The library as interface to public space and public self

The following are the words and pictures that I presented yesterday as part of the University of Windsor's Librarian Research Series for a talk entitled, The library as interface to public space and public self.

This is the first time - ever - that I’m reading a presentation. There are several reasons why I’m reading this one today and, according to what I've written down already, I’ll be sharing one of those reasons.

This speaking series was designed to provide those at the Leddy Library with an opportunity to share our research work -- work that we’ve done and work that we hope to do in the future. My presentation today is more about the former than the latter. But it’s worse than that.

You see, my intention is to apply for my first sabbatical -- filling in the paperwork this summer -- with the intention of starting it January 2014.  At this point, I know what ground I’m interested in exploring but not necessary the particular path that I want to take. In other words, using a more appropriate metaphor, I feel like I’m at the stage in which I feel I have found a piece of glass that fits nicely in my hand, but I still need to grind it down into a lens.  This presentation is my first grindstone.

Even without the external motivation of a deadline, I find that forcing yourself to articulate specifically what you really care about and what you want to learn more about is a very helpful exercise in the pursuit of meaningful work. I know this because in some ways I’ve gone through this process before. It happened almost two years ago now.

In 2010, I was paid to play a game. I was a game runner for a game called Evoke that was designed by Jane McGonigal and sponsored by the World Bank. Evoke was an alternative reality game designed to act as a curriculum for social entrepreneurism and during its 10 week run the game attracted almost 20,000 registered players from around the world and raised $30,000 for 25 projects developed by its players.

After the game was over, I was invited to go to Washington DC for a couple days to take part in was known as the Evoke Summit for the game’s winners and their mentors. One of the activities that occurred during the summit was dedicated to developing a short tagline to succinctly convey the essence of one’s project. Unlike the rest of participants in the room, I didn’t come to the summit  with a particular project, but I did the exercise and eventually I came up with this for myself: public spaces need public events.

It has become the tagline that I use on my personal portfolio site and I think it does a pretty good job of capturing some of the work I have been doing inside the library and outside of it. 

But, being just a tagline, “public spaces need public events” doesn’t explain *why* I think events are so important for libraries, library communities, and communities with and without libraries.  I will do that now and I will start with libraries. 

I believe that events held within libraries animate the space of the library and situates it as a place not just where knowledge is accessed but where it can be created, understood, and shared. Librarians are positioned as perfect hosts of events as we have access to cheap, accessible, and open public space and we are mandated to serve all sectors of our communities. Community events held within libraries embody the notion that libraries are a continual community-building exercise. Libraries, by their very nature, are a gathering of people and ideas mixed together.

These are some of the ideas that I shared last year in May when I was asked to give a talk at TEDxLibrariansTO. My address there was dedicated to libraries and community events and I entitled my talk Organizing is what librarians do.  I will not make you - or me - suffer through the video of my talk, but I will re-read one passage from that day. It’s the call to action part (the genre of the TED talk requires such a call).

I am standing here to extend an invitation to all of you. I believe that we - our profession, our community, our country, our planet - need more collaborative events to bring us together. We need more opportunities to host conversations. We need more opportunities to change the conversation. And so my invitation that I am extending is not to a particular event - but a personal invitation to all of you to organize an event for others.

Now, In that one paragraph I tried to allude to several personal convictions. Today, I would like to articulate the specifics of what I was referring to that day: I believe we are obligated to conserve as much natural habitat and wildlife as possible, that we must continually strive to alleviate human suffering around the globe, and to do so, we need to be engaged in politics and we need to change politics. 

To these ends, I’ve participated in a number of very different public events. I describe most of these events in detail in my TEDx talk, so I’ll give a quick summary here: in the last five years, I’ve helped form a neighbourhood residents association, hosted a Jane’s Walk, and organized an ChangeCamp unconference. I’ve also given a Talk20 pecca kucha presentation - which requires 20 slides at 20 seconds each. That presentation ended up being good practice for a later Ignite talk I gave last year which demands 20 slides at 15 seconds each. And then there’s the TEDx talk that I’ve already mentioned which strictly forbids a talk to go a second over 18 minutes. My enthusiasm for strange speaking formats is one of the reasons why I think it’s pretty funny that what I’ve never done until today is just read a presentation. (* makes checkmark*)

By the way, the theme of TEDxLibrariansTO was “Librarians as Thought Leaders” and that particular tagline was largely misunderstood. There were those when they first heard the theme, thought that the speakers that day were being put forward as “thought leaders”.  And while that would be a personally flattering interpretation, I know through conversations I have had with the organizers of the event, that this was not their intention. The phrase of “librarians as thought leaders” was designed to challenge our all too common practice of sublimating our work as librarians by constantly to referring ourselves and our work  -- in our professional literature, to our own institutions, and to outsiders - as “The Library”.  

Now, that being said, one could also make the case that we don’t refer to our work -- “librarian and librarian staff work” as “The Library” enough. I like to refer to this particular debate as “The library is the building where the books are” versus “The library is the building where the librarian is”.  

This conversation is just one of many that form the current re-negotiating and re-understanding of the relationships between librarians, the space the of the library, the collections that they hold and are connected to, and the communities that are served by these things. It might be too soon to say this, but I believe we are seeing a great change in librarianship and I want to speak briefly about this change because the work that I’ve done and that I want to do makes the most sense in this framework.

The change in question is just a change in perspective, but it’s a powerful one. Instead of the library bringing the world to the community, there are those who are already thinking and working towards how we can bring our communities to the world. The library becomes the community publisher and an incubator for writer and artists. The library recognizes other literacies and embraces the haptic by hosting hackerspaces where technology is taken apart and examined critically before re-purposed. The library recognizes that communities need to spend time together before it can work together. It provides game space where people can spend time instead of money as they play and learn together.  Like the Internet, the library is increasingly seen as a means to communicate and engage instead of just being a locked platform for entertainment and product delivery. 

I mentioned Jane McGonigal before. She is a proponent of using games to fix reality, because games make us happy while reality is broken.  I love this quote of hers from Twitter and I think that it dovetails what something we sometimes forget about libraries. While libraries are  associated with content, libraries were and are created with larger goals in mind: self-education and self-improvement, improving community capacity, and embodying and supporting scholarly communication. The content of libraries isn’t the exciting factor for us. We don’t just exist just to provide information. We strive for literacy, or more accurately in these times, literacies, including  information literacy and transliteracy.

The Research for Citizenship Project by Lisa Sloniowski and Patti Ryan of York University is a great example of this re-interpretation of the library’s potential. So far, this project has involved hosting library based teach-ins and developing research guides dedicated to the Occupy Movement and another surrounding the issue of violence against women in conjunction with campus-based Montreal Massacre commemorative events. Many of you know Lisa Sloniowski from her time here at Leddy Library as Information Literacy Coordinator, when she drafted our Senate-approved Information Literacy Policy and initiated the curriculum integration with History Department and course integration with the English Department’s Composition class.  This collaborative project of hers and Patti’s involves information literacy work *in the library* where it emphasizes the research needs of students beyond the classroom where they are not just students but citizens. In doing so, their work facilitates knowledge sharing between students from different disciplines and different communities while making visible the critical work of academic libraries. 

Now, this all being said -  I’m no longer completely satisfied with my tagline of “public spaces need public events”. I think it served its purpose by providing a conceptual space for what I’ve done but I now I find it too vague and that it doesn’t really capture the stand that I want to take. I want to articulate goals.

I spoke of lenses before. My husband Greg has recently got new glasses with “progressive lenses” - which is a more marketable and more forgiving term for bifocals. When he first got them, he found the two focal strengths terribly disorienting. And I have to admit, that at this particular moment, I’m feeling very disorientated myself, especially with my work. I’ve started to think it’s because I have gotten older, I have started to develop another focus. I’m interested in the same subjects, but I find that I’m interested in them at a different scale.

I’m still interested in the work of citizens who come together to improve their communities and their government, but I have found that I’ve been increasingly interested in those ways in which they are using the Internet to facilitate that work. While I have been thinking towards using the library a place for civic engagement and as a support system for democracy,  I have been extending that line of thought to consider the library moving from a place where citizens can get information about and from their government, to a place where they can understand, engage and challenge that information. 

I’ve realized - by preparing for this presentation - that in many ways, what I’m interested in is this interface between the digital and the analog; the bridge between the digital commons and the public common space.  As a User-Experience Librarian, I am acutely aware of how important the interface is to an application and how it both demonstrates, embeds, and constrains a value-system.

Just the act of presenting the same content with a new interface can be a political act.  For example in 2008, Peter Rukavina spidered the PEI’s Corporate Register and indexed it so that anyone could search the database by company shareholder. He did because he was concerned about a developer’s plan to build a tunnel in his neighbourhood and he wanted to learn more about other corporations that might be involved and there was no way to search the database this way, even though the information was available. The provincial government did not look kindly to this enhancement and quickly took steps to prevent Peter’s database to make regular updates, effectively ending the service.

Peter Rukavina’s work can be considered part of a larger movement usually called “Open Government”.  This movement captures the emergence of non-partisan citizens coming together both online and in person, to find ways to make government more effective and responsive to all of us. It also can describe the emergence of a whole new category of non-profit organizations - organizations that I think have very interesting taglines. Some examples:

Code for America’s tagline is “a new kind of public service”. The longer version is “helping governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the web”

CrisisCommons’ is “we connect people to help those in need”. Longer version:  "connecting people, tools & resources to support crisis response"

Ushahidi: “we are a non-profit tech company that changes the way information flows in the world”.  Part of the longer version: “We build tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories."

Open government groups and organizations are dedicated to improving the wellbeing of all citizens, increasing community capacity, and reducing digital divides. Just like libraries.

And just as I’ve always been more inclined to host and participate in events rather than writing about how other people are hosting and participating in events, I find that I want to build up my computing skills so I can help code and connect the work of these organizations with that of libraries. In fact, I am beginning to think that I  would love to spend a year learning and doing just that.

Speaking of events, I very much appreciate this opportunity to speak to you today and want to thank Selinda Berg for taking the initiative and making this possible. And I thank you for attention. I hope not too much of what work I have described was new to you as I try to capture my ideas and my work in my blog New Jack Librarian as I go along.  If you have been reading my blog, you might be more aware of connections in my work and my interests that I’m not aware of. If so, I’d love to hear it because while this presentation has done much towards my goal of creating a new lens to see farther than I can today, the future is still a little blurry to me. 

Librarians versus city councillors

In the most July 2011 issue of WIRED there is a small article about the promise of open government data called "Why Open Data Alone is Not Enough". I've been following the Open Data movement from afar so most of the ideas in the article weren't new to me, but I will say that the stories of tragic, unintended consequences were.

Those involved in libraries might be interested in particular to its last paragraph:

The concern that open data may simply empower the empowered is not an argument against open data; it’s an argument against looking at open data as an end in itself. Massive data dumps and even friendly online government portals are insufficient. Ordinary people need to know what information is available, and they need the training to be conversant in it. And if people are to have anything more than theoretical access to the information, it needs to be easy and cheap to use. That means investing in the kinds of organizations doing outreach, advocacy, and education in the communities least familiar with the benefits of data transparency. If we want truly open government, we still have to do the hard work of addressing basic and stubborn inequalities. However freely it flows, the data alone isn’t enough.

Investing in the kinds of organizations doing outreach, advocacy, and education in the communities least familiar with the benefits of data transparency? Like, oh shall we say, libraries?

But we know that's not happening now. Not in our schools. Not in Toronto. Not where I live.

I'm still flummoxed whenever I sit and try to figure out why institutions dedicated to learning and our civic life are closing libraries in schools and neighbourhoods. I only have partial answers: our brand is books while the world watches video; the library is now associated with the lower rather than middle class, unionized workforces are vulnerable targets in our current political climate...

In light of these threats to our library systems, I'm working through this possible response:  public libraries should actively develop and promote services to specifically assist citizens in working with and against governments.

I say this because I think it goes almost without saying there is a definite need. Beyond Open Data, there are so many other instances when governments seem to exist only to further empower the already empowered. Indeed, it appears that our governments are purposefully designed to discourage mass participation - as illustrated in this short and recommended TEDx talk by Dave Meslin called The Antidote to Apathy.

While there is a need, this course of action would be with some risk. We could alienate some of our users who shy away from the conflict of politics. And if we were successful, we could end up competing for the same job as our elected city councillors: From Catherine Porter's essay "The boxer: A guide to getting in the ring with City bureaucracy" from the anthology, "Local motion: The Art of Civic Engagement in Toronto" :

Imagine a community activist resource centre on the ground floor of City hall. It would be a place where you could drop in, tell a librarian your idea and be directed towards resources, experts, case studies, maybe even professors at universities who are into just that stuff. Wouldn't that be great?

...'That's what a councillor is supposed to do,' Councillor Adam Vaughan said when I described my dream community activist resource centre to him. Why bureaucratize a system meant to help navigate bureaucracy? he asked. Good point. But not all councillors are like Vaughan, who prides himself on helping community builders make changes in his ward, and even community-minded councillors don't always like their communities ideas. What if you great scheme is a bike lane and your city councillor is on the record for saying anyone who rides a bike on a major street deserves to be hit by a car (i.e., Rob Ford)?

So, should libraries get into the government activist business? Should we be serving up classes on The Freedom of Information Act along with our government documents?

Well, I think the answer depends on what you think the answer to this next questions is: Who is going to protect our public libraries from cuts and closures? Your city councillors or your community?

Libraries and The Fear of Free

Let us speak plainly.

Ebooks are the proverbial iceberg on the horizon of libraries. If the library profession doesn't act appropriately, decisively and soon, libraries are screwed. 

We need to stop insisting that the value of the library is made by the subsidy of objects alone. At the moment, our primary value is that we provide free items that only cost the user the inconvenience of having to physically come to the library to pick up the item when that object is available. But when the price of the such items drop, then the relative cost of the inconvenience goes up to the point that paying $8 a month for Netflix becomes much more attractive than paying for parking twice a month at the public library across town.

Academic libraries are not immune to the forces of cost vs. convenience. There is a growing interest in Activity-Based Budgeting (ppt) or Incentive-based Budgeting at public universities (book) and this means that the campus library, once a shared resource, explicitly becomes a cost centre that must be paid for directly from the other faculties on campus. (The University of Toronto started using ABB since 2007 and two years later, their libraries started charging graduate students from other schools a substantial fee to access their collections). Now imagine a future scenario in which the largest commercial publishers decide to drop the cost per article to $5. Those faculties who will be able to do research without their campus library will advocate that they shouldn't have to subsidize the other faculties that do. Now, I'm not trying to make the case that this particular scenario is likely to occur and play out. I'm just trying to make the point that if the library is seen only as a subsidy, then our future will be controlled by those who set the cost and convenience.

Libraries can change course. It may even be easier than we think. But in order for us to do so, we need more hearts and minds to re-interpret our collective mission and express it in new ways through the communities we serve.

First, we need to stop making free the enemy of the library. 

My own personal epiphany of the matter came through a conversation at OLITA council about the reticence of many public libraries to promote free books from such ventures as Project Gutenberg. One observation was that libraries aren't interested in promoting resources that don't result in an increase in library circulation counts. The stakeholders of public libraries don't think highly of connecting users to free educational material on the Internet.

In the academic sphere, there are similar forces at play. Every time, I hear a librarian say that the library is the place to find "trusted" and "quality" information, I cringe because such thinking implicitly debases open access research because it's free to readers. Librarians don't want institutional repositories (campus research free for the world) at the expense of being able to buy commercial research for our campus.

Next, we need to start expressing the value of libraries through gate-counts (and website hit counts) rather than circulation counts. Not through books, but through book clubs. And writing circles. Letter press workshops. Wordpress bootcamps. Book digitization.

Then, we need to stop waiting for a commercial product to save our profession. It is maddening to see the extent that public libraries are willing to spend their energies castigating Overdrive and Harper-Collins for acting as a business rather than partner with the Internet Archive to lend ebooks. It is troubling to see academic libraries collectively spend millions of dollars on "Google-like" discovery layers and outright refuse to even consider simply using Google Scholar (or customizing their own Google Search Engines or taking on the responsibility to build their own digital library for themselves).

And my last recommendation (for the moment) is ask libraries to stop spending money licensing commercial products that they can never own (nor preserve for the future). Instead, libraries need to use, support and develop open source tools and collections - for ourselves and the communities that we serve. Again, there is resistance from many libraries to use free software. Ironically, if you ask them why not, these libraries will tell you that they don't feel that they can own a product if they don't pay for it. My own personal observation is that the ability to pay for a service contract from a dedicated developer or support company encourages organizations to use open source software.

I haven't read it myself, but I understand that Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" makes a convincing case that software should be thought of as a service and not as a product. As soon as my Sunday afternoon reference desk shift is over, I'm going to head upstairs and borrow this book because I think this is the same transition that libraries have to make.

There is still time.

The future of libraries is what we create in the present

Things have become clearer.

In the future, collection development will be opposite of what we do now. From the description of Dorothea Salo's upcoming talk at the 2011 Superconference:

Buying books and journals distinguishes libraries less and less, as published information becomes a commodity and open access makes inroads into scholarly communication. Perhaps this will turn collection development inside out! Instead of collecting from the vast information world for our patron base, we will collect unique materials from our patron base to preserve and present to the world. 

In the future, librarians will help people build their own libraries.

Students will search and browse through the online libraries of their professor and other experts, both living and passed, for research and learning materials. In the future they are likely to do this before searching google because this is the behaviour that they are exhibiting in the present.

When it came to course-related research, however, almost all of the respondents turned to course readings first—more than Google, and more than any other resource. The findings suggest that students in our study turned to course readings because the resource was inextricably tied to the course and the assignment, were at hand, and were sanctioned by the instructor (pdf).

We will come to see one large collection of items as the result of a quaint but ultimately unkind hoarding instinct. The mission is now to associate every item in a library building into a smaller and more meaningful collection of items. Each item in the library will have an explanation of why it was selected for the collection, just like a museum. With attention and selection, even the cast-offs of libraries have become valuable. Nothing will be allowed to be de-selected from the collection until it is digitally scanned first.

Some are inclined to believe that libraries will be places where people will create together.  I tend to think that the future is festivals. The library that first brought subject guides to the profession now  lead the way today with their event programming.

As we no longer live in a world of scarcity, librarians and other digital humanists will develop and use tools to help manage and understand information.

Library “discovery systems” and/or catalogs are designed to organize and provide access to the materials outlined above, but they need to do more. First of all, the majority of the profession’s acquisitions processes assume collections need to be paid for. With the increasing availability of truly free content on the Web, greater emphasis needs to be placed on harvesting content as opposed to purchasing or licensing it. Libraries are expected to build collections designed to stand the test of time. Brokering access to content through licensing agreements — one of the current trends in librarianship — will only last as long as the money lasts. Licensing content makes libraries look like cost centers and negates the definition of “collections”.

Second, library “discovery systems” and/or catalogs assume an environment of sacristy. They assume the amount of accessible, relevant data and information needed by students, teachers, and researchers is relatively small. Thus, a great deal of the profession’s efforts go into enabling people to find their particular needle in one particular haystack. In reality, current indexing technology makes the process of finding relavent materials trivial, almost intelligent. Implemented correctly, indexers return more content than most people need, and consequently they continue to drink from the proverbial fire hose...

What can we do to make these things come to fruition?

By the way...

When I talk about the future I really mean this afternoon.
When I talk about the present I really mean this morning.

Go to Go to Hellman

One of my favourite blogs is Eric Hellman's Go To Hellman. I've been recommending his recent post on understanding eBook messes to my colleagues and for you, well, I think you should read his Are Public Libraries in a Death Spiral?

In this essay, Eric Hellman laments how library directors are opting to reduce library hours when faced with budget cuts. In one painfully honest sentence:

A library that reduces its hours is just training its public to meet information needs elsewhere, and that public isn't going to rush back. 

The alternative that stops the death spiral?

The public library of the future has to stop being about collections and start being about helping people and communities.

I love the clarity of that call.

What if the libraries who are facing cuts, decided to slash book and DVD budgets instead of hours?  What if, instead of asking their community to act as political lobbyists on their behalf, these libraries asked community groups and individuals to donate their own collections into the community library? Ironically, by asking the community to help the library, connections between the community and the library could even be strengthened. Building a library builds community.

We need the community to help the library so that the library can help the community.

University of Michigan education professor David Cohen says that no education occurs until what he calls “inert” assets (books, teachers, rooms, curricula, rules, budgets, and so on) interact with each other and with students. Education is interaction. People in educational organizations, he says, often behave as if the inert assets were essential and the interactions expendable. They fight political wars over budgets, space, and personnel, and spend little time defending and perfecting the interactions among these assets through cooperation, communication, teamwork, and knowledge about students.

The above passage struck me as having a direct parallel to some of the recent changes I've noticed in academic librarianship. Putting it in broad strokes, we are going through a fundamental shift in libraries from being collection-focused to being user-focused. What I like about the above quotation is that spending time "perfecting the interactions among these assets through cooperation, communication, teamwork, and knowledge about students" sounds very much like what good Information Literacy practice aspires to be.

Its from an essay that calls for a fundamental organizational change in health care titled Escape Fire: Lessons for the Future of Health Care [pdf]. I read this essay because of this recommendation to do from Brett Bonfield on the ACRL blog. And I would second the recommendation. Its worth reading for its own merits relating to health care and for reminding us how important transparency and access to information can be in a person's life.