked in Columbia South Carolina will not work in your community. No matter how well we document it, or call it a best practice, or try and turn it into a downloadable toolkit, it won’t work. It is meant to guide, instruct, and inspire you. You, the librarian, your job is to see what will work in your community. That’s the difference from the era of the Book palace. Rather than trying to connect similar to similar – to make a suite of unified and undifferentiated services for all, the networks of today have to train librarians to adapt, not adopt. The network supports and inspires.
Of course, all of these phases of our evolution still co-exist together.
Take for example The South Carolina Center for Community Literacy – which was the South Carolina Center for Children’s Books and Literacy – which started as collection of award winning children’s books.
The Center has a collection of both award-winning children’s books and books that help teachers learn about including diverse and representative materials into their lessons. It also has digital services. However, in the past few years the movement aspect of SKILL -as we call it -has emerged.
We have a bus full of books. No big surprise there. But this bus is also filled with university students from across the campus, and this guy. This is Cocky, the university mascot and something of a celebrity here in South Carolina. That bus? Cocky’s Reading Express, goes to the poorest schools in the state. Those college students? They read to the kids and demonstrate how vital reading is. And the books? Well, that’s where Cocky comes in. You see he gives them out. Over a 120,000 books given to kids where they promise Cocky, a symbol of sport as much as anything else, that they’ll read every day.
And the center doesn’t stop there. We work with social safety net organizations to do one on one consulting with those in need to connect them to housing, food, and services folks need in their most desperate hours. We work with immigrant groups to advocate for bilingual education. Why isn’t this a community center? Why isn’t this just a bunch of volunteers with book shelves? Because of the answer to David Fenske’s question – it is because librarians with their skills, values, and mission are not simply delivering these services, they are shaping them. Librarians are ensuring privacy in a data driven world. Librarians are ensuring these services are both inclusive in their views, and equitable in their delivery.
And here we come to the meat of the issue: what kind of shared services do we need in this epoch? What do libraries need to support local movements? Awareness, continuous learning, mentorship, and a memory.
Awareness in looking across libraries, cities, and industries for ideas that can help the communities we serve. What do libraries do in the face of artificial intelligence? How can we best advocate with our communities to put in place safeguards for personal data? How can we better welcome refugees? How can we build platforms for the community to connect people of shared interest? The union catalog of today is the foundation of a community learning management system of tomorrow. A system that directly links a persona with resources, experts, and tracks personal progress in mastering new skills and insights.
Of course, awareness of an idea and the ability to adapt it to local needs is a very different thing. And I do mean adapt not adopt. Our staff needs to be constantly acquiring new skills. Technical skills, certainly, but facilitation skills, political skills, research skills to implement technologies, programs, and services that look like the community itself.
As librarians develop their new skills and seek to implement new ideas in a community, they need guidance and fellowship. Networks of libraries need to provide mentoring and coaching. We need to develop future leaders and build strong ties among the most remote colleagues.
Lastly there needs to be a shared memory. This memory ranges from classical archives of community development to identifying and highlighting innovation among the group.
If this sounds a bit familiar…well, it is. The future shared library service is a university of the people. A function that engages librarians and the community players who are part of local movements in learning. Teaching members how to organize collective action. Bringing together different industries together with librarians to forge common goals.
And just as all ideas need to be adapted to local needs, this library university does not have to look like a classical institution of higher education. Don’t build lecture halls, but cooperative laboratories. Teach online, sure, but also learn together in pop up libraries in malls and beaches, and football stadiums. Eschew periodic diplomas for continuous portfolio building. And no class without the partners and community members making this real in their lives.
So there you go, my quick trip through the evolution of libraries. A trip that will never be complete, because we are a living and thriving profession. Our communities need us now more than ever. They need us because we are a trusted place to make sense of a world increasingly wracked with xenophoabia and a flavor of nationalism that seeks to define a nation only as people who think and look like us. Our communities need trusted professionals to ensure not only their rights, but to amplify their voice in the debates on the future.
So there you have it – from an unhealthy relationship with dictionaries to the people’s university. I hope this has been useful, or at least entertaining. I look forward to the conversation to come.
