September 4, 2009 ♦ Categories:
Advocacy
Excerpts from a beautiful speech by Carnegie Corporation1 president Vartan Gregorian to the Kansas City Club, Oct 17, 2002.
Libraries contain the heritage of humanity, the record of its triumphs and failures, its intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements and its collective memory. They are a source of knowledge, scholarship and wisdom. They are an institution, withal, where the left and the right, God and the Devil, are together classified and retained, in order to teach us what to emulate and what not to repeat.
But libraries are more than repositories of past human endeavor, they are instruments of civilization. They are a laboratory of human aspiration, a window to the future and a wellspring of action. They are a source of intellectual growth, and hope. In this land and everywhere on earth, they are a medium of progress, autonomy, empowerment, independence and self-determination. They have always provided—and I would suggest, always will provide—a place and space for imaginative recreation, for imaginative rebirth. That is because the library is a transcendent institution, being able to surpass the limitations of time and space. The library is an oasis, a place for reflection, for contemplation, for privacy, for the renewal of one’s imagination and the development of one’s mind.
1Carnegie Corporation of New York was created by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to promote “the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.”
Innovation is often associated with technology; there’s a constant buzz about applying technology to existing functions and doing new technological things. Innovation is also about doing things differently or doing better by doing less.
Especially in these difficult times, libraries need both forms of innovation. I find two examples inspiring.
- Beginning in 2007/2008, colleges around the country began eliminating trays from their cafeterias. In July 2008, USA Today reported colleges have seen food waste decline by up to 50%, they’ve saved thousands of dollars through not washing trays and the vast majority of students surveyed supported the change.
- A few years earlier, UPS began eliminating left turns from its urban routes. The policy has been fully implemented and the change has improved delivery times because drivers are stuck in traffic less often, saved the company about 10 million gallons of gas per year and reduced CO2 emissions equivalent to the amount generated annually by 5,300 passenger cars.
These innovations disrupt our very notions about what it means to eat cafeteria-style or drive in the city. It’s really hard to see opportunities like these in the everyday things we do. It’s also hard to be disrupted, even in small ways.
So how can libraries overcome these challenges?
- Start small and local and grow innovation as part of your library’s culture.
- Begin with open dialogue among your immediate work team about the potential and difficulties that change brings. Talk about how it feels to learn new things and change habits, and how it feels when something you devised is altered or replaced.
- Share or switch jobs. You’d be amazed at what surfaces when you need to explain what you do to someone else, or answer their questions about options and alternatives.
- Invite the public to participate in library innovation. Create forums where people that work in various office and service environments share how they’ve innovated in their workplaces. Ask volunteers to review processes and perform some library functions and suggest new ways of doing things. Library staff will learn a lot about public questions, perceptions and preferences and the public who participate will be more committed, invested and supportive of the libary afterward.
Here’s a shout out for the ALA’s Privacy Revolution. It’s off to a real good start, for it:
- Puts its cause right out there.
- Says important stuff clearly and concisely.
- Makes good resources readily accessible.
- Works with allies.
- Issues a call to action.
Its focus is privacy and freedom, although this campaign also lights the way ahead for libraries. By urging people to organize through their local libraries, it helps re-establish them as vital centers for community and democracy beyond a time (and let’s pray it comes soon) when their contributions to job search and affordable recreation are not so desperately needed.
To me, this is the winning approach for public library advocacy. We need to truly develop public libraries, in bold ways. I’ve put a few ideas out there in my town election election/library/school dream and being better than free. There are lots more. The true success of our advocacy efforts will be when we render our current forms of advocacy obsolete — when we develop our libraries into stronger centers serving the public good — when they become such a ubiquitous part of public life that people casually say “oh yeah, that’s a library thing”.
The public library mission supports this, and I would argue it is necessary for survival. Like the U.S. Constitution, the library mission sets boundaries sufficient for order and stability yet flexible enough to endure change. The contemporary mission covers everything from storytime and bookmobiles to intellectual freedom and much more. Which brings me back to the Privacy Revolution …
I’m a technologist by trade and have grown increasingly concerned about privacy and freedom. As this campaign notes, most people do not know how extensively their transactions, conversations and physical movements are tracked. “New technologies give us unprecedented access to information. They also facilitate surveillance, with the power to collect and mine personal information“.
It’s a risk to us all, so join the Privacy Revolution and then urge your family and friends to do the same.
After that, check out The Onion’s video satire about Google’s Opt-Out village. It made me laugh and sent a chill up my spine at the same time.
Thanks to Marci Merola from the ALA’s Office for Library Advocacy for the pointer to Privacy Revolution and Kent Anderson at The Scholarly Kitchen to The Onion video.
