he annotations are the highlighted portions of text, and clicking on one

great libraries come from great librarians.

A bad library will use the building as an excuse. The case will be made that the public/students/professionals will flock to the library with better parking or a bigger set of book stacks. And that is true. For weeks after a new building opens it will be filled with the curious. However, it is ultimately the services, professionals, and co-ownership that will bring people back. You build a new library when the old one is too small to accommodate the community, not when it is too small to accommodate the stuff.

Let me be very clear. What makes a library bad is not its collections. Bad libraries can have huge collections or small ones. Great libraries can also have large or small (or no) collections.

“Pizza, pizza, pizza, book!”

You need to spread the word that your library is alive and well and is more than what folks expect.

There is a saying that you shouldn’t muster the troops without giving them marching orders.

they don’t wring the value out of collections.

The average age of school board members in the States is between 40 and 59.

As a community member you must, in the words of Saint Paul, “test everything; retain what is good.”

“test everything; retain what is good.”

That line comes from a hilarious video that a group of librarians put together about getting college students into the library.

The annotations are the highlighted portions of text, and clicking on one

We cannot be unbiased, but we can be intellectually honest.

So what is a librarian if not a degree, if not a mission statement in isolation, and if not a set of functions? I would argue that a librarian is the intersection of three things: the mission, the means of facilitation, and the values librarians bring to a community. We’ve already covered the first two (approach to mission and facilitation), but what about values?

This is exactly the mission of libraries. Teaming with allied missions in journalism and publishing and teaching and health care expands the impact of libraries and the other fields.

And what is the response to these so-called threats? Did librarians build a new Google, or their own eBook platform? No, instead they have adopted Google and Amazon because it turns out these tools work. Never mind that Google is the largest advertising agency in the world, and Amazon is now able to mine your reading history. If librarians and the communities that support them define the world through functional eyes of threats and competition, librarians do not engage new players as partners, nor do they effectively work to instill their values within their services. Too many librarians see what works, and use that tool nearly ignorant of the cost to themselves and those they serve.

More and more, information professions are wrestling with an ever more connected society where information is readily available. More professions are coming to understand the importance of social interactions and the complexities of community. Because of that, many professions have found themselves in increasingly close and sometimes disconcerting proximity to other professions.

A community should be a better place because it contains a library. Better means change—from how it is to something better. The library and librarians should add value to the community. If you add something like value, you change something. So bottom line, a librarian should help guide a community through a continuous change process. Feel free to revisit the whole jackbooted librarians discussion in the “Improve Society” chapter—we know that this change is not solely a matter of the librarian enacting a vision of change. It is also the librarian working with the community, facilitating the change.

Being able to unlock walled gardens and a myriad of sources and then weave information into a comprehensive and comprehendible whole is one of the most valuable skills in a knowledge economy. That said, part of that work is to make the result easy to understand and use, not to make the community members into little librarians. You should expect your librarian to speak your language, and the librarian should expect you to respect that doing so is valuable work.

Now, it would be easy to read that and think it just applies to public libraries. However, as a member of academia I can tell you there are plenty of cultural divides in higher education. Talking to faculty, then students, then administration can be like using three different languages. Likewise, school librarians have to understand not only the differences between teachers and students, but math teachers, and music teachers, and English teachers.

I have mentioned ideas like the prejudice library where libraries circulate more than just books and DVDs. There are public libraries that circulate fishing poles near rivers and libraries that circulate puppets. At the Fab Lab in Fayetteville they will be circulating cameras and book-making materials. In Brooklyn they have an on-demand printing press that will print out bound books written by the community. In Africa they are circulating ceremonial masks; at Onondaga Community College you can check out models of body parts and vivisected cats for anatomy classes. My point here is that you should expect librarians to build living collections that the community needs and guarantee the availability of these resources for the whole community.

Libraries and Museums in an Era of Participatory Culture.

It is not the books that make these containers into libraries, however; it is the dedication to the community good and learning.

Too often, degreed librarians (and the faculty who teach them) get stuck in the reductionist paradigm. Too often, degreed librarians use this reductionist approach to dismiss or ignore innovation and good ideas that come from outside of their specialization. You should expect more.

The same way it has impacted your doctor.

Some libraries have used these tools to maintain libraries for centuries. The Bodleian Library at Oxford first opened its door in 1602, for example.

called reductionism.

There are hundreds of librarians employed at publishers and database providers whose products are used throughout academia.

even as an executive vice president and head of mortgage servicing at JPMorgan Chase.

“is concerned with recordable information and knowledge, and the services and technologies to facilitate their management and use. The curriculum of library and information studies encompasses information and knowledge creation, communication, identification, selection, acquisition, organization and description, storage and retrieval, preservation, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, synthesis, dissemination, and management.”

Illinois

Maine

they tend to shield communities from the workings of the library

The key to being a successful librarian by hire is a dedication to and support for continuous learning and training.

This is not restricted to just rural public libraries either. The Librarians of Congress have included historians, scholars, authors, and even a journalist. In fact, for centuries the heads of the libraries in colleges and universities were professors and humanities scholars.

There are three basic ways to become a librarian: you are hired as one, you are educated as one, or you grow into being one. The first is the easiest and often least effective way. The second is the norm often mandated by law and probably the most effective way. The last is rare but can be incredibly powerful. Let us take these in turn and talk about the potential positives and pitfalls of each, plus a little of what we can expect from each as well.

The fact is that libraries can’t do anything—they are buildings or rooms.

The annotations are the highlighted portions of text, and clicking on one

Stacks of physical resources can now be compressed into smaller space, allowing robotic systems to retrieve them, like at the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago.

The second effect has been on the librarians. Now the librarians can leave the building and facilitate knowledge

A computer from 1982 weighs 100 times as much, is 500 times larger by volume, costs approximately 10 times as much, and runs 100 times slower than the average smartphone in your pocket today.

Libraries as Place

The British Library replaced its Business Reading Room with an incubator to help start businesses.

What do you love? What are you passionate about? Are you willing to teach/share it with the community?

I was thrilled to have so many students who wanted to “help” during their non-academic times in school. Enthusiastically, I found and created jobs and kept them busy. It started to grow like wildfire. Word spread that I loved “little helpers” and soon many were sent my way for various reasons. I began to realize that managing these volunteers was becoming a full time job for me and I wasn’t sensing the jobs would get done unless I was involved. The impact of the tasks was low (straighten chairs, dust, straighten books, sharpen pencils). Initially, I thought about sending out a big “Thanks, but no thanks” message and luckily, I had a revelation of wisdom where I realized that the energy was positive and priceless but the implementation of these willing helpers needed a revised approach.

However, the true collection of any library is not these tools, but the community itself.

“Rising To The Challenge: Re-Envisioning Public Libraries,”

…a public laboratory and educational facility with a focus on information, design, technology, and the applied arts. The more than 12,000 sq foot space hosts equipment, expertise, programs, events, and meetings that work within this scope. While traditional library spaces support the consumption of knowledge by offering access to media, the 4th floor is unique because it supports the production, connection, and sharing of knowledge by offering access to tools and instruction.

McDonald’s has realized that reflecting local culture

Public Library Incubators

one article published from an LHC experiment listed 3,046 authors.

Less than a month later, she was dead.

In 2001 Ellen Roche, a 24-year-old lab technician, entered into a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University’s Asthma and Allergy Center. The trial was investigating how the lungs responded to chemical irritants. Researchers had Roche inhale hexamethonium. Roche was the third volunteer to do so in the study. The first volunteer had developed a slight cough that lasted a week. The second volunteer had shown no adverse reactions. Roche developed a slight cough that got worse and worse. Five days after inhaling the chemical, Roche was admitted to intensive care. Less than a month later, she was dead.

Reorganizing the Research Library

The Northern Onondaga Public Library (NOPL) has built the LibraryFarm

Let me give you some examples.

iPhone

community platform for knowledge creation

This drive for standards, efficiencies, and mass production has had a profound effect on libraries and how they are perceived.

Melvil Dewey. If you haven’t heard the name, then you probably have heard of the Dewey Decimal system, the scheme for organizing books Dewey developed at the end of the 19th century. The system was based on Dewey’s conviction that standardization and uniformity in libraries would help them grow and prosper.

The annotations are the highlighted portions of text, and clicking on one

In New York City there are estimated 730 thousand households with no Internet access in the home.

The same (equal) versus fair (equitable)

There is another necessary attribute of a community: they must share limited resources.

“The Copyright Office provides expert assistance to Congress on intellectual property matters; advises Congress on anticipated changes in U.S. copyright law; analyzes and assists in drafting copyright legislation and legislative reports; provides and undertakes studies for Congress; and offers advice to Congress on compliance with multilateral agreements, such as the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. The Office works with the executive branch’s Department of State, the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, and the Department of Commerce in providing technical expertise in negotiations for international intellectual property agreements; and provides technical assistance to other countries in developing their own copyright laws.”

You can start with the fact that 99.3% of public libraries offer free public Internet access and 64.5% of public libraries report that they are the only free provider of Internet access in their communities.

Is My Library that Grand?

“So one of the analysts – and I spoke to the guy who ran this program, who kind of built this model. One of the analysts figured out that women who start buying, all of a sudden, a lot of unscented lotion might be pregnant. And then they started looking at what else those women bought, and they were able to run these little experiments because they have a baby registry. So they have a whole bunch of people who they know are pregnant, who told them what their due date is. And if you buy unscented lotion, and then all of a sudden you start buying certain vitamins like zinc or magnesium, then that means that you’re probably pregnant, and you’re probably in your second trimester. And if you wait a little while longer, and that same person starts buying washcloths and cotton balls and hand sanitizer, which they’ve never purchased before, then you can use this information. And there’s about 25 different products to figure out, within a two-week window, what that woman’s due date is. So even if this person has never told you that they’re pregnant, in fact maybe they haven’t even told their parents that they’re pregnant, Target, by looking at their shopping patterns, can figure out not only if they’re pregnant but when their likely delivery date is, and that gives them an enormous power to send them coupons at precise moments.”

As there are nearly 4 million miles of highway in the U.S.,

Charles Duhigg is an investigative reporter for the New York Times and wrote a book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.

Over 64% of adults in this country own a smartphone

Starting in 1990, scientists from around the world sought to map every part of the human genetic code, some 20,000 to 25,000 genes.

Grand Challenges

There is a 50/50 chance that if you use the Internet, you use a social networking site

Walled Gardens

This has led librarians to ask whether libraries (public, academic, school, etc.) should be in the eBook business at all. Some in the library community have started boycotts.

But in eBook land, you can pay $10, and the library, if it can even get it, would pay $30.

So what does this have to do with libraries and the conversation about improving society? There is a growing demand for eBooks from library members, and publishers are getting increasingly worried about how they can make money off of their titles. Imagine if you could go register your eBook reader with your local library and seamlessly download any title you wanted free of charge. Why would you ever buy another book? Instead of selling a bunch of copies of the books, publishers would sell one to your library and be done. So publishers are seeking to introduce “friction” into this process. That is, they want to make it easier to license it directly from the publisher than to get it from the library. And most publishers are refusing to license eBooks to libraries at all.

You also must expect a library to do more than simply take a dream and make it happen. Great libraries help shape the vision itself. Notice I use the word “conversation” throughout this book. It is done intentionally, and when talking about how communities seek to improve themselves and the larger society. It is important to know why I use “conversation.”

However, we must never forget that our communities have aspirations and dreams. Though the diversity of our communities can make it difficult to agree on a single vision, we know it is possible. The library can bring our neighbors and colleagues and students and members together in a civil, safe, and inspiring space to dream.

Throughout this book, I talk about expecting more out of the library, but for a moment I need to talk about how libraries and librarians need to expect more out of you. Seeing every community member as a consumer is expecting far too little of you. You are not a consumer or even a customer of a library. Most libraries will use the term “patron” when referring to the community. This is slightly better, but I would rather libraries be energized by their communities, not patronized. I prefer the word member.

Several years ago, the MacArthur Foundation funded research into credibility and youth.

Now here’s one to twist your mind a bit: in some communities and for some questions the Stormfront MLK website is high-quality information. That community is not just the racist sect, but in your community as well. High-quality? Imagine a reporter looking for examples of how hate groups use the web for recruiting. Stormfront is one of the best resources for that reporter. However, it is not the best site to send to an eighth grader looking for after school activities. In discussions of quality, context matters.

Because you need bad information to produce good knowledge.

“Schoolchildren; factory and shop girls; men who tended bar, drove carriages, and worked on farms and boats; and finally, fallen women, and, in general, the denizens of the midnight world, night-owls, prowlers, and those who live upon sin and its wages.”

Let me be clear: talking about libraries improving society does not include jackbooted librarians marching down the street forcing citizens to properly cite works and read only approved books. I say this because there are those in the library community who think that when one’s mission includes “improving society,” it implies a fixed and somewhat authoritarian vision of improvement.

The annotations are the highlighted portions of text, and clicking on one

why is this a library and not a school?

There are, as I write this, over 100 million registered Minecraft users.

Build on Your Motivation to Learn

Inherently enough, Tor was originally develop by the U.S. military to protect intelligence communications.

The public library, with their board’s approval, set up a Tor node.

“There’s nothing necessarily sinister about this subterranean data exchange: this is, after all, the advertising ecosystem that supports free online content. All the data lets advertisers tune their ads, and the rest of the information logging lets them measure how well things are actually working. And I do not mean to pick on The New York Times. While visiting the Huffington Post or The Atlantic or Business Insider, the same process happens to a greater or lesser degree. Every move you make on the Internet is worth some tiny amount to someone, and a panoply of companies want to make sure that no step along your Internet journey goes unmonetized.”

Long before Edward Snowden’s revelation of wide-scale government surveillance

Intellectual Safety

“Unlike in Egypt, however, the demands of the Bahrainis were never met. The Sunni government, with military help from neighboring Gulf States, quelled the uprising and afterwards, reportedly used access to social media to help identify and punish those who spoke out.”

He created what we now call Maslow’s Hierarchy.

The librarians at the University of Auckland launched a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in academic integrity

“In only one year, IDeATe is already recognized as a national model, merging technology and arts in education, research and creative practice. More than 300 students and 70 faculty from 15 different departments and schools are participating in IDeATe.”

Transform U

“This grant will make a huge difference in being able to bring much needed mobile technology to our libraries, and offer Delawareans new services that will help them get ready for jobs, find jobs and enhance their education,” said Governor Jack Markell. “While our libraries do a terrific job with information, these new services will make our libraries an even more valuable resource for people trying to equip themselves for a changing job market.”

“Medieval Helpdesk.”

providing training

Training

The classic view of providing access is providing access to collections. This has been updated a bit to talk about access to information, but even information is often functionally defined as collections of texts, pictures, and materials either digital or print. There is a big problem with this view of access—it’s one way only. In essence, too many libraries have defined access as providing access to their stuff. You must expect more from your library. You need to expect it to provide a platform where you can access the ideas of others, as well as a platform for you to provide others access to your own ideas.

Facilitation

“The mere presence of a large collection of books, magazines, and newspapers in the school library is not enough to generate high levels of academic achievement by students. Such collections only make a positive difference when they are part of school-wide initiatives to integrate information literacy into the school’s approach to standards and curricula.”

One Pennsylvania study found:

“The school librarian and sophomore English teacher collaborated to create a semester-long participatory learning experience using social media and cloud computing to cultivate collective knowledge building and inquiry. Using tools ranging from Netvibes to Evernote to Google Sites, students blogged, contributed to group wikis, used social bookmarking, developed learning/research portfolios and presented learnings in a way that demonstrated an ethical use of information and licensed media. The program also was evaluated in terms of meeting Georgia Performance Standards and the American Association of School Librarian’s Standards for 21st Century Learners.”

She has developed a whole manifesto on the topic.

Buffy Hamilton, the librarian at the “Unquiet Library” in Creekview High School in Canton, Georgia (outside of Atlanta), knows this.

This dynamic view of knowledge and learning is changing how we teach children in schools. Gone are the days when the “sage on the stage” model of learning was seen as the best form of curriculum delivery. Now, students co-create knowledge, get hands-on experience, and work on projects. We also see this in industry and military training. Hour-long PowerPoint sessions are being replaced with simulations and games. Cognitive and learning sciences are showing us that people are not empty buckets waiting for some skilled orator to fill them with knowledge. Rather, learners are active, constantly relating new ideas and facts to what they already know. The sage on the stage has been replaced by the guide on the side. Our libraries must go through this transition as well.

Knowledge is ultimately the way in which we see the world, and knowledge determines how we act.

Knowledge

Provide access Provide training Provide a safe environment Build on your motivation to learn

spin it in front of your Xbox Kinect

a few pictures of a 3D object

create a replica of your favorite statu

a MakerBot Thing-o-Matic

Rather than jump into that answer, I would like to broaden the question even further. After all, I just spent a chapter saying that libraries are not about books—so are they about Fab Labs? If we should no longer limit our definition of the library to collections and materials, how do we define a library? If I should expect more than book warehouses from my library, what should I expect? What does a library do?

It was an unusually warm winter in Syracuse. Still, it was quite cold as I made my way with my two boys, Riley (then age 11) and Andrew (then age 8), to the Fayetteville Free Library. Fayetteville is an affluent suburb of Syracuse, and the Free Library is an award-winning library located in the former Stickley Furniture factory. The boys and I were on our way to meet with Lauren Britton, a librarian at Fayetteville. She was going to show us how 3D printing worked.

he annotations are the highlighted portions of text, and clicking on one

…works exclusively for the United States Congress, providing policy and legal analysis to committees and Members of both the House and Senate, regardless of party affiliation. As a legislative branch agency within the Library of Congress, CRS has been a valued and respected resource on Capitol Hill for nearly a century.

“42% of Canadian adults between the ages of 16 and 65 have low literacy skills.”

36 million [US] adults who can’t read better than the average 3rd grader,”

Yet the public education sector is struggling with an increasingly codified curriculum and an 7% high school drop-out rate (12% in the Latino community and 7.8% of Canadians)

Symbol of Community Aspirations

The importance of access is seen in the millions of dollars state libraries are spending on statewide database licenses, giving equal access to these resources to urban, suburban, and rural communities alike.

If you would like to reserve books to borrow? 55 Euros.

Democracy and Education

click over to the National Library of Medicine and search the PubMed database

THOMAS Database

Cradle of Democracy

The Digital Public Library of America is a partnership of more than 1,300 libraries, museums, and cultural heritage institutions across the U.S. to provide, among other things, access to seven million digital items (pictures, maps, photos, art work, etc.) and a suite of tools to capture and share the heritage of a nation to classrooms and homes.

Digital Public Library of America

StoryCorp

every day Americans

Third Space

It is the library of William McIntyre Elkins, a rich investment banker of Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century and noted collector of books.

Steward of Cultural Heritage

In fact 90% of public libraries offer “basic digital literacy training, and a significant majority support training related to new technology devices (62 percent), safe online practices (57 percent) and social media use (56 percent).”

In Vermont, the state government help build a gigabit fiber optic network that connects rural libraries across the state, making each library an access point for village businesses and homes.

Safety Net

A 2014 survey found that 98% of U.S. public libraries provide free public Wi-Fi access.

In fact, public libraries did not collect fiction or any popular material because folks at the time did not connect general literacy, or “the love of reading” as we talk about it today, with learning.

Center of Learning

The library not only helps an individual member, they help that member help others in the community.

Cuyahoga’s “Encore Entrepreneurs”

Toronto’s “Business Inc.”

“Chef Katie” was able to create a successful catering business and the whole town benefited.

A small library in rural Eureka, Illinois

Transform U. project

libraries are an important consideration when students select a university or college, and, as a result, academic libraries can help institutional admissions boost enrollment.”

For example, recent studies show libraries actually lead to more book buying.

Toronto Public Library creates over $1 billion in total economic impact.”

University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute

2006

2005

2006

1999

2008–2009

2006–2007

2005

2007

2007

2008

2004

2009

“The total economic contribution of Wisconsin public libraries to the Wisconsin economy is $753,699,545. The return on investment in library services is $4.06 for each dollar of taxpayer investment.”

Academic library salaries and expenditures generate an additional $112 million in economic activity in Indiana.

Economic Stimulus

Let’s take a service called Freegal.

The second concept that can get lost in the discussion of libraries as purchasing agents is the notion of the common good. That is, if a community (a school, a city, a college) pools its money to acquire things, those things should benefit the community as a whole. That may seem obvious, but libraries and communities can miss this point. Let’s take a service called Freegal.

Let’s start with items needing organization.

he annotations are the highlighted portions of text, and clicking on one

“The mission of the school library media program is : to be an integral part of Whittier Elementary School and its surrounding community to provide collaboration with staff to create authentic learning for all students to provide quality resources and instruction to students and staff to encourage staff and students in becoming effective users of ideas and information to promote life-long reading and learning both for pleasure and for information”

“The mission of Tehiyah Day School is to inspire curiosity, a strong sense of community, and a vibrant connection to Judaism. At Tehiyah, we live the curriculum!”

“The Library’s central mission is to provide Congress, and then the federal government, and the American people with a rich, diverse, and enduring source of knowledge that can be relied upon to inform, inspire, and engage them, and support their intellectual and creative endeavors.”

“The mission of the MIT Libraries is to create and sustain an evolving information environment that advances learning, research, and innovation at MIT. We are committed to excellence in services, strategies, and systems that promote discovery, preserve knowledge, and improve worldwide scholarly communication…”

“The mission of The New York Public Library is to inspire lifelong learning, advance knowledge, and strengthen our communities.”

Mission to Nowhere?

Take a look at the mission again: improving society through facilitating knowledge creation. What ever happened to promoting a love of reading and/or books? Does expecting more from libraries mean abandoning reading and literature, fiction and poetry? The reason reading isn’t in this larger mission is that not all libraries are centrally focused on reading. School libraries and public libraries see the promotion and expansion of reading skills as one of their core goals; corporate and academic libraries assume the people they serve already have these skills. What’s more, while reading is a crucial skill to creating knowledge, it is not the exclusive route to “enlightenment.” Some learn through reading, some through video, others through doing, and the vast majority through combining these. We should expect our libraries to support all of these modalities of learning.

Bad libraries only build collections. Good libraries build services (and a collection is only one of many). Great libraries build communities.

My point is that if you think of a library as a bunch of books in a building (or worse, if your librarian thinks of it that way), you need to expect more—a whole lot more.

Andrew Carnegie built over 2,509 libraries

In fact, the Library of Alexandria was much more akin to the universities of today.

Growth of titles published worldwide

Music room of the Free Library of Philadelphia about 1927

Libraries, good ones and bad ones, have existed for millennia. Over that time, they have been storehouses of materials, certainly, but also places of scholarship, record keepers for nation states, and early economic development incubators. In fact, the idea that a library is a building filled to the rafters with books and documents is only about an 80-year-old view.

In 1931, S. R. Ranganathan proposed his five laws of librarianship

It seems folks weren’t looking to read the books that they had donated and were willing to drive to the three other public libraries within a five-mile radius.

They also found that residents took this as an opportunity to recycle items like Hustler magazine. The librarians weren’t that interested in sorting through these shoulder to shoulder with Boy Scouts.

Every table was a place for more shelves and more books. That, they said, was the purpose of the library—holding books and materials, not meeting spaces and coffee.

While the librarians were expecting some resistance to the off-site plan, the level of pushback took them by surprise.

off-site storage

The Syracuse University Library was full. There was no room left on the shelves.

he annotations are the highlighted portions of text, and clicking on one

The annotations are the highlighted portions of text, and clicking on one

The annotations are the highlighted portions of text, and clicking on one