Libraries Build Communities

connect

image: ecstaticist
tagged by: helene
tagging: blogjunction

I am very, very excited to have been invited to keynote the Country Public Libraries Association of New South Wales‘ Annual Conference the last week of July and then address the State Library of New South Wales the first week of August.

The conference theme is “The Power of Place” and I’ll be speaking about community building and libraries, and the connections between all our community building efforts, whether they are “inside, outside, or online” (as they say). Enormous thanks to Pam and Deanne for inviting me, and for working with me thus far on settling all the related details. I am very honored to visit Australia, to learn more about libraries there, and to share what I’ve been learning about community building and libraries in my work on the topic thus far.

Oooo. I just can’t wait! Thank you!

Many thanks to everyone again for the love in email, twitter, facebook, and comments here on the blog. Rose’s service will be held from 2 - 5pm Saturday April 5 in the Washington Park Arboretum in Seattle. Due to their proximity to the memorial date, I’ve decided not to attend PLA nor CIL this year. I still may make it out to a few spring conferences, and if I do, I’ll let you know. I definitely hope to be back in the swing, and see many of you, at ALA in California this summer. For details on the memorial … Read more »

it has only been a few weeks since i last wrote. still, i opened my computer this morning and you wouldn’t believe the dust. as i type the number keys are still covered; i moved the screen away from the light so that i wouldn’t see the dust there. getting up and finding something to clean seemed like it might distract me from my impulse to get online and type something. i figure it’s a good feeling and it’s coming at about the right time.

‘feel this’ my sister Rose says to me one day in the fall of 1998, pointing to the top of her right breast. i’ll never forget the sheer terror of that moment. ‘you need to have that checked out,’ i say to her, ‘that’s not right’. turns out it wasn’t. within the month rose was diagnosed with moderately differentiated, infiltrating, adenocarcinoma, a fancy word for a relentless and chaotic form of breast cancer. she was 21; i was 24.over the next ten years Rose traveled to something like fifteen countries, often times against great physical odds, like lungs so filled with fluid that she must be wheeled from international terminal to cab and then to hospital. in addition to travel, she completed a master of fine arts in performance art and performed in international festivals on three continents. she saved skin, blood, teeth, nails, and all manner of hospital attire, documentation, and gadgets for use in her powerful performances about body, self, and illness. just after, she completed a second masters in counseling psychology, again overcoming great physical odds in order to attend courses and defend her final thesis. two years ago she fell in love and married; making future plans for work, marriage, and family life. under the gravest duress and the most challenging of circumstance, she made her plans and kept her spirit.

Read more »

i’m taking a break from finishing the book and from the blog due to illness in my family. many of you know of my sister Rosie and her experience with breast cancer over the last ten years; she started hospice this week and i’m breaking from work, travel, projects, and etc. in order to spend time with her, our family and friends. thanks already for your many kind thoughts and prayers. i hope to be back soon to libraryland - online and otherwise.

just a quick note to say happy thanksgiving - i am very grateful to everyone who talks with me about the LBC project on this site, via email, at conference meetups and speaking gigs, through library site visits, and/or answered online surveys.

your willingness to share how you’re building community through libraries is making this work possible. (and i can comfortably say that it is now indeed a ‘work’!) thank you and happy holidays!

My last fall trip is just now over. I’ve been sitting in my house for, I don’t know, twenty minutes or so, and I’m very happy to report that the trip and the talk went very well. For the first time I tried pulling together some of the ideas and research for the LBC project into a talk about the community building project at WebJunction - the two are obviously very connected for me but not necessarily for everyone - but guess what? it worked! i was relieved and pleased that it seemed to be the right mix of community building for library staff and community building for patrons. Viola! connections made!

I left out the Putnam stuff and instead focused on our community building roots and how in-person community building and online community building share the same principles and practice; then I connected what our patrons are doing with web2.0 tools to what library staff are doing with the same, and with projects like WJ.

I was a little nervous about the mix, with only one hour for a joint presentation with my co-presenter, Mala, the team lead for WebJunction Arizona, but at the end of it all, one of my audience members come up and says something like: thank you for your overview of social networking and what it means for WebJunction; now I understand why this stuff is important. I work in a rural library and I’m trying to help my community understand how to use this stuff and understand what it’s all about; this was really helpful.

Does it really get more libraryland luscious than that? Maybe. I’ll be here for it if it does. I only posted a few pictures from this very short visit, but you’ll find them here. Many, many thanks to the organizers of AzLA for having me. I had a great time and it was wonderful meeting and talking with so many of you and your library staff in Arizona.
(reposted on BlogJunction)

(reposting from elsewhere)
LJ apparently had a server mishap last week and all Mover & Shaker nominations input before November 5 were l.o.s.t. So, please, if you nominated someone for Mover & Shaker this year, you’ll have to go back and do it again.

This from Marylaine Block (to George by email posted here):
We are assured that the electronic nomination form is working, but if you prefer, you can supply all the information requested on the form and either fax it to 646-746-6734, or send it in an e-mail to Francine Fialkoff. The deadline has been extended to November 28.

So sorry to LJ - I hope you have a good turn out of do-overs!

I presented on “Blending In: librarians in our networked world” with libraryman yesterday morning at IL2007, full documentation here and presentation here. We had a great time - those of you who heard me speak at MLC earlier this month will recognize some of the ideas (and slides), as I drew out a lot of the research I’ve been doing for the book in this presentation as well. Michael Porter followed my part of the talk with a whirlwind tour of libraries doing really amazing things on the web to “blend in” to a networked community there; I concluded our program with an example that I just uncovered last week during my “writers retreat” and visit to the Bay area:

Rachel MacNeilly in the Children’s Services manager at the Mission Branch of the San Francisco Public Library. She runs a bilingual Children’s Storytime - now up to five times a week - with an average of 110 people in attendance every time. “I live in this neighborhood,” says Rachel to me during my visit to her library last week, “these people can’t hide from me for long. They WILL come to my storytime.” Over the course of less than one year, Rachel has changed children’s programming from a single session once a week with an average of 45 attendees to multiple programs per week and almost three times the attendees. How did she do it?

First, she did some weeding of the Spanish language collection in her library. “I want this place to look like Nordstrom, NOT the Nordstrom Rack,” she beams! And it works, with the following principles at play: she doesn’t have any Spanish children’s materials in the library that are “older than me;” second, she doesn’t have any books that “look junky. I got rid of everything that’s older than me and everything that looked awful,” Rachel says, and the funny thing is “with less on the shelves, there’s less on the shelves,” (meaning that people check things out more). Circulation has almost doubled, but it’s still not up to where she’d like it to be; she’d has aggressive goals for upping her circ stats in the coming year, stats that match what she’s been able to do with their program stats. “I love stats,” Rachel says, as an aside, “you can think you’re changing things, but stats let you know if you really are.”

Rachel’s impact on the programming attendance in her library is directly related to the facts that they’re bilingual, offered at appropriate times of day for their intended audiences, and have benefited from a complete and recent overhaul of the content. It’s more age appropriate, and more focused on touch and movement; “I also try to throw something in there for the caregivers,” says Rachel, every hour I do a program I give them a development tip that I think they find really helpful.

I visited one of Rachel’s story hours and was awestruck by the energy and emotion in the fully packed, standing-room-only one hour bilingual program. I was very proud to be a small part, as a fellow librarian, of the community building work that she’s doing in her neighborhood.

When I asked her (completely as an aside) about online community building, Rachel (to my sheer, absolute joy and delight) told me that she’s partnering with volunteers from a neighborhood high school to create a MySpace page for her branch. The new page (not complete yet, stay tuned) will “definitely be bilingual, just like our programs” where you can access all the storytime content, songs, and calendar of events in both English and Spanish. “My people are busy,” says Rachel, “they don’t have time to click through the SFPL website and then only find English once they get to my page.” I’ll post their page here as soon as I have a link to it!

When I asked Rachel what makes her programs and services so successful, especially in so short a time, she said very simply “My people ask me for what they need, and I just try to get it for them.” Funny thing, right? Patrons are people, and she tries to get them what they need.

Go Rachel!! You’re a rockstar!!