Libraries Build Communities

these book reviews are facinating to me. but i’m starting to wonder — to you? maybe that’s a sign that i should stop posting them? tell me what you think…

at any rate, here’s the third book review.

A library is more than a building that grants access to information. “Inside, Outside, and Online: Building Your Library Community” is a guide for librarians to adapting one’s library to the community around it. Every community is different, and therefore every library should be different to suit local needs. With advice on identifying the needs and desires of the communities, attracting the community, and more, “Inside, Outside, and Online” is of strong recommendation for any librarian who wants their library and their community to be successful - Library Bookwatch, James A. Cox Editor-in-Chief, September 2009.

i checked in with my ALA Editions representative and she said that the book was sent to Library Journal for potential review, but I have not seen it there yet - hoping it makes it, still. i am so grateful for this feedback. it’s really great to hear and gives me quite the boost for continuing the conversation, so, thank you.

This is exciting. Another positive book review, this one published in Reference & Research Book News (August 2009). It’s really great to hear that this reviewer recognizes (can I go so far as to say appreciates?) the “scholarly and historical context” that I provide for the community building elements you all told me about in our research. My thesis advisors from Sarah Lawrence College (where I got my MA in History) would be so proud…

Hill, a librarian and consultant, provides practical advice and inspiration for building the library community through identifying user needs and designing services to meet those needs, engaging communities with service selection and creation, and using new technologies. The book begins by setting the author’s research in context with broader scholarship, research, and trends. It examines ways in which both people and libraries have been impacted by recent developments in networks, technology, and community, and looks at the implications these developments have raised for library practice. Stressing the urgent need for libraries to consider their work thorough the lens of building community, the author outlines the components of community building, drawing on the experiences of libraries surveyed in her research, and sets each component in its historical and scholarly context. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

In other news, I’d like to thank Cheryl Napsha for her excellent suggestion (via email) about a refreshed direction for this blog. I’m thinking more about it, but I think she’s definitely onto something. I’ll leave it a mystery, for now, but it’s amazing what sorts of ideas and blessings come to you when you put questions out into the universe. I tell ya. Amazing.

Apparently, people are reading my book. Or at least skimming it. The way that I know this is that book reviews are starting to appear. Does anyone know about the business of LIS book reviews? How does your book get selected for a review? Within what time frame will they start to come out? Please, if you’re a seasoned LIS author and have any kind of scoop for me, please dish…

Thank goodness, the first one was very nice and pleasant and here is what it says: inspirational! valuable resource! encourages reading from cover to cover! must have!

Hill, Chrystie. Inside, Outside, and Online: Building Your Library Community. Chicago, American Library Association, 2009. 175p. index. $48.00pa.; $43.20pa. (ALA members). ISBN 13: 978-0-8389-0987-4.

Authored by the director of community services at WebJunction, this inspirational and research-based work outlines principles to support building a strong library community.  Drawing on her background as a writer, librarian, and community builder, Hill outlines the process of making the library the center of your community and thereby raising the perceived value of the library.  Separated into seven chapters, the work begins with people and networks, followed by libraries and communities.  The following chapters address the steps in the process: Assess, Deliver, Engage, Iterate, and Sustain.  Bringing examples and guiding questions, Hill engages the reader to seriously think about how to make their own library community emerge successfully inside the library, in the community the library serves, and in the online community.  References, additional resources, and an index make this a valuable resource, while the writing style encourages reading from cover to cover.  This work is a must have for any library wanting to reach out beyond their present users.—Sara Marcus

This appeared in ARBA online (American Reference Books Annual) in July 09. Thank you Sara Marcus for being so kind.

tonight I was playing around with WorldCat.org, which is something that’s not unusual for me on a Saturday evening, and wouldn’t you know it, my book is now cataloged there.  which made me think now isn’t that somethin’?

my editor was very kind and said my book was delightful. i hope she’s right. and i hope you think so too.

which leads me to the next logical announcement: i’m getting married. to a boy. and he’s from texas. and he’s delightful. and there it is.

and so, I will very not likely be at ALA this year.  our wedding plans will keep us at home the weekend of July 11. I’ll miss seeing many of you for our regular catch-ups, but I am also very much looking forward to re-directing some of my energies from the professional to the personal now that the book is on its way.

I have a flood of random high-level thinking that has been trapped inside my head, backed up behind the dam of finishing the book project. I’m going to take a quick break and just take the time to write it down. Who knows where this will go…

It started when @cindi (Cindi Trainor) published a tweet several weeks back about how a friend of hers had passed away this year. That friend’s flickr account was still online. She was grateful, she said, of the opportunity to be reminded of her friend every now and then. I responded that my sister, knowing she was dying, had methodically set about the task of deleting herself online before she died. Friendster: gone. My Space: gone. Website: gone.  I don’t think she was every on facebook, flickr, or other social networking sites, but she did delete herself from my online world far before she passed. In some way, it helped me prepare I think. Take, for example, the comment/testimonial she had left on my friendster account. “Chrystie is the first person I go to for any reason and on any matter,” she said, “for all of it.” When she deleted herself on friendster, her comment left my testimonial. I wish I had copied it. Printed it. Something. There are always regrets.

After Rosie died, I became somewhat obsessed with building her online presence back up. Memorials online included friend’s groups in facebook and flickr. People changed their avatars to include a photo of themselves with her; they published videos, pictures, stories, and all kinds of “this reminds me of Rosie” over the course of many months. I’m still getting some of that and posting it here. It’s all organized via delicious, flickr, and other memorial tags or sets. I lurk in facebook groups of strangers who have lost siblings and pour over memorials of the same ilk. Online condolences may be a metric of community health. Or, we just can’t help ourselves.

At dinner with Alane and George last month we talked about how our colleague Gary Houk still has a “presence” in our lives via his facebook profile. We wondered if it could be possible to request that dead people be added to a group, a social network of the deceased. So that you could go and visit them in their new context; so that we could mourn them more appropriately online. Last week I discovered the cemetery 2.0 website via attendees at #idea2008. It’s a little gadget that links to digital memorial from the site of your headstone - so that the deceased’s epitaph online is linked with the physical space. I wonder how these two ideas can mash up.

All this talk these last few weeks about publishing anonymously and how or whether the authenticated author and the text are connected, put together with the (culturally constructed?) impulse we have to associate them, has me wondering if it’s ever possible for us to allow an author, any author, to “die” and to also let their text/content be disembodied from them. If we were able to do so, would it change anything? In the case of the actual dead, probably not. But in the case of the living, the texts might be better off without their authors.

If this seems like a crazy turn for the LBC blog, perhaps it’s a sign of things to come. I do like to play in the theoretical space. It’s tangentially related to community building in that it considers the humanity of online content, and how important personal identity is/isn’t in the context of new media.

All said, I go back and forth between the extremes on this one. To write, or not to write. Is that the question?

Last week I sent a first and what I hope will be ‘final’ manuscript to my publisher. So far, so good. He says he likes the book, that ALA Editions wants to do a Janurary article about me and the book, and they’d like me to start thinking about “web extras”. They also asked for Rachel MacNeiley’s info so they could contact her about a program book. Go Rachel! That story just keeps getting air-time, but it’s because Rachel is such a kick-ass librarian. Back to the book: aside from this blog, it’s hard to imagine what else the web extras should contain. Perhaps links to everything digital that I mention in the book? Back to the kick-ass: listen to my outright expletive in my latest post on BlogJunction. Could I get in trouble for that?

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a second project. There’s the movers & shakers survey for LJ and I’m thinking about expanding this into a larger research project for all library professionals about innovation and institutional support for it. For those M&S’s who took the survey, or worked with me on it,  or are simply interested in the topic, would you like to expand this project with me?

Third, with a few other folks, I’ve started an oral history project called “Community First” about mentoring, community, and library leadership (through technology). The first few pieces of the project are published here: http://www.webjunction.org/community-first. Please visit the site and let us know what you think and/or if you’d like to join the effort. The folks at LITA National Forum seemed engaged in the topic but one audience member said to me “young librarians don’t need our permission to innovate. why do you care what we think? just do it!” I agree that sometimes that’s necessary, but the purpose of this project is to keep that from being necessary.

In other news, Francine Fialkoff took note of my commentary on the LJ+AL controversy in her editorial Librarians Too Annoyed. I couldn’t agree with her more.

What will Libraries Build Communities become now that the book upon which it was based is done? I’m not sure, but I’m currently reading Management Gurus and Blue Ocean Strategy. I’m hoping to avoid business school, but learn all I can about business practices on the side and on the job as I work my way towards some next step view of how community building and business practices can come together for libraries and for general social good.

See. Still lots to think about…

As promised, here’s a link to the article Meredith Farkas and I wrote about library journal “movers & shakers” and institutional support for their work and innovations. An excerpt:

What do organizations need to do to help innovation happen? We asked these Movers directly, and their answer was clear: continue to make time and resources available for professional development, thinking, and experimentation. They asked explicitly for listening, leadership, and collaboration from their institutions. They also wanted room and allowances for failure. “Some ideas die, and some don’t,” they said. “Identify resources for innovative test bed projects and let’s see ‘What if?’”

Most of this group longed for leadership, particularly in the area of risk. They saw encouraging “risk-taking” as part of their organization’s leadership role and called for an organizational culture that rewarded risk-takers “among all staff members.” “Model creativity and risk-taking as leaders,” said one, “reward risk-taking,” “provide admin support for risk-taking,” and “create a better sense of unity and vision,” said others. “Specifically address innovation and practices for producing innovation…make innovative work an organizational effort,” said another. “Show us how to handle failure.”

Other points of leadership came around clarity and communication. Movers & Shakers want to know what their organizations encourage and what they don’t. “Often it’s guesswork..,” said one. Several respondents wished for more trust, more conversation, and “just listening.”

And, finally, very simply, “make decisions faster.”

Thanks to the Movers who responded so candidly to our survey. Thanks to Meredith for working with me on it. Thanks to Marilyn Mason for encouraging us to write it. Thanks to Rebecca Miller for turning all of this into a single piece.

(Yay. An article that I co-wrote is on the cover of LJ.)

I’m at ALA in Anaheim this week and while I’m here I’m meeting with J. Michael Jeffers, the new editor-in-chief of ALA Editions about the book and about this project. I met Michael a few days ago over dinner with a large group and I’m very excited to get to know him a bit more and work with him towards (final) completion of my project.

In preparation for my meeting, I opened the the first chapter of my book in Google docs this morning and re-read that first chapter.

My very sincerest thanks today go out to Patrick Hogan for giving me the gumption to take that first *real* step towards completing this work after such a difficult winter and following.

Turns out he was right: I *am* almost finished.

my colleagues at WebJunction published this wonderful article about Rachel MacNeilly’s fabulous children’s programs at the Mission branch of the San Francisco Public Library. they kept my name on the article because I met Rachel last fall, was so impressed with her work in the branch, and blogged about it here back at that time. this article is based on that post.

let’s give credit where credit is due: rachel (herself), along with jennifer, emily, and tim at WebJunction made this wonderful success story much better than i could have done on my own. here’s to collaborative writing, and editing, and all other forms of contribution!

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!