Libraries Build Communities

Last month I had the pleasure of speaking at a local TEDx event - TEDxRainier. TEDx is a locally produced event that licenses the TED name and format. My talk was one of thirty - our event lasted a full day - and I spoke about how library services are shifting and evolving to meet new community needs; my hope was to inspire the audience to think with me, and with our colleagues in the library field, how libraries might continue to evolve in the 21st Century.

TEDx events are an *excellent* venue for raising awareness about libraries with the public; TEDx audiences are discerning in that they are likely already familiar with and have an interest in “ideas worth spreading”. My guess is that they come to the event to be inspired, build local networks, and start making connections and collaborations. I’ve found both my TEDx audiences very interested in how they can support and work with libraries. I still keep in touch with the many people I’ve met as a result, and still have a number of people to follow up with since this last one. I highly recommend working with local organizers to produce or speak at one of these in your area, if you haven’t already!

As a speaker at this event, I was so well supported. My speech coach was Elizabeth Coppinger and my designer was Kolin Pope. Each met with me several times to tighten up my content and the slides that accompanied. Dale Musselman, Kendra Morgan, and the volunteer staff at TEDx Rainier all watched rehearsals (one, or more!). It felt a bit like Phil Klein was my own personal cheerleader (though I know he was doing this for everyone) and the audience was both generous and genuine. My friends and mentors helped me develop and clarify my message all along the way. Huge thanks go to Marilyn Mason, Mike Crandall, Deborah Jacobs, Brian Bannon, Rolf Hapel, Marie Boleman, and the communications team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for their input and support throughout. I hope I’m not forgetting anyone.

Many of you know the story about me and my wardrobe malfunction at the last TEDx talk I did (them: no black! me: but that’s all i brought!). This time, the only thing that I wished I could change was the huge ball of cotton that suddenly appeared in my mouth about mid-way through my talk. Too bad that mic wasn’t connected to a camel-pack.

If you’d like to give me feedback on this talk - please visit my online survey - thank you!!

Tomorrow on WebJunction, we’re hosting John Emerson, an info-graphics professional from backspace.com, to talk about how the library field can get smarter about communicating what we know about our libraries, their services, and their impacts on individuals, families, and communities. More specifically, we’re talking about how to use data visualization for advocacy. We’re going to take a look at a few info graphics that are in development, and do some on the fly designing of some new graphics based on existing communications examples. I highly recommend this to anyone who’s interested in design, communications, and using them effectively to advocate for your library.

wow. this is neat!

I spent the last several days in a room with the strategic advisor network of the global libraries program at the gates foundation. It’s exhilarating to have the time and the space to sit with the collective intelligence of a dozen or so library professionals who are managing global library associations, building the most innovative public libraries in the world, advancing scholarship and practice, developing local economies with the public libraries they lead or support. Exhilarating, honestly, feels like it doesn’t do any of this justice.

By the end of our time together, the group came up with three priority suggestions for the team on where to invest resources in order to “build the global library field” (in my own words):

- human capital and leadership networks

- measuring impact and communicating value

- shared solutions and infrastructure

Implicit in all of these was the notion of “articulating a vision for the future of libraries” and a strong emphasis on “community engagement” and “partnerships” in doing so.

I left the meeting with a renewed, and still profound, sense that this team is the best positioned organization in the world to advance the field globally. They’ll do it with their continued deep engagement with stakeholders (our group is just one small way they engage inside the field) and their commitment to working with others to get the job(s) done. I also felt extremely grateful for my time there. I am so lucky to know every individual in this group; and am changed myself by my interactions with them whenever we have the chance to meet and exchange. I also left the meeting feeling that there should be concerted, coordinated effort to articulate the future of libraries - in context with how content and learning is changing. It certainly wasn’t missed in the discussion, but I would have traded “human capital” investments for more focus there.

It’s hard to prioritize, and really, working in any of these critical areas will do much to energize the institutional change we need now. If you were personally tasked with “building the global library field” - and you had significant resources to apply to this challenge - what would you do?

Last month I was in Dodge City, Kansas doing a talk for the southwest Kansas library system. I was so impressed with the library there because it was so welcoming and usable. A large room off to the side of the reference books and stacks even offered comfortable couches and chairs facing a big flat screen TV, presumably for weekly screenings of DWTS (although while I was there, I only saw CNN). The library community there was just as friendly. I had a great time walking through the stories and experiences of many of the librarians that I spoke with for the Inside, Outside, and Online project. I left feeling re-inspired by the unique ways they were meeting local community needs.

The story that especially stuck with me was the librarian who decided to take story-time to the park when she realized that spanish-speaking mothers were meeting there with their children every week. They didn’t originally feel comfortable with the library, but she’s built up a rapport with them over time, and now they come to the library frequently - though they still do story-time in the park!

A few weeks later, I was in Santa Fe doing a short update on OCLC and WebJunction for the state librarians at COSLA’s fall meeting. The thing that really struck me during this meeting was how far along we are now with our workforce development services. So many of the state librarians were talking about how these services had established real, lasting partnerships with other statewide agencies that they didn’t have before. The recession has really given us the opportunity to work differently, collaborate more effectively, at the state level, and for that I am grateful.

And then the following week, I attended the “state library capacity building” (#buildSLA) meeting at  the Gates Foundation and had a wonderful time serving as a table facilitator during the open discussions. I met a lot of new people from state libraries (since two people were invited from each, and I don’t often get to meet with library deputies or development directors). I walked away from this meeting with an even stronger sense that all libraries, at every level, need to seriously consider and articulate the future of libraries so that we can begin acting on the funding and governance changes that need to occur in order to get us there. The recession and its impact on libraries has brought new opportunities for partnerships and “doing things differently” but I don’t think it’s enough. We need to do more.

In my view, the future of libraries depends on community engagement. User-centered design and implementation of the library and all its services. There is also a thread on learning that can go from cradle to grave, be present for all of life’s “breaking points” (as Claudia Lux calls them), but there’s something about the term “lifelong learning” that gives me pause. Anyway, for two years now, I’ve been thinking about “community engagement” as the center-piece of effective library practice. Early this fall the suggestion came to me that “the future of libraries” was the most pressing topic for public libraries in the US. Over the travels of my last several months, consideration of the future of libraries, and whether or not community engagement techniques can help us prototype the library of the future, has become top of mind for me.

I touch on this a bit in my TEDxRainier talk on Saturday. I’ll post the script and slides here for anyone who is interested; of course, the video will be available eventually for those who don’t make it to the big day (or the live stream online).

Do you know of any libraries that are prototyping their future facilities, services, and content (incl. formats) directly with their users? What techniques are they using? Any results yet? I’d like to build an aggregate prototype of all the great stories we come up with. And with that I’ll say good night. If I keep picking and talking, I might find myself writing another book.

Here I am again. There is so much to say in order to catch you up on things that I am going to instead say “a lot has happened” and “I look forward to being here again.” That will have to suffice for now.

Next Monday, I will have the honor and pleasure of facilitating a workshop at Aarhus Public Library’s Next Library conference. Our panel has six participants from five countries, two of them presenting virtually. We’re using a world cafe model to develop a dialog around building library communities locally. I am very excited about it and can’t wait to share some of my work with this audience. Here are my slides (re-using content that you have seen before). Thanks to my colleague Irina for her work on the title slide.

See you in Aarhus!

I’ve been gearing up for a new baby - and will be on maternity leave through early March 2011. You’ll still find shorter updates on twitter, flickr, and facebook until I’m back to more regular blogging.

My most recent presentation (and likely the last for a little while!) at PNLA / WLA this summer is now on sharepoint - enjoy!

My book was reviewed in 4/15 issue of LJ, available online here:

I searched for my book title in WorldCat today and learned Gwen M Gregory reviewed my book in Information Today back in October. However did I miss that!? Here’s an excerpt:

[Hill's] writing and her professional activities reflect her passion for the social and community aspects of libraries. While she is sophisticated in her knowledge of technology, she always emphasizes that it is a means to an end. It isn’t the be-all and end-all of libraries, and we shouldn’t get stuck there. “[L]ibrary staff seemed more concerned with fixing their print- ers and arguing about why users didn’t find us as relevant as Google than they were with imagining the incredible op- portunity before us: to lead and facilitate the content creation and discourse of our communities and constituents,” she writes.

***

So what do we get from all this? Libraries are a valuable social commodity and provide social links. If we think we are just for sitting quietly and reading books, we will cease to exist before too long. If we jump into the community mix, get out there, and show off what we do, our communities will benefit and will appreciate our services. Best of all, we will be doing something that really matters.

Hill makes a great case for an expanded role for librarians. We can build social capital within our communities and grow to become an even more important part of the social network. This goes for all types of libraries. This book will inspire you to think hard about the role that your library now plays and where it may stand in a few years.

Thank you, Gwen. I appreciate your full synopsis of the work in your review. What took me a while to get down under a few hundred pages, you’ve summed up perfectly in just one! I hope that even as the work gets “dated” from the years we spent in the rush of user-generated content, it will still be relevant to library staff thinking about how we can evolve into new relevance with our users.

Update: I was going to be in a meeting this morning (for work) with representatives from the Department of Labor and IMLS - talking about how libraries and workforce agencies can work together to meet the needs of unemployed. But the meeting was canceled due to all that weather out in DC. As lead up to the meeting, this info below was included. I’ll let you know if I find out about other resources along these lines.

The U.S. Department of Labor announced the results of its Tools for America’s Job Seekers Challenge last week. Top-rated sites in each of 6 categories – general job boards, niche tools, career tools, career exploration tools, web 2.0 and “other” – are now available at www.careeronestop.org/jobseekertools.

From their press release: The job tools postings are the culmination of an eight-week effort to offer members of the public an opportunity to weigh in on their favorite career sites and to provide the sites themselves with a chance to raise awareness about the tools they offer. Government agencies, private companies, nonprofit organizations and many other entities came together to make the project a success. An alphabetical list of all sites will be available on www.careeronestop.org in the coming weeks.

Looks like a tool that may be useful for libraries working with patrons who are just jumping into the online job site world. Let us know if you find this (or other resources) helpful as you’re working to connect the unemployed in your library.