PVLD Director's Blog

Art and Libraries

This will be a quick post since I think that, while my body is here at work, my brain is still on its way home from Washington DC.  I certainly don't cope with time zone changes and long flights the way I used to!

I had a spare couple of hours before my shuttle to the airport yesterday afternoon, so I took the opportunity to take one of the public tours of the Library of Congress - what a testament to the commitment our forefathers had to ensuring access to knowledge and ideas for all citizens.

Tours of the main Library of Congress buidling are led by volunteer docents who undergo six weeks of training and a comprehensive exam.  My tour guide was a gentleman named Gene Rowe.  Gene not only was extraordinarily knowledgeable about the history of the Library and about the facilities, but he positively sparkled with enthusiasm as he described the artwork that decorates the building and the way in which that art reflects and reinforces the Library's mission of fostering the pursuit of knowledge.  He also managed to get the 1/2 dozen or so adolescents on the tour caught up in his enthusiasm.

PVLD has several beautiful pieces of public art commissioned with the same intent, and has worked in the past few years to further integrate art into our service and program offerings, so it was wonderful to see that we share this vision with the Library of Congress and even more wonderful to see Mr. Rowe exemplify how art can engage people's imaginations and enhance the mission of the library.

Truly an hour well-spent!

National Library Legislative Day

I'm writing this quick post during a break fron the Amercan Library Association National Library Legislative Day briefing.

I'm sure I'll have more to write as the next couple of days unfold,but I wanted to post briefly about how proud I feel to be part of a group of library supporters, many of whom came to Washington at their own expense and on their own time, who are committed to making sure our Federal Legislators understand the importance of libraries in a democratic society.

For public libraries the main source of Federal funding is through the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), which provides funds for grant programs administered by the State Libraries. This year PVLD is benefitting directly from LSTA funding in 3 areas -

1. The Early Literacy for Families (ELF) grant that is supporting enhanced services for families with young children and particularly for families of children with disabilities.

2. The Transforming Life After 50 grant that is supporting enhanced library services for the 39% of Peninsula residents who fall into theBaby Boom generation.

3. Scholarships to assist PVLD staff who are attending library school while working.

This morning we have already heard how challenging the Federal budget negotiations are, and how proposals currently on the table amount to a 2% spending increase (less than inflation) before any changes to programs such as No Child Left Behind.

It's pretty disheartening, especially when you realize that the total annual LSTA funding we are seeking amounts to less than 1/2 the amount we are spending DAILY on the war in Iraq (we are seeking $214.432 million in LSTA funding for next fiscal year while in April of this year the Washington Post reported that the Iraq war is costing $434 million/day)!

LSTA is only one of the issues we are addressing in Washington this week. Others include funding for school libraries, for federal libraries including the National Agriculture Library, and for the E-Rate telecommunications discounts that are made available to schoolsand public libraries including PVLD and PVPUSD.

The total annual funding being requested for all of these programs (including LSTA) adds up to less than 3 days funding for the Iraq war!

What does that say about our priorities ?

I screwed up!

I published a post last week that showed me at my worst and betrayed the trust of the PVLD staff in the process.

When I am tired and cranky I have to work harder than normal not to let my frustrations show....and last week I failed miserably and let one episode over a minor issue overshadow all of the truly good things that our staff have done and contuinue to do to make PVLD a great library and a great place to work.

We're heading into some very challenging times and I have been very stressed about things like the challenge of reaching agreement on a new MOU that treats employees fairly as we transition to a new compensation structure and at the same time does not create unsustainable financial liabilities for PVLD as our tax revenues flatten. I can't yet see a way to make everyone happy in this process and it has been really weighing on me. And that's just one of the tricky issues on my plate.

I'm normally pretty good about managing stress, but over the past couple of months my work commitments and personal "stuff" have made it harder to fit in my usual stress-relievers.

The result was a blog post written in haste and regretted at leisure. I would like to to think I'm a better person than that, but maybe not....

To the staff whose trust I betrayed, I am truly sorry.

The post has, of course. been removed.

Innovation

A firday afternoon tidbit from from one of my favorite blogs, Indexed

Here's to less inspection and more innovation.  Have a great weekend!

Eureka!

This past week I had the honor and pleasure of serving as a mentor for the first Eureka Leadership Institute - a weeklong, intensive leadership development program for emerging library leaders in California.

While my official role at the Institute was "mentor", I think I learned at least as much as the participants.  It is a rare gift to be able to spend a week thinking about leadership and what it means in a library context and I came away reinvigorated (despite the 12 hour days!) and with plenty of food for thought about both how to improve my own leadership abilities and how to lead PVLD towards the future.  I also came away with a whole new network of relationships with people I might otherwise never have had the opportunity to really get to know (or possibly even to meet) and with a renewed sense of optimism about the future of public libraries in California.

I'm looking forward to continued involvement through the Eureka blog, follow-up webinars and meetings, and reunions at ALA, CLA, etc.  I'm also looking forward to working with PVLD Department Managers Eve Wittenmyer and Jennifer Addington who participated in the Institute as they work on their leadership project over the next year or so.

It would ruin the experience for future participants if I write too much about the content of the Institute.  Suffice it to say that I will be encouraging more PVLD leaders to apply, and am hoping that I will have the opportunity to again serve as a mentor in future.

Now its back to the "real world"!

Deconstructing librarianship

One of the bonuses of spending this week at the Eureka Leadership Institute is the opportunity to spend time with my fellow mentors, who bring diverse perspectives and backgrounds but share a common passion for our profession.  OVer lunch yesterday a conversation with Joan Frye Williams (consultant/futurist/librarian) and Cheryl Gould (of Infopeople, the organizers of the Institute  and no relation although we joke about it) about a workshop Joan is developing on the Restructuring Reference.

Joan talked about her view that what librarians call "reference" is really a bundle of activities that we need to desconstruct in order to find the best way to delvier that particular service to our communities.  For reference the activities might be seen as

• "Directional" - either helping people find there way to somewhere (the restrooms, the biographies, etc.) or helping people find a particular item ("do you have this book and where do I find it?")
• "Coaching" - helping people become more effective problem-solvers/information seekers (this would include what we traditionally call "information literacy", teaching people to use our online resources, etc.)
• "Advising/Consulting" - recommending reading material or resources, recommending solutions to a particular need or question
• Research - actually digging out sources and finding information on behalf of the customer

As Joan points out, we try to provide all of these activities at the "reference desk", when the customer would probably be best served if we consider each individually and figure how best to provide each in terms of staffing, location, design of the access points, etc.

The conversation got me thinking about the language we use for other core professional activities and how the terms we use obscure the richness and importance of the activity.

For example we talk about "programming", but in my mind (as I've said to some of the staff) that is really a code word for the critical activities of providing lifelong learning opportunities and finding ways to connect the library with the community.

"Collection development/management" has an "order fulfillment" element (all of the logistical systems that go into meeting customer demand from standing orders for bestsellers through the ILL and holds processes) but it also has a "discovery" element of creating those serendipitous connections between people and books that they might never have otherwise found (so it includes the use of professional judgement to select materials that might be outside the mainstream, as well as thinking about how we make those items available so people can discover them...the "connecting people and ideas" part of our PVLD vision).

That fairly brief conversation with Joan and Cheryl over lunch has helped me see what we do with new eyes....and I think will have a big impact on how we approach the design of PVLD's services going forward.  That alone is worth taking a week of my time to participate in Eureka!

Recharging my blogging batteries!

Its been a while since I've felt that I have written a really good, thought-provoking post on this blog.  I really could relate to this post from Logic+Emotion about the challenge of consistently writing really great posts.

I've got more than usual on my plate at work at the moment (budget challenges, union negotiations, issues with our major supplier of books that are resulting in bare shelves and customer complaints, plans for the renovation/expansion of both branches and the associated fundraising efforts, the usual Spring rush of community and legislative activities, negotiations over the proposed redevelopment of the property next to our main library with potentially big implications for us, etc. etc. etc.)

Combine that with lots of houseguests, a string of appliance failures and home maintenance issues, and the normal busy-ness of life and finding time to read and reflect (which for me is a pre-requisite to a good blog post) is a real challenge.

I've also noticed that while I still try to skim my normal complement of library and non-library blogs, they have not been the source of much inspiration lately.  My bet is that some of my fellow bloggers are feeling some of the same pressures I am, but I also think that ideas that seemed new and exciting to me a year ago are less so today.

This blog is important to me, so I'm going to keep at it...but I'm going to try posting a bit less often and putting more time and thought into the posts I do make.

Next week I'm going to be spending the week as a mentor at the Eureka Leadership Institute, a weeklong program for emerging library leaders in California.  I'm hopeful that even though I am there as a mentor and not a participant I will have a chance to reflect on my own leadership abilities and performance and also to recharge my batteries though being in a new environment with a group of energetic young professionals.  I don't expect to be posting much, though!

Hopefully when I get back to work in early May my batteries will be re-charged and you'll see an improvement in this blog....

Curiouser and Curiouser

I came across this gem of a video of Seth Godin talking about the importance of being curious on John Blyberg's blog today and I was struck by the role libraries can and do play in "priming the pump" of curiosity.

I was also reminded of a post I wrote back in February in which I quoted an impassioned email from one of our PVLD Librarians, Sylvia Richardson, about her perception that in their quest for relevence librarians are chasing numbers and growth and forgetting, as she puts it, that

"Our job as librarians is to engage people in growth throughout their lives, before, during and after "school" days, to be a beacon of free thought unencumbered by sales figures, which more often indicates mass market thinking than new and daring concepts; the sales curve always follows some distance behind the new concepts humans create.  (Was Van Gogh a bestselling artist in his lifetime???)  It is our job, as I see it, to include in our collections "items" that may be less than mainstream, but more important precisely because they are out of the main stream; new directions, offshoots, upstarts, wellsprings off the beaten path."

Sylvia's comments have been bouncing around in the back of my mind since she wrote them, and it was one of those interesting instances of synchronicity to first see the Seth Godin video and then, within an hour or two, to read John Berry's column in the April 15, 2008 issue of Library Journal in which he reminds his readers that libraries are more than gateways to information and librarians are more than "information professionals".  I'm sure Sylvia would agree with Berry's comment that while people do come to the library for information, they also

"... come to the library to do much more than that. Many are, of course, studying, searching, reading, seeking, and finding the recorded stuff. But many more are there enjoying, interacting, exploring, and, as old Jesse Shera once put it, engaging in “the quiet stir of thought” unrecorded, unmanaged, uncaptured."

I am a firm believer in the role libraries and librarians can play in exposing people to new authors, new thoughts, and new ideas and I'd be the last one to say that we should let the development of our collections and services be driven solely by giving people what is popular.

At the same time, I recognize that in order to expose people to Sylvia's "...."items" that may be less than mainstream, but more important precisely because they are out of the main stream; new directions, offshoots, upstarts, wellsprings off the beaten path."  We need to get them in the door (whether the physical door to our physical libraries or the virtual door to our virtual libraries), and they won't come (or won't come back) if we don't also give them what they are looking for.

Finding this balance between giving people what they want and providing them an opportunity to discover something that they will value but would not have asked for is to my mind one of the core responsibilities of the professional librarian.  It is particularly challenging given the always present limitations on money (do I buy another copy of the latest Michael Crichton or do I buy something by a little known but outstanding new author?), space (How many copies of this Sue Grafton do we need?  Should I keep our only copy of The Sun Also Rises even though it hasn't circulated in a year?) and staff capacity (do I offer another session of Clutterology, which practically runs itself and always gets a good turnout or do I take a chance on a speaker who might be a bit challenging and may only attract a dozen people?)

It occurred to me today that when making these decisions we could do worse than ask ourselves "How does this "prime the pump" of curiosity?"

Bringing 'Em In

I am currently reading and thoroughly enjoying Letter from Point Clear by Dennis McFarland.  This morning I read a scene in which the young pastor (whose name is Pastor!) of a growing evangelical church who, while describing the church's plans for a new Christian Center complete with a gym, basketball courts, meeting rooms, and running track, says "Half of it is getting them in the door....the other half is building community."

My immediate reaction was "could have been spoken by a library director".  And if you think basketball courts and running tracks are beyond the mission of the library, here's a reminder that this may not be so from Neal Pierce of the Washington Post Writer's Group in a recent blog post on the important role libraries play in the assimilation of immigrants -

"The idea of libraries as social gathering places is hardly new. Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate who built 2,500 free public libraries around the world in response to the immigrant flows and broad social gaps of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, intended them to be places to attract young people. Robert McNulty, a library advocate and president of Partners for Livable Communities, reminds us that Carnegie actually built gymnasiums, boxing rings and swimming pools into some of his libraries -- hoping that once there, the youths would "be exposed to books and learn to read." "  (emphasis mine)

Puts the 21st century debate about gaming in libraries into context, doesn't it?

Hmmm...as we think about the expansion and remodel of the Miraleste Library maybe we ought to think about a gym!

Growing Up Online

BAck in January the PBS program Frontline aired this program on "Growing Up Online".  The entire episode and a lot of interesting supplemental material is available on the Frontline website.  It will take about an hour of your time to view all of the "chapters" - but I found it was an hour well spent in terms of the insights I gained into how today's teens, the first generation to grow up with the Internet as a fact of life, are using the technology.

The program doesn't shy away from the risks of being online, including a poignant segment on the tragic consequences of cyber-bullying, and I have to confess that even my Internet-embracing self was shocked by some of what the kids were doing online. And as a childless person I sure felt for the parents interviewed!  (At the same time the former adolescent in me was also moved by the way some of the kids interviewed were using the Internet to connect with, empower, and validate their deepest selves in ways that would be impossible in the physical world).

In the end I appreciated Danah Boyd's comment to the effect that these kids live in a society with fundamentally different properties than the one I grew up in, and this is not going to change.  Strategies like blocking access to the parts of that society that make us fearful are not at the end of the day going to keep kids safe.  As fast as we block access to something, an alternative will spring up. What we need to do is teach people how to live in this new society safely - just as we teach them to look before crossing the street or to wear a seatbelt.

Libraries are already playing a role in helping people understand how to be safe online, but it seems to me there is more that we could do....