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October 20, 2005
Not so easy questions to answer
The Massachusetts Library Association offers a conference scholarship to first-time MLA conference attendees. I only just recently joined MLA, since my library pays for one membership a year, and being a part of my state library association is something I'd really like to pursue.
While MLA's annual conference is being folded into PLA next year in Boston, a mini conference on "21st Century Literacies" is being held in mid-November that sounds rather interesting, so I'm applying for the scholarship to see if I can get funding to go.
The application is pretty straight forward. Vitals, a signature from your supervisor verifying that if you receive funding you'll be given time off, and a <300-word statement on one of two topics:
- How are libraries adapting to life in the 21st century?
- What is the role of the library in promoting literacies?
How are libraries adapting to life in the 21st century?
My impulse response: slowly, but almost surely. Considering that I came from a technology background to librarianship, the transitions in librarianship when it comes to technology seem almost painfully slow, an observation based on my experience communicating with librarians (at conferences, meetings, via email), and reading articles. Add to the mix that perhaps half of the librarians I talk to about technology are techie like me, then the other half are really just getting their feet wet, and it's a relatively average assessment, so it seems somewhat fair.
In trying to follow this thought, I began thinking about the other half of library life: the patrons. I teach all of the technology workshops at my library, and I have students who I affectionately call "repeat offenders": folks who come to one class after the next on just about everything. I try to mix up my classes a bit, offering traditional workshops on using Word and unconventional Geek Out Don't Freak Out hands-on classes, so I get to see my patrons in a range of tech situations.
What I'm finding is that the digital divide in my library is somewhat like the red vs. blue state issues from the last election. There existed numbers of people in the blue states who believed it would be impossible for Bush to win. (I'm trying *really* hard not to blanket here and at the same time shoot for brevity, since this is just an example; call it fiction if it helps you see the example clearly.) Yet as numbers came in Election Day, the blue state believers saw just how many red states were really out there, and were amazed.
Now, political scandal and arguments aside (I will not argue politics, so please don't email me to do so), it's the issue of being so immersed in a culture that unless the opposite side is presented en force, you don't really see it. With my library patrons, my beloved repeat offenders are the red states. I live in the blue state of technology, where everyone at least knows about the latest and greatest, and assumes that, well, we're adopting, so it's a standard to the general populace, or at least a pretty broad audience. As it turns out, blue technology folks are a smaller number of people, but not so small as to be a minority, or insignificant.
Granted, it is less likely that a tech savvy person would attend a library workshop, so the exit polls here will be a bit skewed. At the same time, by this example alone, and taking into account my other anecdotal knowledge, libraries seem to be adopting tech at about the same pace as the more *average* patron. So, adoption isn't as slow as might be perceived by a techie like myself.
However, I do believe that libraries and librarians have an obligation to be ahead of the curve, which leads into the next question.
What is the role of the library in promoting literacies?
When MLA says "literacies" here, it's broad, including technology, information, and reading. The first day of the conference covers literacy (in the more traditional sense) and readers' advisory, while the focus of the second day is all technology.
It seems that recently libraries have been spending a lot of time playing catch up, but at one point, libraries were pioneers. I've heard so many stories about how the library at a college was the first to have a terminal with Internet access, or how librarians were performing command line searches. But somewhere libraries seemed to fall behind, and I can't quite figure out where that happened, so catch up has become the name of the game overall.
This is certainly not to discount libraries that have embraced technological advances on the cutting edge, or even on the bleeding edge. BPL just started offering downloads of audio books from home (certainly not the first or only library getting on that train), and Jenny Levine is a beacon of technological adoption for librarians. I could go on for posts and posts about it.
The unfortunate fact is that they are currently these examples are exceptions, and not the rule. The goal should be to get ahead of the curve and anticipate needs. Even our lowest common denominator patrons (not a slur, simply an assessment) are learning a new world of customization, portability, flexibility, and anticipation of needs, even if they don't understand all of it. And while libraries and librarians are slowly but surely making their way past the patron to get ahead instead of being reactionary, I don't know that anticipating needs is clearly recognized as the goal we should be working towards. And that's just the technology bit.
I'm not sure that I can speak to the issues of readers' advisory and literacy effectively. With hype from the Pew report on how people aren't reading as much, I can see the need for more effective outreach, even though I haven't actually experienced this phenomenon at my library. If you're a librarian in a library where book circulation is down (while DVD, VHS, CD and game circ remains high) or the book group seems to have died, I'd genuinely like to hear from you. Understanding it will enable me to think on how to help.
What do you think?
What are your answers to these questions? I'm new in the library world, so I'm sure there are tons of people with more experience who could take these queries to task and then some. I think bibliobloggers might feel like they try to answer these questions everyday, but I can at least say for myself that coming up with discrete answers was not as easy as I thought. I don't even think I quite have the answers yet. Even if you don't have a blog, email me and tell me what you're thinking.
October 20, 2005 9:40 AM