The End Of The Library?

I just read this post on TechCrunch:

The End Of The Library by MG Siegler (posted on October 13, 2013)

Obviously, this post is generating huge reactions among some librarians. There’s not a lot for me to add to the discussion on the future of libraries that I didn’t say in my post Another Librarian’s Response to “What’s a Library?” and in my response to Terry Deary when he suggested that libraries are no longer relevant.

In particular:

He doesn’t see our research resources, our literacy initiatives, our job search assistance, our government documents collections, or our social services. He doesn’t see our partnerships with local school systems and cultural institutions. He doesn’t see community use spaces and safe places to for people to hang out. He doesn’t see a champion of informed democracy and self-improvement. He doesn’t see librarians as curators of information, experts to guide people through society’s myriad information resources.

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Print, Ebooks & Reading Comprehension

I’m not gonna lie—I do experience a wee bit of a thrill when I get to say I told you so.

OK, this isn’t really an “I told you so” moment… but this is something I’ve been saying for the past several years.

Paper Versus Pixel by Nicholas Carr (posted on Nautilus Quarterly, 2013)

This doesn’t really offer any new ideas. That print offers better reading comprehension than ebooks is something that’s been shown by quite a lot of data recently. The telling quote for me is this:

Some scientists believe that our brain actually interprets written letters and words as physical objects—a reflection of the fact that our minds evolved to perceive things, not symbols… The differences between page and screen go beyond the simple tactile pleasures of good paper stock. To the human mind, a sequence of pages bound together into a physical object is very different from a flat screen that displays only a single “page” of information at a time. The physical presence of the printed pages, and the ability to flip back and forth through them, turns out to be important to the mind’s ability to navigate written works, particularly lengthy and complicated ones. We quickly develop a mental map of the contents of a printed text, as if its argument or story were a voyage unfolding through space.

I told you so.

Internet Censorship: A Global Perspective

Given the blog I posted yesterday about CIPA, I think this is an important perspective to keep in mind:

A Map of the Countries That Censor the Internet by Casey Chan (posted by Gizmodo on August 13, 2013; found via Stephen’s Lighthouse)

This is not in any way to mitigate the irreducible importance of the freedom of information in our democracy. But the larger reality is that we’re far better off on this front than many other people in throughout the world. If anything—this makes upholding our own freedom all the more important, as an example of the benefit to society that it engenders.

CIPA, Censorship & the EFF

For the past few days, this article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been making its way through the library sphere:

The Cost of Censorship in Libraries: 10 Years Under the Children’s Internet Protection Act by Rainey Reitman (posted on September 4, 2013)

There’s much excellent material to go over in this piece. I have many reactions to it. The first and most important being this:

It’s not a library’s job to police people.

It’s not actually our job to act in loco parentis. This is one of the big differences between public libraries and public schools, and it’s something that many library patrons misunderstand. It’s not a library’s job to judge any patron’s information needs—it’s not even any of our business why they need it.

It is our job to provide access to information and to help people learn how to handle it in useful and healthy ways.
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5 Myths About the 'Information Age' by Robert Darnton

This article needs to be shared as widely as possible! I couldn’t have said any of this any better.

5 Myths About the ‘Information Age’ by Robert Darnton (posted by The Chronicle of Higher Education on April 17, 2011)

It may be a couple years old but the points he makes are important.

I discovered this post through the Library Juice Press blog—for my money, one of the very best library blogs out there.

Theatre, the Arts & Libraries: The Power of Storytelling

One of the things that strikes me most about working in a library is how much overlap there is between libraries and theatre.

In my MLIS program, there were several of us who came from a career in theatrical tech / stage management and were transitioning into librarianship. As I’ve noted before, theatrical technician-to-librarian is a fairly common path.

The professor who taught my Intro to Library Science class (the ever-delightful Dr. Janice Del Negro) once commented that “librarians tend be a little bit off of center”. Theatre people tend to be a lot off of center, so we feel right at home in libraries.

Theatre is about telling stories—librarianship, at heart, is about sharing stories. Both passions are founded on a love of storytelling, a recognition of the irreducible importance of storytelling in society. Even history, science, math… All forms of human communication and the sharing of knowledge are forms of storytelling.

So when I read this article about the nature of arts and theatre, I couldn’t help but think of how it applies libraries, too.

The Truth About the Arts: Art is Activism by Lisa A. Kramer (posted on her blog on August 25, 2013)
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The Continued Value of Print

With the inexorable rise of ebooks, there have been a lot of people expounding the continuing benefits of print books. Most of them tend to cite similar things:

The physical heft of print books.
The smell of print books.
The permanence of print.
The retention of knowledge when reading print books.
Etc.

People also approach the issue from the perspective of the benefits of ebooks.

We’ve all read these blog posts and articles, we know how they go. These are all legitimate and important considerations.

Here’s an article, though, that mentions a couple benefits of print that I’ve not seen cited before—and I think these reasons are some of the best for continuing to allow print books to play an important role in all our lives:

The Biblioracle on Physical Books in an E-Book World by John Warner (posted by the Chicago Tribune on August 2, 2013)
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My Path to Libraries

Another Personal Reflection Post

Sometimes it amazes me that it took so long for me to figure out that I could make my living working in libraries.

My mom loves to tell the story of when I was little and I proclaimed that when I grew up I wanted to live in a library. From my earliest memories, my concept of heaven has been a giant library. I went through a phase in junior high were I tried to sketch out my ideal home and the centerpiece of the house was a multistory library (also, a huge terrarium for a pet three-toed tree sloth… I was a strange young man.) During the years I lived in Chicago, I always said that if the apocalypse came, I’d barricade myself in Harold Washington Library and protect the books.

I’ve always felt at home in a library. Some of my fondest memories from childhood are when my mom worked in the history library on the local campus and I’d get to spend time wandering around in the stacks.
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Observations of People Interacting with Vending Machines

(aka – The World of UX in Afternoon Snacks)

When I tell people that I’m a Digital User Specialist at the Kansas City Public Library, the most common response I get is: “What’s that?” My fumbling attempts to explain my responsibilities are typically followed by the question, “So… what do you actually do?”

Explaining what I do is a challenge—partly because what I do is new enough that I have freedom to decide for myself the best ways to do it and I can create specific tasks as I go; and partly because my job is as much about observing and learning and thinking and conceptualizing and ideating as it is about day-to-day to-do lists (not that there aren’t plenty of those).

What follows is a semi-silly, semi-serious attempt to explain how I conceive my job…
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The Problem with Summer Reading

So much yes to this!

The Problem With Summer Reading by Carolyn Ross (posted on The Millions, July 25, 2013)

I was a voracious reader on my own but I hated reading for school. It was never any fun when it was for school. I understand that reading is essential for childhood learning in almost every respect—but this is not the way to encourage kids to want to read.

Ironically, I never read any of the assigned books for my classes in junior & high school—but I’ve read every one of those books on my own just for fun (and because I think it’s important to be well read) since then. The mere act of assigning the book automatically made me not want to read it.

Over the years, I’ve spoken about this phenomenon with many people—friends, coworkers, classmates—and I’ve been struck by how many people had the exact same experience in school. Moreover—it tends to be the most well-read and best educated people who felt this most acutely.

When the people who love reading the most hate reading for school… that should tell us something.