“It would have cost the 645 libraries participating in the TexShare database program $84,158,212 to purchase the database subscriptions that were purchased by the TSLAC for $7,286,620.”
Texas State Library and Archives Commission, “Facts at a Glance,” last modified on June 24, 2015, https://www.tsl.texas.gov/texshare/facts_ataglance.html
In 2012 Harvard that their costs for these journal subscriptions have gone up 145% from 2006-2012 and indicated that such increases will soon put materials out of reach for the richest university in the world
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices
table put together by the University of Iowa that shows how much it costs for the University
http://blog.lib.uiowa.edu/transitions/?p=720&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter (accessed January 5, 2016)
“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free (accessed January 5, 2016)
To give you a small sense of how much money we are talking about, let me show you two quick examples. The first is a table put together by the University of Iowa that shows how much it costs for the University to provide academic journal titles electronically to faculty and staff:
This reality, increasing journal and database costs, is a bit of a game changer in my experience. Particularly in academic settings, few faculty know or understand the huge cost for journals and such. I had a colleague who saw that half an academic library’s budget was in licensing costs and he was ready to claim mismanagement and incompetence. It was only after talking about the reality of surging costs that he went from mismanagement to an open access activist.
One of the great strategies academic librarians have used around this is making these costs completely transparent and involving academic units in deciding which journals to cut to meet a budget – or turning the faculty into advocates for the library to prevent cuts.
Collective Buying Agent
This is an interesting argument. It is the most concrete argument for libraries, and one that is widely accepted…however it also can veer towards redistribution of wealth and some anti-taxer discussion.
It also increased the library staff and allowed students to access the resources of the library 24/7
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/do-school-libraries-need-books/# (accessed January 5, 2016)
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/09/04/a_library_without_the_books/ (accessed January 5, 2016)
Collective Buying Agent Economic Stimulus Center of Learning Safety Net Steward of Cultural Heritage Third Space Cradle of Democracy Symbol of Community Aspirations
This list comes from a review of the literature, and in talking with library leaders and librarians. It is most likely not complete (Third Space, for example, was a justification added between the 1st and 2nd edition of the book. Encourage your audience to think of others.
There are plenty of voices that question the need for any library.
Never deny the obvious. There are those that question the need for libraries. This is also true, by the way, in discussing the fact that there are librarians without and MLIS.
Cushing Academy is an elite prep school about 70 miles west of Boston. On its lush wooded campus, 445 students from 28 states and 28 countries work through high school. It is also, if you believe the Boston Globe, the end of libraries as we know them.
Start with a story. People are tuned to listen to stories.
Here is the key to a successful library: you. In a city or a Fortune 500 company, the library must shape itself around you and the goals of your community. If your community strives for greatness, the library should be great. If you are concerned about the future, or the economy, or the state of democratic discourse in this country, your library should be concerned as well. If you make these expectations known, if you arm yourself with what is possible and not what is, then the library and librarians can meet those expectations and goals. Of course, this is a two-way street. Great libraries expect a lot of their communities as well. Yes, great libraries require financial support, but even more than that they require open communication about your needs, your challenges, and your dreams.
True advocacy is about bringing people on board and getting them invested.
In this book, you are going to read about a public library that has created a Fab Lab—a space where the community can work with 3D printers and make new inventions. You are going to read about a school library where the librarian is too busy helping teachers raise their performance to shelve books. You are going to read about librarians creating new companies in rural Illinois and transforming lives in Dallas. These are brilliant libraries and librarians, but if you see them as exceptional—as above and beyond the norm—you expect too little of your library.
Foreshadowing for folks who may think this is still going to be a big love letter to libraries as they are. Linking to trends and hot topics.
Did you know “one out of every six people in the world is a registered library user” and “Five times more people visit U.S. public libraries each year than attend U.S. professional and college football, basketball, baseball and hockey games combined.”
https://www.oclc.org/content/dam/oclc/reports/librariesstackup.pdf (Accessed November 28, 2015)
The field of librarianship represents an annual investment of nearly $26 billion in North America and well over $40 billion worldwide.
https://www.oclc.org/global-library-statistics.en.html (accessed November 28, 2015)
Libraries and librarians stood at the center of a growing Egyptian empire in the third century BC and the expansion of mathematics in Arabia in the fourteenth century
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/Arabic_mathematics.html (accessed January 5, 2016)
This book is written not for those librarians but for the people who either support or oversee libraries. This includes college provosts, students, parents, board members, volunteers, and, well, just about everyone who has ever gone to school or pays local taxes. You need to know what libraries are capable of, and you need to raise the bar on your expectations.
Big tent time – a major aim of the book is to get folks to realize libraries are beyond public libraries.
Perhaps the biggest “why” question you can ask, and the one at the center of this book, is why do so many people see librarianship as antiquated, conservative, and less-than-inspiring? Why is it that while folks love the idea of libraries and librarians, they are quick to limit them to books or children, or simply think of them as historical holdovers? The answer is not that these people are wrong, but that they need to expect more. Too many libraries are about books. Too many librarians are reliving history and are stuck in a sort of professional conservatism that favors what they do over why they do it. Too many librarians see their collections, not the community, as their jobs. Too many libraries are seeking to survive instead of innovate, and promote the love of reading over the empowerment of the populations they serve. I am not claiming that these librarians are the majority, but they are too numerous and their communities (you) expect too little of them.
Acknowledging current perspectives, forgiving them, and then presenting them with something better.
The field of librarianship represents an annual investment of nearly $26 billion in North America and well over $40 billion worldwide. In an age when traditional institutions are declining, library usage has grown steadily over the past twenty years. Did you know “one out of every six people in the world is a registered library user” and “Five times more people visit U.S. public libraries each year than attend U.S. professional and college football, basketball, baseball and hockey games combined.” By understanding librarians and libraries we can understand how to build credibility and trust in a community overwhelmed with change and choices. We can discover how to create an environment to disagree and maintain a civil discourse. Ultimately, by understanding librarianship, we can even understand something as grand as the role of a citizen in society.
Using data to make stories real.
Today’s librarians are using the lessons learned over that nearly 6,000-year history to forge a new librarianship based not on books and artifacts but on knowledge and community. They are taking advantage of the technological leaps of today to empower our communities to improve. The librarians of today are radical positive change agents in our classrooms, boardrooms, and legislative chambers. They built the web before we called it the web. They were crowdsourcing knowledge and searching through mountains of information before Google, before Facebook, and even before indoor plumbing. Today’s new librarians are not threatened or made obsolete by the net. They are pushing the net forward and shaping the world around you—often without your notice.
Libraries evolve and technology changes opportunities.
When we try to discover why, we find that there is power in libraries and steel in librarians. It goes deeper than tradition, buildings, and books. The reason for the protests and protectiveness over libraries is not found in collections of materials or columns and architecture. To find the answer to this riddle, one must look past the buildings and the books to the professionals who, throughout history, have served humanity’s highest calling—to learn
Making the link to learning specific – also putting it in a universal context: who can fault learning?
In Ferguson, Missouri, amidst racially charged protests and riots, the teachers and parents turned to public libraries to create ad hoc schools teaching and feeding the children of the city. In the wake of natural disasters the librarians of Calgary and New York City opened their libraries to provide the devastated residents of their cities with a safe place to recover and power to contact loved ones. Librarians in Ferguson, Calgary, New York, Baltimore, Iraq, Paris, and beyond chose to support their residents even when their own homes were destroyed, and their lives upended.
Begin introducing a larger narrative about the importance of libraries beyond books – without mentioning books. This is tied to George Lakoff’s work.
Why are stories like this, while maybe not quite so dramatic, repeated across the U.K. and the United States? As cities faced with a devastating financial crisis sought to close library branches, citizens rallied. Protestors disrupted town halls and city council meetings. Citizens picketed, and in Philadelphia, the City Council went so far as to sue the Mayor over the closing of libraries.
Tie it to the local and less lofty.
The Arab Spring had come to Egypt. In early 2011, on the heels of a successful revolution in Tunisia, Egyptians took to the streets to demand reforms from a government regime that had been in power for nearly 30 years. While much of the media fixated on protestors who occupied Tahrir Square in the Egyptian capital of Cairo, many protests started in the port city of Alexandria. In Alexandria, as in Cairo, people from across generations and the socio-economic scale rioted to demand liberty, justice, and social equity. In an attempt to restore the constitution, what was seen primarily as a peaceful uprising lead to the deaths of at least 846 people, and an additional 6,000 injured across Egypt. On January 28 at 6 pm, after the prisons had opened, releasing murderers and rapists onto the street, all security withdrew from the streets of Alexandria. Roving gangs of looters took to the streets to take advantage of the chaos.
Linking love of libraries to a larger scale.
“recapture the spirit of openness and scholarship of the original,”
http://www.bibalex.org/aboutus/overview_en.aspx (accessed January 5, 2016)
an additional 6,000 injured
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Egyptian_revolution —Yes, a librarian and university professor just cited Wikipedia. I do it a lot throughout the book. There is nothing inherently wrong or non-credible in Wikipedia. In fact, it is more transparent in the construction of information than most published encyclopedias. I cite it because it is easy for the reader to get to, it is a great jumping-off point through references to other works, and I have verified the information in other sources…like we all should do.
The New Librarianship Field Guide
Lankes, R. D. (2016). The New Librarianship Field Guide. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press
The Atlas of New Librarianship
Lankes, R. D. (2011). The Atlas of New Librarianship. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
The field of librarianship represents an annual investment of nearly $26 billion in North America and well over $40 billion worldwide.
https://www.oclc.org/global-library-statistics.en.html (accessed November 28, 2015)
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.
Reinforcing librarianship across library types.
providing training
In my work to librarians this is knowledge creation. I’ve made it more specific for a general audience.
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.
If you are going to challenge an existing narrative (libraries are books) you need to replace it with something better. This is the long form version of that thread we started in the first chapter. What we’re trying to do is allow people to replace the narrative, not because they were wrong, but because it is a reward for knowing more – becoming an insider.
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.
Humor is a powerful way to help people retain ideas and information.
Safety Net
This is a strong narrative, but really relies on knowledge of community. Do they care about the safety net? Also, this is an argument that can be used across library types. Academic and school libraries provide remediation and study services.
There is also a danger to this argument (or rather the consequences of this argument) in the public library as the last public service standing. See (https://davidlankes.org/?p=6421 ) for more on this.