Opening Up a Can of Libraries on All the World's Problems

I’ve been thinking a lot about the world’s big problems lately.  Fracking poisoning our water supply, pesticide cocktails killing off the bees, climate change, privacy and the government’s reach (and the public’s inability to adequately gauge appropriate levels of either)--it’s all so overwhelming.  I believe that staying informed and voicing our opinions on these issues can help, but it’s a minor kind of help at best, a lot of the time.

So I like to go looking for domains in which the efforts of the little people can have outsized positive consequences. Luckily, my own lovely librarianship is one where small-scale and grassroots efforts are doing incredible things for communities, the country and the world by bridging access gaps, addressing special needs, promoting literacy and so much more.  Here are just a few of my favorite examples of such efforts--I hope they brighten your occasional gloomy outlook!

• The Volunteer Librarian Brigade: This radical, grassroots effort based in New York City brings the ‘roving librarian’ concept to a whole new, and necessary, level.  It doesn’t occur to many people out on the street to go to a library to get help, so these folks bring the library to the streets.  Professional librarians train volunteers in the basics of reference and research work, then they all head out to make a difference.  If you’re in the New York area, consider joining up!
• Librarians Build Communities: In the same wheelhouse, this is a web-based service pairing librarians (and their skills) with communities and organizations in need.  It’s another kind of roving, this time focused on the things librarians do that are not necessarily book-oriented.  Why haven’t we been doing this for decades?
• The Internet Public Library: Another go-where-they-are entry, this website brings reference services to the masses over the non-threatening medium of the Internet--and as a bonus, it provides real-world experience for LIS students, which is always great (and somewhat rare!).  Search their site or submit a query, and dedicated (or dictated) volunteers will soon have a detailed answer for you.  It’s hosted by Drexel University’s College of Information Science and Technology, so you can trust their quality-control to have some cred.
• Little Free Library: As far as i’m concerned, this one is almost venerable at this point--not because of age, but because of the impact it’s made during its existence.  So simple, so good.  The mini libraries built with the support of the folks running this show are cute, artsy, and/or surreal in form, and they’re popping up all over--taking ‘take a book, leave a book’ up a level or twelve.
• ALA Think Tank: Social media drives this community that underscores the quirky, funny, and unabashedly rough-hewn side of librarianship.  This group is an incubator for great ideas and great librarians.
• LibraryReads: This is a brand-new book recommendation initiative.  It’s extremely open--any employed public librarian will be able to contribute recommendations and reviews once the service launches in the fall.  Sure, it’s a major undertaking with a snazzy website and everything, but by its nature this kind of reader’s advisory has a very personal touch.  And of course, pulling book recommendation out of the hands of the publishers’ echo chamber and the rarefied ivory tower of the critics can only be a good thing for readers!
• Libraries Changed My Life tumblr: A great public outreach tool.  What better way to pump up the public than by asking them to share their own beautiful bibliotecky memories?  The posts so far are funny, sweet and throat-lump inducing.  And it’s a tumblr blog, which is just so full of win right now, to use the argot of the day.
• Queer For Books: An individual effort that fills a serious gap, this evolved from an LIS student project into what is, in my ever so highly qualified opinion, the go-to resource for LGBTQ resources and knowledge for the information professional.  LGBTQ patrons tend to languish on the underserved side of public institutions, due to the population’s innate tendency toward invisibility and a lack of awareness of those knowledge gaps on the part of non-LGBTQ professionals.  This fills those gaps most admirably for librarians.  Big kudos to my web-friend Sami Gardner for building this.  If my readers do nothing else with my blog, please put this site in your toolbox!
• The librarian who banned a book: I love this guy and what he did and why he did it.  He made a stir over what is often an ossified  issue that is often condemned by rote, or worse, ignored entirely.  Of course we all mostly oppose book banning, but until it happens in our community, we are rarely moved to agitate for the right of freedom of expression and inquiry.  If that sounds gloomy for this hope-oriented post, take a page from DiMarco and...ban a book at your library?  Never thought I’d be saying that...
• Librarians LOUD: Okay, so this might be a little bit of tooting my own horn. I was part of a group of library students at the University at Buffalo who staged this three-day event last year, which included a game-filled festival, lively panels, an information booth, visible read-outs around campus, and a rally outside the university president’s office building.  The goal?  To raise awareness that we exist, that we have voices, that yes, you need a  master’s degree to be a librarian.  We hoped to get students and faculty talking about those noisy, kooky kids with the silly signs out on the pavement--and we succeeded.  Now we’re planning Librarians LOUD 2--Louder and Librarian-er! (That’s not what we’re calling it.)  This year, we’re hoping to get other schools and libraries involved, too.  Wanna be loud with us?  Email me at andalex34@gmail.com!

The point of all of these examples is that everything librarians touch turns to gold.  Okay, maybe not gold, but we do a lot of things to make a lot of things better--our patrons’ lives, their communities, and our own profession.  Radical, individual, and/or grassroots expressions of the knowledge, power and importance of librarianship help move society forward.

That makes me feel better.

Foster the Best Impulses

I visited friends over the weekend in Ithaca; one of them is staying there to work for the summer, and it was the first geographic opportunity for four of us, friends since high school, to all get together in the same place at the same time in many years.  It was a wonderful reunion, but I won’t get into all the boy-watching debauchery here.

The three of us who were left on Saturday found ourselves armed with a set of ridiculous photo-booth pictures and decided we had to arts-and-crafts them into commemorative picture frames.  Cue the trip to the pharmacy to make copies and to Bed, Bath & Beyond to tiredly heckle a sweet assistant manager named Isaac (we love you, Isaac) and buy matching frames, followed by a frantic slice and dice until we had three charming keepsakes for our walls.

One of my friends mentioned that if we hadn’t all been together to put this together, it would likely have stayed on her to-do pile for months, if not forever.  The rest of us agreed.  It didn’t matter whether we had all the supplies and the best will in the world; it would get pushed off, superseded, a folder in the good intentions file.

But together, we had the positive pressure of community, the immediacy provided by shared experience, to spur us to complete our task.  I use the word ‘task,’ but it’s a pleasure--the first thing many of us decide is not important enough to take up space in our busy lives--and a pleasure heightened by working on it together.

Libraries can provide that community and that immediacy, spurring patrons to get down to brass tacks on those feel-good projects right away.  Whether the library budget can sustain the collection of art supplies or participants have to bring their own, there is no price for those primary, invaluable  commodities.  

Market your library as the place for get-togethers of all types to end up.  It could be a small reunion like the one I had this weekend, or it could be the bachelorette party, the retirement gala, the high school reunion.  Instead of leaving the commemoration or memorializing to one person or a committee, let it be the capstone of the group fun.  Leverage the sense of community and immediacy into a way to keep your community’s to do lists uncluttered and happy!

And provide that feeling for those who aren’t part of some big group or formal event.  Set a table aside for patrons to gather and foster a feeling of community even among strangers.  These resources, these ineffable feelings that occasionally drive us, need not be rigidly situational.  Libraries are the perfect place to set up the conditions for the community to thrive creatively, so foster those impulses while they’re hot and stoke them when they’re cool!

There's too much sad and discouraging news today to do a blog post--including people's reactions to some of that sad and discouraging news.

I'm off on a little trip this week, but I'll try to find time to post something more substantial at some point.

It's a Point of Contact: The Importance of ALA Annual

Looking forward to ALA, I thought I would have a ton to say about it on my blog.  And I do--I just don’t want to provide a pointless rehash of the sessions I attended and vague descriptions of the people I met.  I have to keep my audience in mind--a habit I am striving for--and that means providing entertaining relevance.  And maybe a little ranting.  

 

I suppose that general impressions of such a major event  are not to be despised, since I’m a first time attendee and a major conference is always quite the bouleversement.  But I don’t want eyes to glaze at this, of all times.  Because if there was ever a time for you to be excited about the fact that I’m a librarian, it’s now.

ALA taught me that I’m going to take my MLS and smash everything.  Based solely on the sessions that I attended, I am going to integrate immigrants into my community, rescue homeless LGBTQ teens, turn 20-somethings’ library ‘mehs’ into ‘MMMMs!’, and transmit the love of truth and justice down through the generations in delicious four-color funnybook format.  I’m going to schmooze charmingly, make great professional friends, speak French as if I’ve been doing it every day, and stare Cory Doctorow right in the mean mean FACE every freaking day!

I sound like I’m joking.  I’m not.  As far as ALA would have me believe, I am capable of all these things.  ALA took one set of PLA jumper cables, set me in a puddle of LGBT Roundtable, and turned on the overly-loud-and-earnest Brandon Sanderson juice.  And I met Gene Luen Yang!  ALA completed my life.

I know this euphoria will wear off, but I think that periodic jolts of this energy will keep me flying through my career.  I want to live up to the expectation those librarians, newbie and veteran, up on the stages and panels lit in me.  It doesn’t even look that hard to BE them!  I can do that!  I can talk for 15 minutes about Librarians LOUD!  I can!

Look, I had an amazing time.  I need to thank my three great library-buddies, Esther Jackson, Natalie Bennett and Bryan Sajecki.  I wouldn’t have even been able to go if they hadn’t invited me to tag along with them.  The car ride was hilarious.  Our shared hostel room was chill.  Wandering around Lincoln Park was lovely.  And knowing, even when we split up to go to the various sessions that interested each of us, that we’d be reuniting in a few hours to chatter about what we learned and who we saw and how dumb some things were and what we wanted for dinner...well, that took the whole thing beyond level of ‘professional development.’  Thank you for sharing it all with me.

I also really have to say that it’s not as overwhelming as everyone makes it out to be, this big conference.  Maybe it’s just me and my experience with comic-cons and weekends at Times Square, but the people-crush stress actually struck me as rather mild--moderate at most.  If I can offer any tips to feel merely whelmed: familiarize yourself with the layout of the venue; be aware of where you’re going and when you have to be there; and remain flexible to avoid stress if things don’t work out as you planned.  Sometimes it’s good to deviate from the schedule if opportunities to network or schmooze come up.

In fact, I only got stressed out on the occasions when I was forced to deviate from my schedule against my will due to transit issues, and this brings me to my major gripe with ALA as an organization: they seem not to have given any serious consideration to the needs of lower-income attendees such as little old moi.  My main evidence is the utter lack of transit support for anyone who might have chosen to stay outside of the handful of high-priced hotels ALA recommended for our use.  My friends and I chose to trade off proximity for the economic benefit of staying in an affordable hostel in the Lincoln Park area, only to find it very difficult to navigate to the conference on the first morning we tried; even after we had it all figured out, the trip took about an hour, and we were spending significant amounts of mental energy trying to piece together alternate routes that might cut the commute down.  

Look, I know you can’t provide every attendee with curbside limo service at a thing like this.  But some nod in our general direction would have been appreciated--like a warning among the first-timer material that the commute from outside the immediate city core will take an inordinate amount of time, or an insert among the other transportation materials about the closure of a key metro station along the way.  (That would have saved us one mega venue-overshoot, but to be fair, I guess, the city of Chicago didn’t do a great job making that clear either.)  And would it be that onerous an undertaking to poll prospective attendees on their intended accommodations and say, “Gee, if these guys are choosing to stay somewhere that cheap, maybe we should spare them a little time and money by providing a shuttle to that area”?  Perhaps more attendees would then choose to stay in the littler, cooler neighborhoods of a given city, better spreading the librarian love around our conference site.  (Every bartender and drunk bystander we informed of our profession was endlessly fascinated.  I quite enjoy the “You need a master’s degree for that?!” conversation.)

It wasn’t so bad, in the end, and I love public transit, but I’m just kind of offended that our economic bracket was so low on the list of concerns.

If at all possible, go with friends.  Look up buddies from your LIS program if you’re not particularly close to current co-workers.  Yeah, it helps keep costs down, but that’s the smallest part of it.  My friends and I had such a wonderful time; we built in-jokes, proudly represented our field, fed off each other’s excitement from good sessions and relieved each other’s boredom from bad ones...I’ve already covered this territory, but it bore repeating.  Don’t go alone!

Now, besides recounting my trials and triumphs at this year’s conference, I would like to talk about the importance of ALA.  I’m very aware that what I’m about to write is pretty touchy-feely, maybe naive, and definitely pro-status quo.  There are lots of things wrong with ALA, and groups like ALA Think Tank on Facebook do a good job of articulating them and providing alternate voices, a chorus of which I hope to be a part; but I also happen to think that the annual conference is where the best of ALA comes out.

So...what is the best of ALA, its importance?  What does it reach beyond its bureaucracy and occasionally out-of-touch policies?  The excitement, the ideas, the sharing, the opportunities for expression. It’s a point of contact, where librarians of all shapes and sizes bump up against each other and where intellectual osmosis works its wonders.  It’s the availability of easily copycatted ideas, because when it comes to making our libraries work, there’s no such thing as plagiarism--or at least we’re all more willing to cite our sources than the average high school paper-writer.

It’s a point of contact, again.  The engaging that members of our profession do with another city each year, making a positive impression on a population--the engaging of the profession as a body with a city as a being.  Actually I would like to see this done more self-consciously in future.  Let’s paint Las Vegas librarian.  I don’t want a single gambler to be unaware of what’s going on around their slot machines next June.

Jiff--the world's most photogenic dog!

It’s a point of contact, for small photogenic dogs and brash cynical hipster chicks and a forlorn representative of the National Library of Qatar and a transitioning MTF teen and blue-collar Muzzy executives and a self-published Beowulf comic creator and OA aficionados and Snowden apologists and an interactive robot and and and and and...

ALA, I hope to join you in painting Las Vegas librarian next year.

Lincoln Park, you've been painted librarian.

Boarding Pass, episode 2: The Hobbit card game

For this second entry in my Boarding Pass series, I’m inaugurating a little faceted analysis of the games reviewed.  These represent my initial effort at breaking down some key facts about every game, developed after not a little bit of research through sources like Board Game Geek and by playing and playing and thinking and playing.  I want to capture both the traditional game-y info that people would want to know for the purposes of actually playing, as well as the more--dare I say--artistic considerations, such as board games’ very own versions of genre and medium.  Am I missing anything key?  Is something I have included superfluous?  Are any of those listed here unclear in purpose to you? Please do let me know! Now, on to the post...

• Game medium: Card game
• Game genre: Unknown! Any thoughts?*
• Context genre: High fantasy (Tolkien’s Middle-Earth and The Hobbit)
• Mechanic type(s): Trick-taking
• Player role: Prosaic (literary characters)
• Number of players: 2-5
• Time for setup: Quick
• Time for play: 10 minutes - infinity

*Two typical genres listed by some experts are Ameritrash--super complex, super thematic games--and wargames, which are somewhat self explanatory.  I’m open to making up new genres!  What could we call subtle, mildly thematic, engaging yet low-key gameslike this?  British-style Games? ;-)

Picture from http://news.mymiddleearth.com/

Overview

In a game that expands and contracts for the number of players around the table, the forces of light and shadow face off in a war that brings together orcs, elves, spiders, wargs and all the rest of the races of Middle-Earth.  A simple bid and trick mechanic dressed up in the trappings of The Hobbit makes for an engaging entree into themed gaming.

Play as Thorin, Bilbo and Gandalf on the side of goodness or as Smaug and Bolg from the seedier side of Tolkiana.  Each card has a value, and the higher bid wins the trick--allowing the player to assign damage, health, or bonus draws where it will be most helpful to his cause, whether pure or nefarious.

My thoughts

This game is simple, but it borders on addictive.  It was my first experience with the trick-taking mechanic, and The Hobbit card game demonstrates that it is effective outside the realm of faux-economics or casino lite games; it’s simply a fast-moving inroad to a lot of subtle strategy.  It’s not so easy as to just always assign damage to your foe and health to yourself, as health for one faction doubles as damage for the other, and vice versa; you have to weigh your strikes against the hits you think you can sustain safely.

Things are nicely balanced and play out in such a way that each faction, and even each character, approaches the game in a different way.  Smaug is a powerhouse, absorbing loads of damage while dishing out even more, as well as discarding threats to himself and help for his foes.  The good guys, meanwhile, perhaps in token of their more benevolent nature, are unable to discard at all, leading to situations where you have no choice but to hurt yourself or help your enemy.  This makes for interesting choices and delicate expressions of power: you might choose to lose a trick now and then rather inflict pain on yourself (even though, yeah, I know, the baddies will just do it to you then, but hey, there’s a psychological factor here).

There really isn’t too, too much here that screams “Hobbit!” in the actual gameplay; yeah, each character’s unique rules for disposing of won tricks sort of broadly reflect their literary personalities, but not in any kind of quintessential way.  The theme is light but effective enough in mirroring the literary modus operandi of the characters to lend a bit of impetus to in-game choices.  What really marries the theme into the game is the beautiful artwork on each card, delightfully reminiscent of the classic art in the Middle-Earth canon.  It makes perfect sense, for example, that “Dragonfire” would be a devastating attack, so placing it as a high-value card depicting Smaug’s desolation (sorry) makes great sense.

If you’re familiar with the card game Crazy Eights, this is essentially a souped-up version of that.  It satisfies and it’s compulsive.  It’s not the most complex marriage of theme and mechanic, but it’s a good starter game for fantasy enthusiasts interested in getting into the gaming artform.

Library Use

• Good simple game for beginners; neither too long nor too quick
• Opportunity to connect novice players to the more experienced who can talk them through the rules
• Illustrates a mild but effective marriage of theme and mechanics to enhance gameplay--works to illustrate this principle of modern gaming to novices
• With the second of three Hobbit movies due this holiday season, this game might provide extra pull to your library for game programming!

Over-involved

It's just about a week until that holiest of weekends, the American Library Association Annual Conference.  This year it will be held in Chicago, Illinois (for fun and profit) and, as I believe I mentioned in my inaugural post, I'll be attending with three other freshly-hatched librarians from the UB LIS program!  We're all very excited, especially as this year's theme is Science-Fiction and Fantasy: The Factual and the Counterfactual.  Oh no, wait, it's Experimentation and Innovation in Libraries: What We Can Learn from Startups. No, that's not it! My mistake.  It's Introduction to RDA and Ontologies for the Semantic Web.

Not really.  In fact, the conference doesn't actually have a theme; the three that I listed above are merely the names of three of the many programs happening across the four days librarians take over the Windy City.  The many, many programs.  I mean, unless the tagline on the ALA Annual website--"Transforming our libraries, ourselves"--is meant to be a theme, in which case it's so general as to be not really very useful, and, based on my very thorough survey of all those programs, not particularly binding of presenters' focus--which, we can all agree, rather defeats the purpose of having a theme at all.

Now, I don't really mind this, myself.  We have a varied field and we all approach our corners of it in our own way.  I would rather give all my librarian buddies full range in which to develop presentations and poster sessions and so forth than force them all into any particular thematic cubbyhole for the year, however expansive a cubbyhole it may be. (And, again, expansiveness of theme has a certain limit beyond which it starts to get self-defeating.)

But I did run across a peer voicing concern with this tendency toward sprawl on a social network group the other day.  He worries that the breadth of offerings at ALA Annual bespeak a certain lack of coherence and discipline on the part of our profession.  And despite my above approbation, I think he has a point.

You can't take my approval of sprawl as evidence that everything is dandy--I am, after all, lacking in coherence and discipline myself.  My ALA schedule runs the gamut from graphic novels to Deaf culture to LGBTQ support to late-night programming and LITERALLY EVERYTHING in between.  If I could tame my own incoherence I might be happier, but I would almost certainly have less fun.

So is that it--is our profession undisciplined?  Are we less of a single body than, say, dentists?  (A dangerous force, dentists.)  Are we the professional equivalent of the over-involved college student, desperate for a snatch of everything campus life has to offer--drama club, newspaper, debate team, track and field--taking part in a little bit of everything but excelling at nothing? When the Meta-Librarian gets together with the Ur-Dentist and the Quintessential CPA and all the other Professionals Up In The Sky, are we the guy whose face everybody knows but whose name they can't place?  Is that the source of our under-appreciation and our embattlement in society at large?

We are very good at some specialized things, and I would never give up our engagement in the cultural, intellectual, and academic lives of our patrons.  And I still believe that's a good thing.  But is it possible there is a better thing? A leaner, meaner librarian? Slam, bam, reference interview, thank you, ma'am?

I think it bears some questioning.  As long as we keep all the extra-curriculars I'm interested in; I'll work on my self-discipline later.  Meanwhile, I think my dentist would REALLY like to hear about my Deaf LGBTQ overnight treasure hunt program idea.

UPDATE: "Transforming our libraries, ourselves" is, in fact, the conference theme.  I guess that's cool!

The David A. Howe Public Library

How about a picture essay! Let's take a virtual swing around the David A. Howe Public Library in Wellsville, Allegany County, New York--my mother's hometown library and social and intellectual incubator.  (Hi, Mom.)

The 76-year-old building is full of beautiful architectural touches and accessories.

The spacious reading room and research area is studded with helpful little pamphlets, like this one spelling out the library system's online catalog...

...and this one about the Dewey Decimal System. I haven't seen a resource in quite this user-friendly format before!  Maybe in academic libraries, but not public, in my experience.

A lot of nice 'soft programming' (I just made that up, I think)--

--invitations to the community to interact with the collection and intellectual material in self-directed, meaningful ways.

The children's room is the heart of the building.  Those chairs, that table, the toys and posters...all original from the 30s.  What an amazing place to learn to read.

Nice touches of local flavor abound, like this painting in a meeting room showing the famous Wellsville Balloon Rally.

There are lots of things that make this a perfectly fabulous library.  It seems distinctly suited to serving the needs of its community--quiet yet active, with a lot of focus on its sizable print collection (the above photo underscoring the collection of photo books, for instance, or a daily-shifting author birthday display near the front door that shakes occasionally-dusty classics to the top of browsers' considerations).  On the other side of things, the Howe seems dedicated to ensuring its patrons come along with its 21st-century advancements through its handy pamphlets and guides to technology.  All in all, the building carries a sedate, weighty presence appropriate to its position as a local landmark; and yet there's a vibrancy to the proceedings as well, between its sprightly children's room complete with Batman action figure and the full-size theatre in the basement.  My grandmother once staged a full-scale production of an original kids' play there--my earliest experience with some seriously non-traditional library service. (Perhaps I have her and the David A. Howe Library to thank for my interest in such things!)

If you find yourself in the southern Tier, consider taking a look around this great institution.  And if that's not in the plan, why not poke around the library website instead?

Bonus Post

Just wanted to highlight this comment on an article found here, continuing the interminable conversation on what to call the people who use our institutions:

scades  Mollie • 7 days ago

• −

"Client" is exactly right. Librarians, like faculty members, have a body of knowledge and skills that they can bring to bear to assist those who seek their services, not as commodities, but as valuable to each individual, dependent on unique needs. Just as accountants, lawyers, etc., we, as professionals, offer services that users may seek, or not. But our users do not seek one-size-fits-all mass-produced products, as do "customers." So let's convince our colleagues and administrators that "client" is the appropriate word.

Personally I'm not into the word 'client,' but I love this person's definition of who our, er, clients are and why they make use of us.

Or to go in another direction, maybe we should start referring to our customers as 'library pets.'

Shoulder to Shoulder

I found this lovely photo by Elizabeth Felicella here.

The NYPL notes that this particular branch of their system, the Chatham Square Library, has been serving the Chinese-American population of its neighborhood since the early 20th century--just about exactly when there started to be a Chinese-American population to serve.  It has evidently adapted well to the context it has found itself in.

Our libraries stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the other facets of the communities we live in, as this photo reminds us in beautifully concrete terms.  Whether you're talking the urgent needs of a new immigrant group or the comfortable wants of an entrenched subculture, the library has got it.

Or rather, it should.  Remember that we are here to represent you, in a truer way than any politician or pop culture figure can or wants to.  If there is a need you do not feel is being addressed by your library, tell the librarians!  It is our ambition to do everything in our power to serve you.

And if your home library (because they are, after all, a kind of home for all of us) has suffered cutbacks in recent years--or decades--or is under threat now, step up to the line with them, brush shoulders, mingle your greatness, and refuse to take the cut without a fight.

Here's a neat way you can do that. It's a start, at least. If you decide to share your story over there, let me know in a comment!