CILIP/ English-Speaking Union Travelling Librarian 2012

Transcription

1 CILIP/ English-Speaking Union Travelling Librarian 2012 Report by George Roe My tour of US libraries was a fantastic experience on a professional and personal level. I wanted to explore the link between libraries and democracy and visiting during the presidential elections provided an exciting time to do this. Each of the libraries that I visited was extremely hospitable and I learned far more than I had hoped to. I covered a wide variety of types of library, and encountered a different approach to library services. It was enjoyable to share common experiences with librarians that I visited, such as at the Library of Congress. It was equally stimulating to learn about services and practices that were completely new to me and are relevant to my work as Senior Indexer at the House of Commons Library. I found that writing a brief summary of each visit on my blog was a very helpful way to record and share my experiences as they happened. My itinerary appears below, followed by a report of my main findings, arranged thematically: Washington DC American Library Association Office of Government Relations DC Public Library Watha T. Daniel/ Shaw Neighbourhood Library National Agricultural Library DC Public Library Juanita E. Thornton/ Shepherd Park Library Library of Congress US National Archives Office of the US Presidential Libraries Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Library Association Pennsylvania State Library Library Company of Philadelphia National Federation for Advanced Information Services University of Pennsylvania Library Chicago Harold Washington Library Center (Chicago Public Library) American Library Association Public Programs Office Project on Civic Reflection Urban Libraries Council 1

2 Elections Public libraries in the US today have helped to inform the electorate about the elections, for example about controversial changes to voter ID requirements in Pennsylvania. Chicago Public Library ran a mock election for children, featuring candidates Babymouse (the frontrunner) versus Bad Kitty. The children could vote online, and the experience helps them to learn about the basics of elections while they are surrounded by coverage of the presidential elections in the adult world. The library also provided resources for the children to design campaign posters of their own invention (see photo). I thought that these were fun methods for involving and explaining the electoral process to younger children, who are surrounded by coverage of the presidential elections in the media. On the day of the first presidential TV debate, I visited a library book club event at a branch of DC Public Library. The club had chosen to discuss a book about Barack Obama. The monthly afternoon book club made a politically partisan choice to read The Obama Hate Machine: The Lies, Distortions and Personal Attacks on the President and Who is Behind Them by Bill Press. I thought that this was an interesting choice to be held in a public library, especially as other librarians that I met talked about the value of impartiality (see below). The members of the book club displayed a concentrated erudition in the issues that they had gathered to discuss. The library itself is an example of grassroots democracy. Twenty years ago, a fast food outlet was proposed on some vacant land. Local activists (led by Juanita E Thornton) campaigned for a neighbourhood library to serve the community. They won, and the library bears Juanita Thornton s name our symbol of the system. At Pennsylvania State Library, in the state capital Harrisburg, I learnt about how public libraries are helping to inform the electorate. In the run-up to the Chicago Public Library: Children's librarian with the display of election posters designed by children. presidential elections, the state government had introduced some controversial changes to voter ID requirements. Local library branches across the state publicised the effects of these changes to their users, although the new ID requirements were later postponed. On a wider level, these public library branches aim to improve education in rural and urban communities, such as job-hunting or in-work skills development, and tax credit and benefit advice for disadvantaged families. The libraries are also important for health information in rural areas where there aren t any clinics, and for communities that choose not to use technology, such as the Amish people. 2

3 Public duty Libraries across different sectors in the US consider that they have an important role to play in enriching democratic society. The link between libraries and democracy was not a difficult one to make for the libraries that I visited. The Library Company of Philadelphia emphasised the role that libraries played in the origins of the United States as an independent nation. New books were hard to come by in colonial North America, as only second-hand stock was imported by the authorities. Founding Father Benjamin Franklin established the Library Company of Philadelphia in Franklin used his connections with publishers and booksellers in Europe to import works of modern philosophy and culture for dissemination among colonial Americans. It is claimed that this library network helped to foster a climate that led to the movement for independence later in the century. Inspecting the Library Company of Philadelphia s Articles of Association with Librarian Jim Green From the Founding Fathers to more recent times, the link between democracy and libraries in the US has continued into the modern age. I visited the headquarters of the Office of Presidential Libraries at the US National Archives in Washington DC. The US presidential libraries perceive their role as learning centres of the democratic office of president. The presidential libraries are spread across the US, and are based in areas where a particular president was born or raised. The libraries are composed of the President s papers of office, which are available for research. I learned about the work that the presidential libraries carry out for school visits. Students are allocated various roles in government and are presented with a key moment in a presidency, such as the decision to desegregate the military. The students are provided with information from the time, such as government briefings, poll figures and press comment, and are asked to debate the issues and come to a decision on the course of action. In the process, the students learn about the difficulties of decision-making in a democracy. Democracy at large Democracy is considered by many US libraries in a wider sense than voting and elections. I visited the Public Programs Office of the American Library Association at its HQ in Chicago. The role of the Public Programs Office is to engender the role of libraries as centres for cultural and civic participation across the US. Libraries are valued as the only non-partisan spaces within communities that can bring together the diverse elements that make up our society. The aim of civic engagement is to draw people together, and achieve mutual understanding and the empowerment of members of the local community. The Public Programs Office provides training for how to organise civic engagement, such as fund-raising, planning events, reading lists etc. However, librarians also have to become facilitators in cases that can involve contentious issues and conflict, which is difficult 3

4 to recreate in a training environment. Maintaining neutrality is also a pressure in cases where the issues can be incendiary, but experience helps to deal with this, and the satisfaction of achieving positive outcomes is rewarding. The Public Programs Office often works on civic engagement projects with The Project on Civic Reflection. I visited the Project s headquarters in Chicago. The project runs regular sessions that aim to bring communities together through a contemplation and dialogue on issues that are felt to be important. Subjects for discussion are raised from within the local community, and can be highly-charged and contentious issues, such as how to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The discussion of these issues is conducted in a sensitive and inclusive way. The issues are not tackled head-on, but through a reflective process that leads towards a deeper understanding of the underlying themes. Discussions begin with reading a poem or looking at an image or short video to make people comfortable, to prompt responses and begin a dialogue. Teenagers have used art to explore issues that affect them, such as gun violence or racism. This is an important means of empowerment for teenagers who aren t old enough to vote. A library that has provided some inspiration for the work of the ALA s Public Program Office, and the Urban Library Council s Learning Labs idea (see below) is Chicago Public Library. The city s flagship Harold Washington Library Center has developed some highly innovative services for its teenage users. Chicago has a problem with young people of high school age being caught up in violent crime. In order to try to counteract this, and to involve young people in their communities, the library s YOUmedia space empowers teenagers from different backgrounds to come together in the library and fulfil their creative potential as citizens of a democracy. YOUmedia provides facilities for creative arts, design and engineering and has helped teenagers to win scholarships, publish their own magazine and even release a hit single. The capacious surroundings of the Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago. The largest public library building in the world. Intriguingly, the space has mimicked online learning communities, where users come together informally to collaborate around common interests. Adults are not allowed into the space (apart from library staff!), and I was really struck by how the teenagers are able to use this area to give voice to their interests and concerns, which are all too often marginalised within wider society. The library believes that this is the future for all library services and is currently developing equivalents for adults and younger children. I was lucky enough to be invited to observe a teens' drama workshop on the theme of 'banned books' for children and young adults. I felt that the library provided an important public platform for the expression of young people, whose voices are often marginalised in wider society. 4

5 Impartiality and transparency I learned that impartiality is crucial to the success of libraries. In the US, libraries are trusted by the public as the only non-partisan public space in society. This applies as much to the Library of Congress as to public libraries. The Library of Congress has just re-designed its legislative database, Congress.gov. The database reflects the increasing demands of the public for transparency and easy access to the transactions of Congress. The library has added features to the database that enable users to manipulate legislative data, such as viewing all of the bills that a member of Congress has sponsored, alongside their voting record etc. Library staff have added subject terms to this legislative data, which enhances a users ability to search for the topics of interest them. This is done in an impartial manner. Controversial legislation such as the Obamacare bill, receive subject terms based entirely on the substance of the bill, rather than partisan interpretations of it. I found a similar sensitivity to papers produced by the US Department of Agriculture at the National Agricultural Library. The Library contributes to democracy by providing access to, and dissemination of, government information. In this case, the information is agricultural research papers produced by the US Department of Agriculture Research Service. Indexing terms are assigned to the papers, which are taken from a library thesaurus (Agricola). There are a large amount of agricultural terms in the thesaurus 225 broad subject areas which are then broken down into individual terms. The thesaurus is available online for users to look through and find which terms to use for their database searches. Impartiality is crucial to the usefulness of the thesaurus, in order to be accessible to all users. An example is the term Global warming, which has caused considerable political controversy in the US. This term is a cross reference, so users are re-directed to use the less politically-charged term Climate change. Improving access to information is important to democracy. Social media can offer new possibilities for libraries in this process by involving the users, and the University of Pennsylvania Library has taken the plunge and experimented with the social tagging. In 2006, the library set up a new tool for users to create and add tags for journal articles, assignments and records from the library catalogue. This process was made as easy as possible, so all catalogue records have an Add to Penn Tags option. Penn Tags can be searched by their title, such as screwball comedy, and results include a Related to sidebar, showing which other tags have been combined with the tag you re looking at. The aim of this experiment, and for social tagging in general, is for crowds of users to end up using a semi-formal vocabulary of tags that have been adopted by the majority of users. Unlike more orthodox library practices, such as indexing terms or Library of Congress Subject Headings, these tags are created from the bottom up, by users and not librarians. In time, the University librarians had planned to map the Penn Tags to the more traditional librarian vocabularies, and try to develop a synthesis so that users could search using either or both sets of terms. However, the results of Penn Tags were uneven. Unfortunately, there weren t anywhere near enough of them. Less than 5% of the potential user community participated in the experiment, and the wisdom of crowds could not emerge. Penn Tags are still in use, but the project is no longer in active development. Nevertheless Penn Tags are an interesting experiment in user-generated tags. 5 Statue of Penn University founder Benjamin Franklin, opposite the University Library. The library catalogue is also named after him.

6 Library Advocacy At a time of restricted funding, many libraries in the US have advocated successfully for extra resources, often on the basis of how libraries help enrich democracy. The Pennsylvania Library Association (PALA) is developing a new advocacy programme that is forming partnerships between libraries and organisations in the public and private sectors. The emphasis of PALA s PA Forward programme is not so much defend what we ve got as this is the value of libraries we need more resources. PA Forward aims to unite all Pennsylvanians in a library movement that alters popular perceptions of what libraries do and enlists their support in funding services. These partnerships focus on working together to achieve specific goals within the community, such as Civic and social literacy. PA Forward chair, Mary Garm, explained that this was one of the earliest aims of the programme, as democracy happens everyday in a library. The members of PA Forward that I met are confident that the experience of working together to achieve these aims will convince the partners to lobby within their respective sectors for increases to library funding. The American Library Association s Office of Government Relations (OGR) lobbies Congress about legislation affecting libraries. Recently they were successful in seeing an amendment added to a bill on community colleges that will now include library provision. The OGR is staffed by a team of lobbyists who specialise in certain fields (such as intellectual freedom or government information), and scan the Congressional Record (US equivalent of Hansard) and press coverage, taking into account any political bias of a particular source. The team also works with allies in areas of common concern, such as copyright, as well as contacts who work on Capitol Hill, who will flag up legislation of interest to the OGR. Bills that have serious consequences for libraries and are being rushed through are deemed to be an emergency. In such cases, the Office will send out s to ALA members, urging them to take action, such as writing to their representatives in state government and/or Congress to vote in a particular way or pass amendments in favour of library services. Future of the Profession The Urban Libraries Council (ULC) designs programmes, resources and conferences. I met ULC staff at their headquarters in Chicago. The ULC emphasised the need for library and information professionals to adjust our bearings and to adopt a more active role. The ULC feel that library training courses need to include more about the social role of librarians in a democracy. If librarians are to continue to enhance democratic society, the profession needs to shape library services to fit online learning, and changes in lifelong learning. The ULC are currently developing a system of Learning Labs across North America, which are based on the YOUmedia space in Chicago Public Library. The ULC feels that this is a more significant achievement to society than libraries registering people to vote, for example, as it helped to build a community whereas people who register to vote don t have to participate in elections. At Philadelphia, I met staff of the National Federation for Advanced Information Services (NFAIS). NFAIS spreads awareness of technological innovations developed in the non-library world in the private sector, and highlights the need for libraries to adopt these practices or risk becoming obsolete. Library services are coming under pressure by a massive explosion of content from online and digital sources, and lack sufficient resources to organise it all. Developments have been made in indexing non-textual content, such as voice recognition technology, which NFAIS hopes that libraries will adopt and so continue to be relevant in the future. 6 Visiting members of the Pennsylvania Library Association in Harrisburg, Penn.