Core Chapter Concept: The community is the collection.
Funded by public dollars at the city, regional, or national level, public libraries in many countries are open to serve the general public of their localities.1 Their broad mission—broad because the communities they serve are broad—can be summed up as “community improvement.” In many municipalities, the public library is the only civic organization tasked to provide direct service to citizens of all ages, all socioeconomic groups, and all vocations. Some public libraries are direct departments of larger governing bodies, but many act as semi-independent organizations with their own oversight (normally in the form of a citizen board), and even their own tax structure.
As with academic libraries, public libraries can be small, like a rural library with a part-time librarian serving a community in the hundreds, or large, like the Queens Public Library in New York City with a service population in the millions. Yet big or small, municipal or regional, all public libraries have to prove their value, how they have used the public resources allotted them (tax dollars, space) to improve their communities.
For centuries, public libraries leaned heavily on the basic reasons put forth for having libraries in general. Public libraries have provided economic benefit, reduced costs for the acquired resources, and worked to promote literacy (typically limited to reading readiness). But it is worth looking at how public libraries of all sizes can modernize their classic functions of reference (answering the questions of their community members) and collection development (building, organizing, and maintaining tools for their members to use in knowledge development).
The term “community reference” was first put forward by Jamie LaRue, former director of the Douglas County Public Library in Colorado. LaRue sent his librarians out of the library to be part of important community organizations such as Chambers of Commerce or Arts Councils. He gave these embedded librarians three tasks: show up, pay attention, and stay in touch.2
Associate Director for Public Services at Salt Lake County Library Peter Bromberg was given the task of implementing the community reference model for Salt Lake. His librarians were unsure about the value of doing community reference and unclear about how it differed from traditional outreach or even marketing. For many of them, leaving the library to proactively engage community members in nonlibrary spaces was outside their comfort zone and, indeed, beyond their conception of what “library work” entailed.
During a series of meetings with the librarians, where Peter listened to their concerns, he explained the service in a way that resonated with many of them:
When you go into the community you’re really doing two things: reference, and collection development. In reference what do you do at the desk? You listen, ask questions, and once you have a clear sense of how someone’s question can be answered, you connect them to the best resources. When doing community reference, we’re using the same skills and behaviors, but we’re doing it in their space, not at our reference desk.
So when we’re at an Arts Council or Chamber of Commerce meeting, we listen and ask open-ended questions about the organization’s aspirations, goals, concerns, and challenges in an attempt to understand what they need. When we understand the need, we can then connect them to the appropriate resource. That resource may be a database, but it may also be another organization that we have connected with. Over time, as we build our “community collection,” this will happen more frequently.
When doing community reference, we are also doing collection development. We are curating the organization as a potential resource in the community. We listen and ask questions to both understand their needs, and understand their value as a resource in the community collection.
The real power is when you put these together. As you are listening to an organization, you may find that linking them not to a library resource, but another community member or organization might be the best answer.3
Peter’s explanation helped the librarians understand that community reference is “library work”; he made them feel more comfortable and confident about performing the service. To incentivize all his library branches to join in, Peter put up a simple online form. Librarians who attended events in the community would document whom they spoke with and what they learned about the organization and the community in general. Before they responded, however, they could see how many community events were added by the other library branches, which served as a form of positive peer pressure, working either on the librarians’ internal motivation to do more or on their external motivation not to be seen as the library branch that did least.
What Peter’s story shows us is that many librarians are uncomfortable with the proactive librarianship being presented here. They feel their skills of reference and collection development have a place inside a library, but they worry that, outside that setting, they will be unequipped for success. In reality, however, traditional librarian skills have a bright future in community reference and in the idea that the community is the collection. Only, just as traditional librarian skills must be disconnected from any one institutional type to thrive, so, too, the librarian skills of information organization, reference, and instruction must be understood and applied outside a library-owned collection if they’re to be put to best use.
Say you’re a librarian who has worked at the reference desk for thirty years. Your core librarian skills are still valuable, but you won’t truly know their value until you use them in the larger context of your community. As a librarian, you can catalog not just books and other materials, but also people and projects; you can use your indexing skills not just on series and manuscripts, but also to build websites and your reference skills not just inside your library, but also on Twitter, on a bike, and in town hall. Far from being a waste or irrelevant, those thirty years have prepared you to shoot ahead: without your desk time, you wouldn’t be ready for your community time.
I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about some of the dangers facing public libraries. Of the special concerns voiced in and about public libraries, perhaps the two biggest are “What happens when public libraries are the last civic service agencies standing?” and “As public libraries expand their services to include everything from tax help to makerspaces, how are public librarians supposed to know it all?” These two concerns are related.
To save money, one after another, government agencies are closing their local offices and moving their “services” to the web. The quotation marks are there because, even though the agencies often post documents online, they rarely provide sufficient human support for citizens trying to understand or use the documents. If I have a question about filling out a form, simply having access to the form online is no help. Librarians realized this a long time ago (collections of books and other materials aren’t enough to educate or inform community members—we need librarians). But the net effect of retreating governmental services is that librarians are often left holding the bag in terms of support.
In today’s municipalities, the public library is left standing virtually alone as a community-wide civic organization. In many, perhaps ironic ways, the retreat of mediated social and civic services has pushed public libraries to reach out to their communities; both the mission and functions of public libraries are being expanded. This is a good thing—public libraries have the opportunity to become more central in the lives of their community members. But an expansion of services without a corresponding expansion of resources (budget, personnel, authority, training) is a recipe for disaster.
The doomsday vision for tomorrow’s public libraries is not obsolescence, but overexpansion: doing far too many things far too poorly. Rather than serving as advocates to shore up and strengthen the democratic process, public libraries can become the latest targets of a citizenry looking for examples of failure in government. The question then becomes not why do we have public libraries, but why are our tax dollars supporting their substandard services?
The apocalyptic vision for tomorrow’s public libraries is not obsolescence, but rather an overexpanded shell doing a million things poorly. Like a balloon, libraries expand in mandates without support, creating an ever-thinning membrane and an empty core. Rather than working to shore up the democratic process, libraries become the latest target of a citizenry looking for examples of failure in government. The question shall become not why we have libraries, but why tax dollars support substandard service.
So how do public librarians avoid this terminal overexpansion? Some call for retrenchment. Get back to core literacy (reading), refocus on collections, and promote the role of libraries as safe havens from the world of crime and drugs. This is an equally bad idea, doomed to failure. Rather than inviting complaints of too little service in too many areas, public libraries will get dismissed as too narrow to be of any real use to their communities. No, our public libraries need a plan to take hold of this opportunity and grow to meet the needs of our communities.
This plan requires two major efforts. The first is obvious and many have started down this road: advocacy for more resources. We must mobilize citizens and government to support and fund our public libraries as the public face of our communities—a marketplace of ideas and services, where private and public come together seamlessly.
But if all public libraries do is appoint themselves the next great bureaucracy, they will fail here as well. Public librarians will lose their special status as their libraries are forced to hire more and more people from social services, education, technology, and other fields. There is a very real and legitimate worry that public librarians, indeed, librarians of all stripes, are being called to do too much. Can any one professional really be librarian, programmer, maker, social worker, and employment consultant at the same time? No, we librarians can’t do it all—but we can help our communities do it all. The second major effort requires us to look at every new service or program offered by a library not as a new set of skills that we must learn as librarians, but rather as an opportunity for us to empower our community members to learn those skills themselves.
That is the big change and opportunity in librarianship. Librarians must stop looking at those who walk into their buildings or those who visit via the web as consumers and users who require help from an all-knowing bookworm. For too many the answer is not in the community of librarians, but in the collections we build. But if we leave it to the collection then we are making the same mistake those government agencies are making … retreating to the town hall, leaving pamphlets and forms to fill the void when people want service and opportunity.
Librarians have the ability (with resources) to form teams of experts on the payroll, but more importantly by drawing on expertise within the community itself, to educate, and improve. Librarians value in this equation is a little of the tools we bring (spaces, standards, collections), and A LOT in the expertise we bring. Librarians can help truly define community needs and gaps. Librarians can identify experts, and work with them to provide expertise to everyone (in lectures, hands-on skills, consulting, production, new publishing efforts). All the while knitting together the community in a tight fabric of knowing … that is the value of the librarian. Do librarians need to know everything? No! They need to know how to unlock the knowledge of the community and set it free while imbuing the entire community with the values of learning, openness, intellectual honesty, and intellectual safety.
This idea of the library being a safety net by weaving together the fabric of community expertise works in other library communities as well. Faculty need research and support, students need motivation and to be valued. Lawyers need trial support, doctors, oh God help me, doctors need the humanity of librarians working with people in crisis. Do librarians become doctors, lawyers, and faculty? Perhaps in some special cases, yes. However, more generally, we become the connective tissue that binds the community together. Librarians become engineers in the social infrastructure of greatness that could be our communities.
This is our opportunity and challenge. The potential reward is not in dollars or square feet, but in better communities and improved lives. This is a vision worth fighting for, and that others will join. Right now, today, your communities are looking around to see which institution of democratic participation, which institution of learning, which principled corps of professionals can see them through a particularly scary moment in history. For all the promise of progress seen in every new iPhone there is the crippling poverty spreading like a cancer to fill the wage inequity of the land. For every new medical miracle cure there is an Ebola shining the reality that nature is not simply controlled. For every fair and free election there is an authoritarian state showing us that freedom and participation is not in our genes, but in our constant mortal struggle to rise above our animal nature.
Our communities need us. In colleges and universities they need us to span the vaulted towers of disciplines. In schools they need us to shatter the isolating walls of the classroom to bring students and teachers into the light of inquiry. In our states and our towns they need librarians to provide safe shelter for the bodies and the minds of the frightened—we must embolden them with the armor of knowledge and the defense of their neighbors. If libraries are to be the last civic institution standing, then we shall stand tall, and together, locked arm in arm with our patrons, and students, and faculty, and principles, and congressmen, and all those who value the society we live in. We will not be so arrogant as to believe we can know it all, or that any one person, regardless of rank or title, can be alone in all the knowledge they ever need.