More Relevant Than Ever
Luis Herrera is the city librarian of San Francisco.
The New York Times, December 27, 2012
The public library is a true American invention. Perhaps no other place captures the values of freedom of expression and democracy like this venerable institution. Libraries represent what we should never take for granted: the freedom to read, the freedom to choose and the freedom to share our ideas. The library’s mission to provide free and open access to information in all its myriad formats remains constant.
But libraries across the nation are in a state of transformation. A key issue is the transition of the publishing industry from print to electronic materials, especially as the industry grapples with allowing libraries to buy and circulate e-books to meet the growing demands of readers.
Libraries are a place for personal growth and reinvention, a gathering place for civic engagement.
Libraries are successfully moving from analog to the digital age by providing access to a broad range of digital and multimedia tools that will prepare future generations with 21st-century technology skills. Across the nation, public libraries are the No. 1 point of online access for people without Internet at home, school or work. One hundred percent of public libraries now offer access to the Internet and 90 percent offer technology training. Libraries are finding creative ways to address patrons’ technology demands. Several years ago, San Francisco Public Library began allowing patrons to check out laptop computers to use in the library. This is now the highest-circulating item in our system.
Visit a public library today and you will see a hub of activity. In San Francisco, our computer labs thrive as drop-in resource centers for job seekers and small business entrepreneurs. Librarian-led workshops teach basic computer skills (in Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish and Russian) and help avid readers of all ages to download free library e-books onto tablet computers and other devices.
Libraries are more relevant than ever. They are a place for personal growth and reinvention, a place for help in navigating the information age, a gathering place for civic and cultural engagement and a trusted place for preserving culture. While the technology for accessing library materials has changed and will continue to change, our mission – to inform, to share and to gather – will not.
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Failing to Close the ‘Digital Divide’
Susan Crawford is a visiting professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School, and a contributor to Bloomberg View and Wired. She is the author of "Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age."
DECEMBER 27, 2012
For a growing number of Americans, a library is for Internet access. According to a Pew survey last month, more than a quarter of all adults used the Internet at a library during the past year. The numbers are higher for blacks and Latinos than they are for whites. Indeed, whites may not know or understand how important library Internet access is to minorities: 92 percent of blacks and 86 percent of Latinos said it was very important for libraries to offer free access to computers and the Internet, while only 72 percent of whites did.
Users of public library Internet connections tell surveyors that they're applying for jobs, doing homework, getting information about health care, finding out about government benefits and managing their finances. And because almost a third of Americans (again, more blacks and Latinos than whites) don't subscribe to our country's expensive Internet access at home, librarians say that they're scrambling to fill the gap left by our nation's yawning digital divide.
The demand for libraries’ limited resources has outstripped the supply of both computers and bandwidth.
A recent study by the Information Policy & Access Center at the University of Maryland reports that the demand for libraries’ limited resources has outstripped the supply of both computers and bandwidth: 87 percent of urban libraries report having insufficient computers, and only 17 percent of rural libraries offer broadband speeds greater than 10 Mbps, compared with 57 percent of urban libraries.
In the 21st century, high-speed Internet access is almost as essential as electricity. That libraries serve as the provider for millions of Americans isn't something to celebrate. It's a sign that we're in trouble. We're depriving people of basic information access that is central to every policy we care about – including health, education and national security – even though every American should be able to communicate reliably and access information at any time.
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It’s Not Just Story Time and Bookmobiles
Buffy J. Hamilton is a school librarian at Creekview High School in Canton, Ga. In January she will become the learning strategist for the Cleveland Public Library. She is on Twitter.
DECEMBER 27, 2012
Contemporary libraries have shifted from warehouses of books and materials to become participatory sites of culture and learning that invite, ignite and sustain conversations.
The media scholar Henry Jenkins has identified that such participatory sites of culture share five traits:
· Creating learning spaces through multiple participatory media;
· Providing opportunities for creating and sharing original works and ideas;
· Crafting an environment in which novices’ and experts’ roles are fluid as people learn together;
· Positing the library as a place where members feel a sense of belonging, value and connectedness; and
· Helping people believe their contributions matter by incorporating their ideas and feedback.
Modern libraries of all kinds – public, school, academic and special – are using this lens of participatory culture to help their communities rethink the idea of a “library.” By putting relationships with people, libraries can recast and expand the possibilities of what we can do for communities by embodying what Guy Kawasaki calls enchantment: trustworthiness, likability, and exceptional services and products.
Libraries in various communities provide enchantment through traditional services, like story time, bookmobiles, classes and rich collections of books. However, libraries are also incorporating innovative new roles: librarians as instructional partners, libraries as “makerspaces,” libraries as centers of community publishing and digital learning labs.
While libraries face many challenges – budget cuts, an ever-shifting information landscape, stereotypes that sometimes hamper how people see libraries, and rapidly evolving technologies – our greatest resource is community participation. Relationships with the community build an organic library, that is of the people, by the people and for the people.
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For Gathering and for Solitude
Matthew Battles, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, is the author of "Library: An Unquiet History." He is on Twitter.
DECEMBER 27, 2012
The library is very nearly unique in its flexibility both as institution and metaphor. Books and the places that keep them have taken many forms, and yet, whether it’s the rarefied milieu of the Vatican or the sleepy stillness of a small-town reading room, we tend to subscribe to a set of norms: studiousness, solitude and quiet above all. These connect the sense that all these disparate places really are one place, consistent across times and cultures.
But libraries are very different, not only from one institutional context to another, but also over the course of their long history. Throughout that history, the qualities we ascribe to them have shifted and changed as well. Libraries constitute archaeologies of knowledge, reflecting not only cultural memory, but also the changing import of information, learning and literary expression in different times and places.
We still need spaces for making knowledge and sharing change, and some of those, surely, we will continue to call “the library.”
Are books repositories of all that is good and true, or shifting signifiers whose meanings change from one reader to the next? Is reading a means of individual development, ethnic acculturation or the expression of intellectual freedom? These ever-changing values play across the catalogs of standing collections and inspire new institutions to emerge.
In their long history, libraries have been models for the world and models of the world; they’ve offered stimulation and contemplation, opportunities for togetherness as well as a kind of civic solitude. They’ve acted as gathering points for lively minds and as sites of seclusion and solace. For making knowledge and sharing change, we still need such places — and some of those, surely, we will continue to call “the library.”
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