[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]
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redsixwing asked how many functions a library has. The true answer to that question is "however many people the library serves," because each person uses the library in their own personal way. Now, you can group those people fairly broadly (and we do, based on the anonymized usage data we collect) according to the general form of their primary usage, but really, each person uses the library in their own individual way, in what works best for them.
The first group are the scholars, those that use the library to advance their knowledge and use the library as "the people's university", or to find what they need to get their homework done. These are the "original" library users, the people for whom the Carnegie libraries and many of the dead white dudes that are part of history promoted the public library. These days, we have a lot more than homework help available for people to learn with, much of it digital, but plenty still in books. And a public library doesn't have the resources of the academic and school library to specialize a collection of things that will be helpful to the students.
There are, then, the entertainment folks, who come to the library because we're certainly cheaper than any streaming or rental service, and definitely more so than cable. They don't mind the artificial wait times imposed on us but studios for movies and television, and they make good use of us as a way of trying out things along with keeping up on their favorite shows, especially the ones that air on the premium cable channels and are about time-traveling women who get married in the past and future. There are also the readers, who do much the same as the entertainment folks, just with books instead of movies.
There are grownups accompanying and attempting to shape the reading decisions of children, with varying degrees of success, who often come to the library because it's a lot cheaper to use the collection that's already been bought than to buy up every book that a child wants to read at anywhere from seven to twenty dollars a book. They also bring the smallest ones to storytime, which not only lets the grownups talk with each other about parenting and other shared interests, but also provides the little ones with positive experiences in social settings and with rhyme, song, and text that will be crucial to helping them get ready for reading and schooling. (Storytime is very important for everyone, and is often the first experience a person gets of a library.)
There are teenagers and after school people here because they can't go home yet and they're not participating in anything that will keep them at school or elsewhere between school and when they can go home. Many of them game, draw, do homework, or check their social media sites with their access.
And then there's a group that, most broadly, has been affected by an outside force in their lives, and needs to adjust to the new reality. The low-stakes version of this is the person who has received a technological gadget, usually as a gift, and is now in a much higher-tech world than they were before, often without choosing to engage in it. A lot of people are concerned they will break the device, or that they will end up doing something that will cause their personal information to be stolen by nefarious actors. They don't know that devices these days are often locked to the point where it's really difficult to break them permanently, and that many of the things you can do to protect yourself are learnable. The library contains people who are generally closer to their age and who can explain the new device, offer the basics in how to use it, and provide context on what kinds of things can be done with it, including what the library offers for their new devices. Without sounding like these people are somehow less intelligent because they're not completely up to date on the latest tech.
There's a higher-stakes version of this group as well, and they tend to appear when the economy goes down, or if you're in an area that's not particularly affluent. Job-seekers use the library a lot, because we have internet access. Most job applications are online, and a person who last had to apply for a job when typewriters were the accepted technology is often lost trying to navigate creating job agents, profiles, recreating their resume, having an email address to receive replies to, and using networking and social media to source prospects, do research, and otherwise navigate the way the job world works now.
And then there's the unemployment insurance system to make sure that someone doesn't end up starving or homeless while they are looking for work. (Actually, libraries in general have a lot of people who are homeless and need a place to stay during the day when the shelters aren't.) And paperwork that someone might need to fill out for immigration purposes, or because they found work and have to get all those forms in. Or they're taking classes online and need someone to proctor their examinations so they can get a(nother) degree and find different work.
And that's the one that come to my location. Someone else may have a completely different mix of people and tasks they want to accomplish. Each library is composed of and reflects the community around it. Until you're in the middle of the community, you won't understand it fully. Library school gives a good go at what you can generally expect, but it often assumes that the people you're working with are going to be as good at things as you are...or that they know nothing at all, and neither of those options are really true.
redsixwing asked how many functions a library has. The true answer to that question is "however many people the library serves," because each person uses the library in their own personal way. Now, you can group those people fairly broadly (and we do, based on the anonymized usage data we collect) according to the general form of their primary usage, but really, each person uses the library in their own individual way, in what works best for them.The first group are the scholars, those that use the library to advance their knowledge and use the library as "the people's university", or to find what they need to get their homework done. These are the "original" library users, the people for whom the Carnegie libraries and many of the dead white dudes that are part of history promoted the public library. These days, we have a lot more than homework help available for people to learn with, much of it digital, but plenty still in books. And a public library doesn't have the resources of the academic and school library to specialize a collection of things that will be helpful to the students.
There are, then, the entertainment folks, who come to the library because we're certainly cheaper than any streaming or rental service, and definitely more so than cable. They don't mind the artificial wait times imposed on us but studios for movies and television, and they make good use of us as a way of trying out things along with keeping up on their favorite shows, especially the ones that air on the premium cable channels and are about time-traveling women who get married in the past and future. There are also the readers, who do much the same as the entertainment folks, just with books instead of movies.
There are grownups accompanying and attempting to shape the reading decisions of children, with varying degrees of success, who often come to the library because it's a lot cheaper to use the collection that's already been bought than to buy up every book that a child wants to read at anywhere from seven to twenty dollars a book. They also bring the smallest ones to storytime, which not only lets the grownups talk with each other about parenting and other shared interests, but also provides the little ones with positive experiences in social settings and with rhyme, song, and text that will be crucial to helping them get ready for reading and schooling. (Storytime is very important for everyone, and is often the first experience a person gets of a library.)
There are teenagers and after school people here because they can't go home yet and they're not participating in anything that will keep them at school or elsewhere between school and when they can go home. Many of them game, draw, do homework, or check their social media sites with their access.
And then there's a group that, most broadly, has been affected by an outside force in their lives, and needs to adjust to the new reality. The low-stakes version of this is the person who has received a technological gadget, usually as a gift, and is now in a much higher-tech world than they were before, often without choosing to engage in it. A lot of people are concerned they will break the device, or that they will end up doing something that will cause their personal information to be stolen by nefarious actors. They don't know that devices these days are often locked to the point where it's really difficult to break them permanently, and that many of the things you can do to protect yourself are learnable. The library contains people who are generally closer to their age and who can explain the new device, offer the basics in how to use it, and provide context on what kinds of things can be done with it, including what the library offers for their new devices. Without sounding like these people are somehow less intelligent because they're not completely up to date on the latest tech.
There's a higher-stakes version of this group as well, and they tend to appear when the economy goes down, or if you're in an area that's not particularly affluent. Job-seekers use the library a lot, because we have internet access. Most job applications are online, and a person who last had to apply for a job when typewriters were the accepted technology is often lost trying to navigate creating job agents, profiles, recreating their resume, having an email address to receive replies to, and using networking and social media to source prospects, do research, and otherwise navigate the way the job world works now.
And then there's the unemployment insurance system to make sure that someone doesn't end up starving or homeless while they are looking for work. (Actually, libraries in general have a lot of people who are homeless and need a place to stay during the day when the shelters aren't.) And paperwork that someone might need to fill out for immigration purposes, or because they found work and have to get all those forms in. Or they're taking classes online and need someone to proctor their examinations so they can get a(nother) degree and find different work.
And that's the one that come to my location. Someone else may have a completely different mix of people and tasks they want to accomplish. Each library is composed of and reflects the community around it. Until you're in the middle of the community, you won't understand it fully. Library school gives a good go at what you can generally expect, but it often assumes that the people you're working with are going to be as good at things as you are...or that they know nothing at all, and neither of those options are really true.
