Librarianship is proactive transformative social engagement. Librarians make communities better in partnership with their community members. In preparing other librarians to engage their communities, you must be proactive as well. It takes far more than reading a book (or any number of books) to overcome nearly a century of librarians’ preoccupation with efficiency (often at the expense of effectiveness), collections (defined as materials not people), institutions (libraries over librarians), and neutrality (or at least the illusion of it). As a librarian, you must take an active role in shaping your own community and in preparing this generation of librarians and the next to engage their communities—and the world.
What follows are means for the continuous training and development of librarians developed through four significant efforts to date. The first such effort, the Salzburg Curriculum, has already been discussed in some detail in chapter 8. The second effort combined keynote speeches and workshops in the form of an Expect More World Tour. The third, ILEAD USA, has so far involved ten states and nearly 769 librarians. And the fourth, the New Librarianship Master Class, was offered online to nearly 3,000 people from across the globe. All four of these efforts have provided consistent means of success in moving librarians from a focus on collections to a focus on communities.
The following nine means have been particularly effective working with in-the-field librarians:
These nine means build on what librarians know about good instruction generally and how people learn through conversation. With that in mind, staff development should be targeted, interactive, and build on the learners’ current understandings. Let’s consider each of these approaches in greater depth, providing examples where necessary.
When you talk about incorporating communities into every facet of librarianship, too many librarians will try to compartmentalize working with community members as the job of the “community engagement librarian,” as though it was only another of the many different facets of librarianship. This is not the case. Everything librarians do must take their communities into account. From arranging materials, to furnishing rooms, to coding software, all tasks should be guided with input from and awareness of community members.
I recall a student in my introductory course telling me, “You know, I was ready to quit and say this field is not for me. I’m not looking to work with people directly. Then I started looking at the other courses I’d be taking, like cataloging, and I saw my place in the field … behind the scenes working on the collection.” She looked relieved. I felt bad breaking the news that everything librarians should be doing involves working with their community members.
I told her about a conversation a new dean of a library school had with local technical service librarians. When the dean asked them how the school’s curriculum could be improved, they replied that, though the school was doing a good job teaching the part of cataloging from resources to descriptive metadata (which at the time meant using MARC, AACR2, and so on), it was failing to teach the most important part of cataloging—from resources to community members. Where documents fit in classification schemes, the subject terms used to describe resources, keywords, and so on all depended on knowing how community members were talking about and looking for these resources. As my colleague Barbara Kwasnik is fond of saying, a catalog record is really just a pre-reference interview. The goal is to anticipate how community members will look or ask for resources. In other words, catalogers, like reference librarians, have to know and work with community members in a meaningful, personal way.
This means that all librarians need skills in community engagement, communication, and identifying community needs and aspirations. Although the so-called soft skills of facilitating and interacting with individuals and groups are hard to nail down and often needed across many domains, they can be taught, and learning them is more a matter of practice than cultivating some innate predisposition. The key for learners is to know why they are working with their community members. The key for you as teacher is demonstrating methods of eliciting input from members that go far beyond the ability to engage in small talk.
Cheryl Gould is not only an outstanding facilitator of meetings and conversations; she is also a student of facilitation in general. A key to her approach is improvisation, which Cheryl shows is something that can be both taught and learned. In her contribution, she talks about how she applied improvisation directly to engaging librarians on the mission of librarians as part of the Expect More World Tour.
by Cheryl Gould
Most of us have been to presentations or trainings where all we do is sit and listen. If we have a fabulous speaker, this can be pleasant and even inspiring if we care deeply about the topic. In most cases, we’re just happy to have “a day away from the office,” but little learning or behavior change takes place. Learning takes place when people are invited into and engaged with a topic, when they have a chance to investigate ideas in a safe space where all ideas are respected and all opinions valued. A good facilitator with a good design can create this safe space for people to try out new behaviors and ideas.
You start by doing something different that “shrinks the room,” makes people slightly nervous, but that also guarantees success. I usually choose an activity that gets people up out of their seats and talking to someone they don’t know. I’ll ask them to share something simple for a minute. I often have this initial activity relate to the topic of the event, but it could just as easily be about a book they’re reading, where they’d like to go on a vacation, or a recent work success (or failure, depending on your topic). This works best when you ask people to talk to someone they don’t know.
I start every event with an activity like this within the first five minutes or so. It lets people know they’ll be expected to participate. In the Expect More World Tour workshops, we start by asking people to get in groups of three and spend two minutes talking about what “engagement” means. We then have a short debrief and talk about how we will, in the space of the next few hours, engage with one another to facilitate knowledge creation for the community of learners in the room. In this way, the activity directly relates to the topic of the day, which is to discuss the various parts of the mission of librarians. Doing this activity gets people not only thinking about engagement but also feeling engaged, and it models the kinds of engagement we want librarians to use in their communities. In the Expect More events, we are modeling community engagement at its best; this includes
Instead of telling, we spend more time asking and facilitating conversation. If your goal is to teach someone to catalog or to use a computer, you’ll end up doing a lot of telling because there’s is a right way and a wrong way and endless details to learn. In New Librarianship, when we talk about engaging with the community, you’ll be in discussions where there may be no right or wrong answers. The skills required to engage in those conversations are to have a facilitator’s toolkit for mediating the process and a killer set of communication skills to help people feel heard and not judged, to listen appreciatively even when you disagree, to not shy away from differences of opinion, and to have a truly facilitative mindset where you believe that your role is to make it easy for people to be successful, however they define success.
My belief is that only by pairing a facilitative mindset with excellent communication and facilitation skills can we make New Librarianship a reality and fulfill our mission as librarians.
In chapter 16, you saw how Peter Bromberg was able to move community reference forward by showing that, even though the venue (community organizations) was different, the skills the librarians brought to bear (reference and collection development) were long standing and well understood. This points to one of my frustrations with the name “New Librarianship” given to this community approach. There are both supporters and detractors who seek to portray the approach as a nearly complete break from current and past practices.
To be sure, the community approach entails major shifts in the understanding of librarianship (most notably, focusing on librarians over libraries and on communities over collections). But far from asking librarians to abandon their traditional skills, librarianship asks them instead to reapply and adapt those skills to new environments.
Take the slogan “The community is the collection.” Clearly, this is about librarians paying greater attention to and using the expertise resident in the communities they serve rather than focusing on accumulating resources alone. The slogan didn’t just pop out of the air; it arose in response to librarians asking questions like “How can I know whether a community member’s expertise is real?” or “What if the member doesn’t have the skills needed to present it in public?” or “How do I find the expertise in my community to begin with?” Consider the same questions focused on collections of materials and artifacts: “How can I know if this book is credible?” “What if this resource doesn’t have a usable interface for our members?” “How do I find credible resources on this topic?” The answer to both sets of questions is: collection development. Liberians have always developed skills in selection, acquisition, and organization. It has been around books, but also around scrolls, tablets, manuscripts, ephemera, and now people.
I hear all the time, even from the most traditional of librarians, how the age of Google and the Internet has made librarians more necessary than ever before, how librarians are the best search engines or the best judges of the quality of information. I would argue that these applications of librarianship in an Internet world are incremental, and frankly short-term at best. Librarians aren’t good search engines. Search engines sort through billions of possible resources and match it to a query in milliseconds returning results often highly influenced by advertising and dependent on the erosion of community member privacy. As for librarians as arbiters of quality, they can only do this by a strong knowledge of what a community member already believes and will find acceptable.
The future of librarianship lies not in making librarians cogs in our consumption-oriented society, but in librarians’ power as professionals to facilitate and unleash the creative abilities of our community members. And the future of libraries lies in embedding our librarian values in community institutions like businesses, governments, schools, colleges, and universities, and civic welfare groups. Let Google build good tools for our larger mission. Let Amazon build collections for commerce, while librarians ensure that every community member, whether citizen, government official, student, teacher, preacher, or homeless person, has access to the rich history and current conversations of our communities. We’ve been doing this in one form or another for millennia; we need to ensure that we continue to far into the future by adapting to current realities.
I used to do a fair bit of work with primary and secondary school teachers. The hard reality I found was that many teachers are isolated in their classrooms. Librarians can also become very isolated, especially in large libraries, where the isolation comes from working on a desk or in a compartmentalized library function.
By bringing librarians together, you help them build a cohort, a practice community that allows them to share ideas and conversations with like-minded peers. This is, of course, not a new concept. In academia, we’ve talked for generations about “invisible colleges,” where scholars find peers across institutional boundaries. Many librarians need the support of like-minded agents for change, and good continuing education makes this possible by helping librarians build cohorts. But cohort building needs to go beyond continuing education. In a recent trip to Italy, I met with amazing librarians like Stella Rasetti, director of the San Giorgio Library in Pistoia, and Anna Maria Tammaro a professor at the University of Parma. I met with librarians from academic libraries, companies, and all sorts of other institutions. They all expressed a level of frustration with the status of librarians in Italy and a strong desire to engage their communities.
Working for change, however, was an increasingly tight knit group of what Stella referred to as “guerrilla librarians,” a cohort that spanned the country and beyond and whose members talked with one another constantly. They sought out leadership positions in library associations. They wrote books and translated materials to support their work and their approach. Any attempt to prepare librarians for this new librarianship must help librarians build a cohort—a band of brothers and sisters across departments, institutions, and library types. Help your librarians build cohorts wherever you can.
From posters to websites, to whole new systems, librarians who facilitate the ideas and questions their community members care about by helping them put these ideas and questions into practice as projects achieve the best results. If your learners feel they can make something they love better, they’ll learn more about it. This makes sense, of course, because it demonstrates everything we know about learning.
The point of continuing education for librarians is to help them break habits that are not serving them well, to help them reexamine how and why they do things. This can be difficult. Not just difficult because you’re asking your librarians to embrace change, but because you’re asking them to set aside an entrenched worldview whose assumptions about library tasks and about librarianship in general have brought them some success. Often these assumptions have not been consciously developed, but have been implicitly learned over years of practice.
To be successful in convincing librarians who have “manned the desk for thirty years,” or “cataloged all my life” to adopt a more proactive community approach to librarianship, you must begin by challenging these implicit assumptions. The fastest way to do this is to have them work with librarians from other environments. Academic librarians quickly find that, despite their differences, they have a lot in common with public librarians, as do school librarians with law librarians, and so on. But interacting with librarians from different environments also forces learners to make their implicit assumptions explicit, which gives you, as a facilitator, an opportunity to challenge them or link them to new practices.
When I was junior in college, I took a C programming language course. On the first day of class, the teacher drew a simple illustration on the chalkboard.
“Who can tell me what this is?” he asked us.
As we gave our guesses, the teacher slowly made his way toward the back of the classroom.
“A keyboard,” someone offered.
“Right, and what’s that key on the far right?” he asked, still moving toward the back of the room.
“Escape key?” “Alt key?” the guesses rang out.
“No,” he said as he made it to the back wall. “That’s the key that blows the whole damn computer up!” he shouted, hurling his chalk at the board, where it promptly shattered.
Now, with the class’s full attention, the teacher returned calmly to the front of the class while saying, “Of course, there is no such key, but many of us work like there is.” He went on to talk about how we were going to make a lot of mistakes, “blow up” a lot of programs, but that was how we learned. Moreover, the systems we would be working on were built for this kind of thing, and we shouldn’t worry about “killing” our computers.
In these days of white boards, I haven’t quite found the courage to try to shatter a marker with my library science students, but, in every other way, I let them know that our class is a safe place to try out ideas and thoughts and criticisms, and they shouldn’t worry about “blowing up” the classroom. In giving them what they need to succeed in the class (feedback on assignments, rubrics, clear instructions), I tell them there’ll be a lot of ambiguity, but that they should see that ambiguity as a space for innovation and for trial and error.
In our libraries and in our learning, we must stop seeing ambiguity as disorder as something to be minimized if not completely avoided. We need a solid foundation and a safe harbor, but we also need to embrace the ambiguous—the unclear and unformed—as an invitation to experiment, to push our knowledge further.
Many people will say that failure should be celebrated, not feared, as a natural consequence of learning and a way of pushing ourselves to go further than we’ve gone before. Failure should indeed be welcomed, but only if there is some solid ground to come back to or a clear means of learning from it. Because, ultimately, none of us celebrates failure; we celebrate the courage to try new things and reach beyond our current grasp.
Most librarians who look to community engagement almost always end up thinking about the web and using the Internet to reach their communities. This in itself is not a bad idea, but in my experience, they often take a collection-oriented, one-way access mentality with them.
“We can use Facebook to connect to the community!”
“Great, how?”
“We’ll put organizational announcements on our wall.”
Sigh.
“We’ll use this content management system to allow kids to sign up for our gaming programs and talk about gaming!”
“Where do the kids talk about gaming now?”
“Mostly online in the games or with their friends at school.”
“So, why would they want to move that conversation to your system? What does your system provide that they don’t already have?”
Blank stares
Let me be very clear. You need to tell your librarians that they can marshal all the ideas of usability, user experience, accessibility, responsive design, good graphic design, and laser light shows they like in building their new websites, but these websites will fail if they’re not meeting their members’ needs, or if they’re not at the point of their conversations. Here’s the test. Ask them to put in the word “participant” every place they want to write or say “user” or “patron” and to change the word “use” into “create.” If the result doesn’t make any sense, they’re doing it wrong.
One of the activities Cheryl Gould introduced in the Expect More World Tour workshops was having participants identify perceived barriers to implementing the ideas presented in this book. This table summarizes the feedback she received across all five sessions:
| Barrier | Percentage |
| Lack of staff | 20.69 |
| Fear of failure | 17.24 |
| Lack of time | 12.07 |
| Loss of control | 6.90 |
| Selling it to others | 6.90 |
| Lack of vision | 6.90 |
| Keeping up with technology | 6.90 |
| Fear of community | 5.17 |
| Lack of planning | 3.45 |
| Whom to talk to | 3.45 |
| Community expectations | 3.45 |
| Lack of flexible schedule | 1.72 |
| Fear of overcommitment | 1.72 |
| Setting boundaries | 1.72 |
| Lack of funding | 1.72 |
The percentages in the table are based on a small sample size and are presented here just to give you a sense of the distribution of perceived barriers. The topics identified by workshop participants are consistent with issues raised online and in other World Tour activities. Before moving on to the other projects and other generalizable means of training, it’s worth addressing the top identified barriers.
I’ve heard many librarians say that the expanded community engagement called for in this approach to librarianship requires additional staff and time. With librarians focused on the daily tasks of running libraries and library systems (reference, cataloging, shelving, and so on), who’s available to go into the community? Given the financial situation of most libraries, creating positions for community engagement or community reference simply isn’t possible, they say, especially in one-librarian or other small libraries.
The belief that community engagement requires additional staff is a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of librarians. Community engagement is not simply another of librarians’ many functions; rather, it lies at the core of all librarian functions. Just as Sue Kowalski in her school library enlisted the help of her student iStaff volunteers on library maintenance tasks so that she could better focus on engagement with teachers and delivering curriculum, librarians in all settings need to take a serious look at the time they spend on tool and system maintenance, enlisting help from their community members as needed in order to devote more time and energy to engagement. Often knowing their members far better than librarians in larger libraries do theirs, the librarians in small libraries are also often in a better position to engage their members.
Community engagement is not a job for a special kind of librarian; it is the job of all librarians in all of their functions. No librarian can be all things to all people; that’s why librarians must turn to their community members to help provide and extend services. Librarians need to give up on the idea that they must know everything or master every topic before they share it with their members. Does this mean there are things that a library currently does that will need to be scaled back? Yes. Can I name those things? No. Why? Because every library will have to make that determination with its community members. In some communities, collection activities or virtual services through the Internet will need to be scaled back, in others not. The days that one size fits all libraries are over. Librarians and their professional identities now form the common core of the field, and the systems they build, including the libraries they maintain, will be as varied as the communities they serve. But by focusing on facilitation, librarians become amplifiers—expanding their impact through the community members they empower.
Shifting the focus of librarianship to librarians can be exciting, but also very scary. Many librarians have enjoyed the stability that comes from defining their jobs by tasks such as cataloging, reference, story time, and bibliographic instruction. Tasks can be shared and made routine; policies can be attached to them that minimize choice and conflict. Indeed, many librarians look at policies as a risk avoidance strategy. If a book is challenged at the circulation desk, they don’t have to engage the challenger in debate or discussion, they can shift the conversation to a premade policy. Don’t get me wrong, policies have their place, but they should be ways of documenting decisions and conversations between librarians and community members, not means of avoiding debate. Overreliance on tasks and preemptive policies reflects a fear of failure.
Change can be discomforting, particularly change that’s seen as episodic and even arbitrary. Change is also discomforting when librarians fear that a failed project will result in their being punished or losing the confidence of their community members.
The way to allay fear of failure is to implement procedures and reward systems for experimentation, to encourage librarians both to try constantly to improve current systems and to try new things. When you make clear to community members and staff alike what the core values of your library are and how current services should be judged against those values, then you create room for accepting that experiments that may fail. Adding a 3-D printer to your library can be seen either as an experiment to enrich the learning mission of your library or as a fad. The difference in perception is all about expectations and connection to your community.
I can give a killer keynote speech. I’ve gotten pretty good of “putting on my Baptist preacher” and rallying librarians. I use humor at the right spots, I talk about a positive future for our profession, and I call out the pride we librarians have within ourselves. I can, on good days, inspire.
We all need to hear inspirational speeches and motivational messages from time to time. A good keynote speech that conveys the passion and potential for the field is a great thing. But it’s only half of the equation. Good continuing education should inspire, but it should also provoke introspection. Having learners ask themselves why the talk was inspiring, how they should respond, and how they can kindle that kind of passion in their community members is equally important.
What you’re asking your librarians to do in adopting this approach to librarianship is a tall order. You’re asking them to leave the safety of stacks and policies and long-standing practices and to go out into their communities—to listen to their community members and ask them for their participation. You’re asking librarians to stand up and say that the value they bring to their communities is not to be found within the walls of their library buildings, nor in deep databases, nor in catalogs, but only in the librarians themselves. You’re asking librarians to set aside their long-held belief in neutrality and impartiality and to actively pledge themselves to a very local definition of community improvement. No speeches can prepare them for that.
It’s only by looking at librarians as people that we can prepare them to succeed in improving society. Any adoption of this new librarianship must be accompanied by a recommitment to values too often taught in the abstract. We must say that we personally will make a difference, and we must say it not out of arrogance or self-importance, but in recognition that to help our communities achieve their very human aspirations and solve their very human problems, we must first identify our own aspirations and problems.
Beck Tench understands this. With a background in innovation and museums. Beck has for the past several years been part of the ILEAD USA project to strengthen librarians’ understanding of leadership and technology. The project challenges librarians to work on real projects in teams across a range of organizations and constantly shows them a new way to look at our profession. The experience can be unnerving for many participants. But Beck is there, as she says, to “pick up the pieces.”
by Beck Tench
Every year at ILEAD USA, I give a talk about fear, failure, and change. For the last few years, I’ve followed that talk up with something called “Team Time with Beck.”
Team Time with each ILEAD USA team runs just over an hour and is the result of previous ILEADERs requesting “more time with Beck” in the feedback cards passed out each day of the yearly project. Being Beck, I didn’t know why teams wanted more time with me, and I don’t think they did either, but, in true ILEAD USA fashion, we made a space for it and watched what happened.
At first, I treated the time like a Q&A, but the teams didn’t have questions for me. After a little flailing about and a lot of improvising, I figured out what they wanted: they wanted to talk, and they wanted to be heard.
“How Do You Feel?”
I start the groups by asking them how they’re feeling about their projects. I truly listen to what each of them says. I reflect back what I hear and when I don’t understand something, I ask questions. I work hard to stop myself from interrupting them, from suggesting solutions or my own ideas. I keep listening, try to understand how they’re feeling, and nudge them into a space of uncertainty when they seem to be too comfortable or, for the most fearful ones, even when they seem to have tuned out altogether.
“What Are You Afraid Of?”
I’m most interested in having these librarians try things that might not work. I know through my own experiences of failure and also a long history with ILEAD USA leadership that, even when they fail, they are truly safe. I want them to experience librarianship without the scaffolding of certainty and predictability their typical work provides. I want them to go out on a limb in their time at ILEAD USA. So, I ask them to tell me what they’re afraid of and I push them to go places that cause them worry and fear.
Nervous, but Excited
Sometimes they can go too far with the worry, and their fear feels too big. Sometimes they don’t go far enough and it feels too small. I try to size up where they are as individuals and where they are as a group. I know that they have limited resources in both time and money. I also know that, since they are librarians, it is likely they want to save the world and appear to be effortlessly perfect while doing so. Through conversation, we balance these pieces so that they let go a little of their expectations and perfectionism, but hold on to enough of both that they’re working toward something that matters. The emotional state that seems to resonate with most everyone is “nervous, but excited.” When they’re there, individually and as a team, they’re where they need to be.
Not Group Therapy, but We Do Have Kleenex Handy
Mr. Rogers once said, “You rarely have time for everything you want in life, so you have to make choices. Hopefully, those choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.”1
I’m not a librarian, but I’ve sat with, listened to, and paid a lot of attention to hundreds of them. I’ve observed that even though they entered this profession for a multitude of reasons, they are all different persons now than when they chose to become librarians. They bring the persons and librarians they are now into Team Time with Beck. I consider it my job to understand who they are today, and to support each of them in choices that honor that.