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?"