Tag: libraries

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The Thrill of Exploring the Unknown

My daughter recently shared with me a meme that said this:

Some dream of fame.
Some dream of traveling to space.
I dream of having a secret door in one library that leads to another, hidden library.
– Elliott Blackwell

I immediately had two reactions. One was, “Yes. I get this.” The other was, “Why such a dream?”

The why question, predictably, turned into a bit of a rabbit hole. Why do some of us thrill at the very idea of a library in the first place? And then, why would the idea of a secret door in a library be exciting? And even more, why would a secret library behind that hidden door inside a library be even more exciting?

I imagine psychologists would have fun with this series of questions, but I think the answer is fairly simple: Humans are curious. Around the world, in any culture I’ve ever been exposed to, people want to add to their knowledge and understanding. Not for everyone, but for many people this is fundamentally true.

That curiosity explains the James Webb Telescope.

It also explains Q-Anon.

Knowledge, especially forbidden or hard-to-find knowledge, is thrilling.

Libraries are full of information – knowledge waiting to be explored. Much of what we find in libraries is ordinary knowledge – facts and theories that have already been vetted and tested, if not perfectly proven. Another big chunk of it, especially in public libraries, consists of the imaginings of people who want to explore humanity and the possibilities of the universe (we call this “fiction”).

When we visit a library, whether we read fiction or non-fiction, we expand our awareness and our ability to process what we know.  (We do the same thing when we travel and immerse ourselves in other cultures, but that’s another essay.) Over time we learn how to distinguish between amazing facts (eg: images from the James Webb) and absurd beliefs (eg: Q-Anon), and both contribute to intellectual growth.

The idea of a secret library suggests knowledge and growth beyond the ordinary. The appeal of rare or hidden knowledge is manifest as a recurring theme in the Harry Potter books, the recent Netflix series “Wednesday,” and other teen / young adult literature. Young people appreciate this appeal instinctively.

The appeal of hidden knowledge is also the driving force behind scientists searching for gravitational waves, elementary particles, and the inner workings of biochemistry.

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When do we stop educating ourselves?

From the time my son was about three years old, he looked forward to going to school. We had neighbors down the hall who had two bright and curious daughters in elementary school,  and my son really wanted to go to school, too. He was excited to learn new things, meet new people, and, like his friends down the hall, figure things out.

My wife and I remember the day he was brushing his teeth and his gaze wandered – as one’s gaze does when brushing your teeth – and he saw a 3×3 square of dots in the lower corner of the bathroom mirror. After staring at it briefly, he turned to my wife and said through toothpaste frothy lips, “You know, mom, three threes is nine.” At the age of four he had figured out multiplication, which became a subject of happy parent-child conversation for days.

Unfortunately, my wife and I also remember the numerous times – after my son finally started kindergarten and even after he advanced into first grade – when an adult heard that this charming small child before them was in school and loving it, the adult would laugh and say incredulously, “Really?” And then follow up with, “Wait until you have homework! You won’t like it so much then.”

These comments always infuriated us. People – often smart, well-educated people – were teaching our child that school is something to dislike. They were telling our child that learning is something unpleasant. It seems that in America, all children are taught this lesson by the adults around them. And they continue to believe it when they become adults, too.

A meme that periodically appears in one or another of my social media streams attributes the following pithy quote to Isaac Asimov: “Education isn’t something you can finish.”

What he really said, in a 1988 conversation with Bill Moyers, was something a good deal more thoughtful.

[P]eople think of education as something that they can finish. And what’s more, when they finish, [graduation is] a rite of passage…. And, therefore, anything that reminds you of school — reading books, having ideas, asking questions — that’s kids’ stuff. Now you’re an adult, you don’t do that sort of thing anymore. [Y]ou have everybody looking forward to no longer learning, and you make them ashamed afterward of going back to learning…. 

As a result of this mindset, conversations become exchanges of pronouncements of what we think we know rather than questions to increase what we can know. People seek out information only to confirm what they already believe to be true.

We need to instill in our communities the notion that asking questions, digging up information, learning new things, forming and reforming ideas is fun and valuable. We need to remember that increasing our understanding of each other and the world around us is essential to our own happiness and to the survival of the societies in which we live.

Until very recently, the best (and only) place to find information and new ideas was in books, so we collected books and built buildings to store them. We called these buildings filled with books “public libraries.” Today, libraries are becoming more than warehouses of books, and they are less dependent than they used to be on their physical buildings. Libraries are still information resources – powerful resources for continuing to learn – but the nature of the information they store and the ways libraries deliver that information to their communities is becoming more connected, more discerning, and more complete.

Education in a school is something that can end, but ending is not the same as being finished.

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Podcasts on Library Leadership and Community Engagement

What are your favorite podcasts for staying current on library news and trends? I look for podcasts that focus on Community Engagement or Transformative Leadership in libraries. Here are a few that consistently include material relevant to one or the other (or both) of those subjects. If you know of another great podcast that addresses these issues, let me know using the “Contact me” link on the right.

Call Number with American Libraries presents “conversations with librarians, authors, thinkers, and scholars about topics from the library world and beyond.” Host Phil Morehart, communications manager for the American Library Association, is professional and focused on the topics, which he and his guests explore systematically and in depth. The length of each episode varies dramatically from 15 minutes to 45 minutes, though you should expect just over 30 minutes. The range in length seems to be a function of subject matter, the number of guests, and whether or not it’s a sponsored podcast. Many podcasts are not only purposeful but also fun, such as the late 2021 podcasts on Zombies (in October) and food (in November). Call Number is a great general-subject podcast for librarians and occasionally touches on topics related to community engagement, management, and transformational leadership.

Libraries Lead in the New Normal addresses strategic library leadership issues. It’s a little irregular, disorganized, and long-winded, but it is also highly relevant and insightful for library leaders. Many discussions look at how libraries fit in their communities and the role libraries play in society. Each podcast is 45 minutes to an hour long and includes one or more practicing librarians as guests. The hosts (R. David Lankes and Mike Eisenberg) ramble a bit, but the casualness also makes the podcasts entertaining and, again, the topics are fundamental to librarianship and the guests are interesting.

Library Leadership Podcast tends to adhere to important, day-to-day concerns about library management such as “Beating Burnout” and “Talking So Your Boss Will Listen”. It is tightly organized and professionally presented – it comes out regularly, the topics and the questions are  prepared in advance, and the host (Adriane Herrick Juarez) does a good job of staying focused. Each podcast is about 15 minutes long and consists of an interview with one librarian.

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Communication: Leadership’s Binding Agent

You’ve hired people with all the right skills, talent, and experience and you’ve given them the tools they need to perform their functions. And yet, patron services just aren’t clicking. Project pieces don’t fit together. And unresolved friction is the norm. Maybe patrons aren’t complaining, but the library’s image isn’t exactly shining either. In the end, some of those valuable people on your team-that’s-not-a-team leave, and you discover they aren’t necessarily leaving for better positions. They just want to work someplace else.

Where do you begin looking for the root cause behind the disfunction on a library team (or any team)? How do you know what to fix?

A good place to begin is communication, and look to yourself for figuring out what to fix. Let’s face it, survey after survey shows that librarians completing the Myers-Briggs personality profile (or almost any other personality profile) score high on introversion. That’s neither good nor bad. That’s just a fact, and as a library leader it’s something that you need to be aware of and work on, especially in your own communication.

Good leaders need to be good communicators in three ways:

      1. Outbound communication: Enlightening and listening to higher level management, the board, or the larger community, including patrons.
      2. Direction oriented communication: Talking to peers and staff about what your team’s overall objective is and how success will be recognized.
      3. Day-to-day communication: Staying on top of progress on tasks and coordinating problem solving.

These are interrelated communications, of course. Problem solving, for example, will always be conducted in the context of objectives. Weakness in any of these levels of communication, however, could spell failure.

A library team that does not listen to the larger community (especially listening to people who do not currently use the library) cannot possibly expect to meet the needs and interests of the community at a high level of satisfaction because it simply will not know what those needs and interests are. Library leaders are responsible for making sure that the community is heard and understood. Otherwise, the library will miss opportunities or produce services that few in the community want or need.

Similarly, library leaders need to coordinate library or department activities with their peers within and outside the library. They also need to make sure that the people who work with them understand what the goals are and why they are important. Workers who are disconnected from the finished product are not likely to care whether they do their work well or efficiently, but team members who know why they are working on a project will derive greater satisfaction from doing the job well. People are far more likely to care about how well they do their jobs if they understand the consequences of both doing well and doing poorly.

Finally, operations can quickly get bogged down in minor unresolved issues. Leaders need to empower team members to quickly make decisions by communicating and coordinating with each other, but leaders also need to make sure that team members are resolving the problems. Without at least some oversight, some problems may simply be ignored because each person thinks it’s someone else’s problem – or at least that it’s not their responsibility. It’s a basic management skill required of leaders at all levels to stay attuned to the emergence of issues within their team and the need to resolve them. How they are resolved (within the context of the team’s objective) is less important than that they are resolved and that everyone affected by the resolution is aware of it and why it worked out the way it did.

Ultimately, I would argue that having a team with a perfect balance of skills or having a team on which everyone is friendly and gets along is less important than having a team that communicates well. It is possible to fill most skill gaps and to get past many personal awkwardnesses, if the team can communicate well professionally. Communication is the tool that binds teams together and makes them strong. Assuring the team can and does communicate is your responsibility as the team leader. If communication is a problem on the team you lead, address this first and many other problems will take care of themselves.

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What is the Role of a Library in a Pandemic?

The fundamental mission around which everything a library does is the accumulation and dissemination of information for its community.

A secondary objective of a library is to provide a certain amount of entertainment. 

We can debate the details of these assertions at another time, but if you grant me that “accumulation and dissemination of information” is at least a fundamental mission of all libraries, we can continue.

We can also assume that people need information and entertainment to survive an emergency, especially a pandemic. They need information so they know what to do – how to respond to the pandemic – and they need to have confidence in that information so they do not panic. In addition, community members need entertainment so they can survive emotionally as well as physically.

Finally, let us take as a given that in a pandemic, library buildings will close. In the current pandemic, many states have ordered libraries to close their doors. Many libraries in other states have voluntarily curtailed in-building operations.

Does closing the building mean that libraries have to cease operations? Of course not. That’s absurd. Libraries can still offer much of what makes libraries libraries through online services. It takes some adaptation, to be sure, but it can be done. 

I have listed below some ideas of what a library can do while it is still “open for business” even while the library building is closed.

1. Communicate library activities to the community. This can and should be done aggressively by all means available. 

    • The cheapest and easiest way to let the community know what a library is doing is to post it on the library’s web site! Use basic marketing principles around placement and messaging (do not, for example, have a message that says “the library is closed until further notice” right next to a message that says “come to these online meetings.” From the patron’s point of view, that’s very confusing. The building may be closed, but the library is open. It’s that simple.
    • Facebook is a great way to get word out to much of the community. For a few dollars (literally about $10), it is possible to put announcements that “The Building is Closed, But the Library is Still Open” in front of thousands of community members who are stuck at home browsing Facebook. Direct them to your Facebook page and your web site where they can find out all the other details.
    • The visual nature of Instagram makes it a tool good for generating interest in and excitement about library activities.
    • Email is also cheap. Send a note to members about changes to policy (due dates have been extended, blocked cards have been unblocked, etc) and in the same email, tell them about all the things going on at the library. Get patrons to sign up for a monthly newsletter that provides updates on past and upcoming activities. Send out a vibrant, low text, high-imagery newsletter sharing past and upcoming events.
    • Newspapers are still being published, online and in print. Make the library a story and get the newspaper to cover it (both online and in print!).
    • Have the mayor and other public officials mention in their announcements that the library is still functioning online and encourage community members to visit the library’s home page for information about resources and activities that are available.

2. Move book clubs and other groups online. Don’t cancel anything! GoToMeeting, WebEx, and Zoom are just three of multiple online meeting services available to libraries that make virtual meetings possible. I belong to a literary group at my neighborhood library. We don’t read specific books each month, we talk about different genres and aspects of literature. The average age of members may well be around 60, but everyone quickly learned how to participate using a virtual meeting tool and everyone has been grateful to have the human contact during the stay-at-home period. It’s possible to chat while knitting in a virtual meeting. ESL sessions can be conducted online. Even chess is possible. D&D would be easy. Perhaps board games would be a challenge.

3. Add (online) events. Take advantage of online resources to add events, especially for kids. Pandemics – any emergency requiring people to stay home – are especially hard on kids and parents with small children. The more events you have that can keep kids entertained, the happier the kids will be – and the happier the parents will be that they have an active and supportive library. I know a librarian who organized an art group for teens that produced spectacular imagery. Another library added reader’s advisory services via FB in which a librarian would interact with multiple patrons looking for books to read.

4. Expand existing online services. When people are stuck at home, unable to go to theaters or the gym, they look to the internet for services. Some need more variety than what is available through paid services. Others simply can’t afford them. Most libraries have access to magazines, ebooks, and streaming video. These can all be expanded. Team up with other libraries through the county or state or the ALA to negotiate for greater availability of titles and less restrictive limits on the number and length of time digital assets can be accessed.

5. Expand internet access services. Libraries are often the primary source for internet access for students and adults who do not have high speed internet access at home. They made need access to broadband internet access through the library just to access the library’s online services, but they are also likely to need it for school or work, not to mention entertainment. Even when the library is closed, the library can facilitate internet access by

    • Extending WiFi services deep into the parking lot. If patrons have access to a car, they can sit in the parking lot and use the internet.
    • Lending WiFi hot spots. Obviously, anything that is being lent by the library requires the object be moved from the library to the patron, which can be an infection transmission mechanism. However, if the sterilization procedures can be worked out, libraries that can lend WiFi hot spots to patrons will do a great favor to high school students preparing for college (or college students trying to wrap up courses for graduation).

6. Provide community updates. People want and need to know what’s going on. Cable news and even regional newspapers are pretty good at covering state and national news. But what about local news and information that provide actionable knowledge to residents? Often it comes from many sources. Often community members only get part of the news they need. The library should consolidate it on their web site. No commentary. No editing. Just post it.

    • Updates from the mayor’s office.
    • Notices and updates from the police department.
    • Updates from the county health department.
    • Anything else that applies directly to the decisions being made by community members such as:
      • Testing locations.
      • Lists of businesses providing curbside pickup.
      • News about non-library community activities.
      • Stories about good-deeds in the community.
      • Stories about scams or people abusing the crisis.

7. Post information on the disease (or other emergency). Find basic, factual, non-Wikipedia sources of information about the disease, how it spreads, where it came from, what it does inside our bodies, etc. Libraries should NOT attempt to digest this information and write their own material about it. Instead, create a reading list of magazine and journal articles, books, videos (lots of videos), and webinars, all of which should be available through the library, with links for ready access. Librarians should use all of their information literacy skills to sift through the available information to find the most current, reliable information. Be sure that the information is in a form the library’s community can readily digest – the latest peer reviewed journal article in Lancet on the way the virus affects protein replication in lung cells may be useful to a practicing physician, but it will not help an accountant or a mom understand what they are facing. The library may want to break out the information according to age group so parents can share (and learn) with their children.

Remember, it’s all about the patrons. Don’t forget who your patrons are. If you have a large Spanish or Mandarin speaking community, be sure to offer these services in Spanish or Chinese as well. In many ways, these communities are the most shut off from reliable information and will depend upon the services of the library more than majority language communities.

Stay in touch with the community. While the building is closed, direct person-to-person contact with the community may be curtailed. The library staff, especially the executive director and the department heads, need to stay in touch with members of the community to identify needs the library can fill and or things that it could do better.

In a pandemic, as in any emergency, access to current, reliable information is essential for productive debate and coordinated, unified public response. Make the library what it is supposed to be: A center for reliable information for the community it serves.

Author’s note: This blog post is dated in mid-May 2020. However, it draws extensively on conversations held over the last five years in which I asked, “What is the role of a library in an emergency (such as a blizzard)?” Beginning a year ago, influenced by years of exposure to Bill Gates’ warnings about the likelihood of a global pandemic, I refined that question to “What would the role of a library be in a pandemic?” In early February of 2020, as reports of the Chinese COVID-19 outbreak spreading to other countries began appearing in the news, I proposed to the library where I worked that we begin a basic information campaign around flu avoidance (washing hands, coughing into sleeves, etc). Then in early March of 2020, as reports of the virus in Washington State and New York City appeared in the news, I asked my pandemic question of a group of library leadership graduate students at Rutgers University. In the Rutgers discussion and in the conversations last year about the role of libraries in a pandemic, I proposed many of the ideas presented here. Of course, I got lots of thoughtful feedback then and I welcome more thoughtful comments here now.