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silveradept[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.]
I enjoy making old technology work in new situations, and wringing every bit of performance that I can get out of a device so that I can keep using it until it well and truly dies. Every tablet I have owned has been part of the Nook line of tablets, because while they haven't been the fastest creatures in the tablet universe, they have been the cheapest, and each one has been flashable so that I can have them running some form of custom Android experience. I love that Raspberry Pi computers cam be used as media clients, appliances that can run messaging programs, or be transformed into system emulators that have enough power to remotely play streaming games from a computer. My very best find will be something slightly less than top of the line that can be popped open and modded so that it is the top is the line with some help from new software or firmware. For the longest time, my house router was a wireless GPS network router transformed with a new firmware into broadcasting itself strongly enough to cover the entire house and all the way or into the backyard. I've always had to work with severe budget constraints in mind, and so I've always been trying to come up with ways of making what I already have into something strong enough to work.
This makes me a bit of a good fit for the public library, as we get rid of technologies and formats much much more slowly than anyone else. The library has manual typewriters, even though word processor software is now than forty years old at this point. My system ditched the last of its cassette holdings in this decade, and VHS fully perhaps at the end of the last one, despite the format not really being available for a while before that. Despite two databases that we have had access to for years, we finally made the decision to stop purchasing the paper copies of automobile repair manuals. And so forth. Much of these decisions to retain old and outdated formats is because a not-insignificant portion of our user base is still using those technologies and is quite content with them. There are still plenty of cars with cassette tape players, after all, and while vinyl is on the upswing again as a format, it never really left in the first place. Other times, it's because the work being sought hasn't been published in a new form. If the thing you're looking for existed once in paper, and it hasn't been digitized in someone's project, then you're essentially stuck in microformats if you want to see the thing itself and how it's arranged (unless you are interested and able to take a trip to an archive where the thing itself is preserved, and even then, you may not be able to see the original unless you have a convincing enough research purpose for it. Microformats are relatively old, but they're also relatively stable. Our library might still have a singular microformat reader in the system for that reason, but digital collections are slowly starting to index the back catalogue and will hopefully provide a more searchable interface for this information. (The tradeoff is that those forms are subject to new issues like power surges, DDoS attacks, the running out of their funding, and bit rot. So old forms will not disappear entirely, because we have a lot of practice at preserving them and a demonstrated need to do so.)
However, the public library's users do not consist solely of people who are trying to control the pace of change in their lives or those looking to preserve or access the past. The library has to also serve a population that is trying to make sense of their right now, the current moment, and keep up with the popular culture and be literate and knowledgeable about the world around them. Which necessitates having much more current formats, such as compact discs and digital video discs, as well as downloadable versions of books, magazines, newspaper articles, government actions and proclamations, scientific material, and performed works. Having (or getting) this material, in addition to having people trained on how to get or and bring it to the library, cam be the difference between apathy and active allyship when the library has to go before the voting population to ask for sufficient money to keep the lights on and the people employed. Since there's so much of it, there has to be decisions made about what gets bought and circulated, and for how long, but we have a lot of people who use the library as an extension ox their own personal media libraries while they try to preserve as much of their money as possible so they aren't bankrupted by life (or their own body's needs).
A critical component of the public library that has not always had the most attention paid to it, though, is to look forward into the future and see what will be relevant to the community the library serves, as well as developing a rapid-response capability to produce and curate material and programming for a community in the aftermath of an unexpected event. (Regrettably, those events are usually tragedies in the community.) Public libraries are generally conservative institutions by practice, but that conservative outlook generates a gap of people who use the library. Children use the library because it's cheaper to borrow a book than to buy every one that might be interesting and then turn out to only be read once. They use it for homework help and to get some fun in their lives. Teenagers, mostly the same thing, but also because the library is a place they can socialize after school and before they have to go home. But once you get past teenagers, the adults that come to use the library fall into the categories of people that are looking for older formats, parents starting the cycle of readers with funfair own children, and adults that are looking to use our resources because their lives don't have them, whether by circumstance or by choice. Job-seekers and those looking to use the Internet are a large part of our adult user base. Cord cutters are slowly growing as part of that base, who don't mind waiting months for things if it means shucking their $80-100 monthly cable charge. (All the Game of Thrones fans also like us a lot because that means not having to pay for the premium cable offering on top of that.) As demographics change, public libraries need to adapt.
For example, the tragic events that sparked Black Lives Matter started a fierce discussion about police accountability and procedure. In most of our communities, the library's meeting space was a hot commodity for groups to organize, discuss, and have conversations all about what was going on, but many of our libraries did not actually host or have official programs on the matter. (Many of the libraries had concerns that hosting such things would be considered partisan and against the idea that libraries are neutral. That is another matter, but I don't think libraries have ever been neutral. Nonpartisan is probably the best to aspire to.) It took my own system nearly eighteen months before they decided that perhaps that's needed to be a group that would react and provide programs and lists for when something like a massive amount of sex scandals drop. Because we can be remarkably...something about believing that such things as police shootings are one-offs.
We were a little quicker about the increased attention being given to science education in schools and the general uptick in STEM as the next great fad, but that doesn't necessarily mean that every public library went out and trained their staff on science programming and rearranged their spaces to accommodate places to make and do creative works work various levels of technology. Not every place would necessarily need a three-dimensional printer, but plenty of places did a lot of looking at what they were doing and seeing if they could rebrand it as a STEM program, because they didn't have the budget to get anything new. (Because people seem to think public libraries can survive perfectly well with a budget that would make any other civic agency curl up in the fetal position and cry, in addition to the other parts about being a generally conservative agency.) But it was still mostly a youth-led thing - and youth services and teen services are usually more forward-looking than other departments, because we have to keep up with what the kids and teens are doing, and that includes trying to make coherent sense of Tumblr culture while it resembles an electron cloud governed by the Uncertainty Principle.
Library school likes to assume that people are coming in for well-defined information needs that are either timeless or well-documented. The actual reality is that people often come to the library because there's something there that's immediately relevant to their lives there. One of the best things a public library can do is figure out how to have something relevant to as many people as possible as much as possible.
I enjoy making old technology work in new situations, and wringing every bit of performance that I can get out of a device so that I can keep using it until it well and truly dies. Every tablet I have owned has been part of the Nook line of tablets, because while they haven't been the fastest creatures in the tablet universe, they have been the cheapest, and each one has been flashable so that I can have them running some form of custom Android experience. I love that Raspberry Pi computers cam be used as media clients, appliances that can run messaging programs, or be transformed into system emulators that have enough power to remotely play streaming games from a computer. My very best find will be something slightly less than top of the line that can be popped open and modded so that it is the top is the line with some help from new software or firmware. For the longest time, my house router was a wireless GPS network router transformed with a new firmware into broadcasting itself strongly enough to cover the entire house and all the way or into the backyard. I've always had to work with severe budget constraints in mind, and so I've always been trying to come up with ways of making what I already have into something strong enough to work.
This makes me a bit of a good fit for the public library, as we get rid of technologies and formats much much more slowly than anyone else. The library has manual typewriters, even though word processor software is now than forty years old at this point. My system ditched the last of its cassette holdings in this decade, and VHS fully perhaps at the end of the last one, despite the format not really being available for a while before that. Despite two databases that we have had access to for years, we finally made the decision to stop purchasing the paper copies of automobile repair manuals. And so forth. Much of these decisions to retain old and outdated formats is because a not-insignificant portion of our user base is still using those technologies and is quite content with them. There are still plenty of cars with cassette tape players, after all, and while vinyl is on the upswing again as a format, it never really left in the first place. Other times, it's because the work being sought hasn't been published in a new form. If the thing you're looking for existed once in paper, and it hasn't been digitized in someone's project, then you're essentially stuck in microformats if you want to see the thing itself and how it's arranged (unless you are interested and able to take a trip to an archive where the thing itself is preserved, and even then, you may not be able to see the original unless you have a convincing enough research purpose for it. Microformats are relatively old, but they're also relatively stable. Our library might still have a singular microformat reader in the system for that reason, but digital collections are slowly starting to index the back catalogue and will hopefully provide a more searchable interface for this information. (The tradeoff is that those forms are subject to new issues like power surges, DDoS attacks, the running out of their funding, and bit rot. So old forms will not disappear entirely, because we have a lot of practice at preserving them and a demonstrated need to do so.)
However, the public library's users do not consist solely of people who are trying to control the pace of change in their lives or those looking to preserve or access the past. The library has to also serve a population that is trying to make sense of their right now, the current moment, and keep up with the popular culture and be literate and knowledgeable about the world around them. Which necessitates having much more current formats, such as compact discs and digital video discs, as well as downloadable versions of books, magazines, newspaper articles, government actions and proclamations, scientific material, and performed works. Having (or getting) this material, in addition to having people trained on how to get or and bring it to the library, cam be the difference between apathy and active allyship when the library has to go before the voting population to ask for sufficient money to keep the lights on and the people employed. Since there's so much of it, there has to be decisions made about what gets bought and circulated, and for how long, but we have a lot of people who use the library as an extension ox their own personal media libraries while they try to preserve as much of their money as possible so they aren't bankrupted by life (or their own body's needs).
A critical component of the public library that has not always had the most attention paid to it, though, is to look forward into the future and see what will be relevant to the community the library serves, as well as developing a rapid-response capability to produce and curate material and programming for a community in the aftermath of an unexpected event. (Regrettably, those events are usually tragedies in the community.) Public libraries are generally conservative institutions by practice, but that conservative outlook generates a gap of people who use the library. Children use the library because it's cheaper to borrow a book than to buy every one that might be interesting and then turn out to only be read once. They use it for homework help and to get some fun in their lives. Teenagers, mostly the same thing, but also because the library is a place they can socialize after school and before they have to go home. But once you get past teenagers, the adults that come to use the library fall into the categories of people that are looking for older formats, parents starting the cycle of readers with funfair own children, and adults that are looking to use our resources because their lives don't have them, whether by circumstance or by choice. Job-seekers and those looking to use the Internet are a large part of our adult user base. Cord cutters are slowly growing as part of that base, who don't mind waiting months for things if it means shucking their $80-100 monthly cable charge. (All the Game of Thrones fans also like us a lot because that means not having to pay for the premium cable offering on top of that.) As demographics change, public libraries need to adapt.
For example, the tragic events that sparked Black Lives Matter started a fierce discussion about police accountability and procedure. In most of our communities, the library's meeting space was a hot commodity for groups to organize, discuss, and have conversations all about what was going on, but many of our libraries did not actually host or have official programs on the matter. (Many of the libraries had concerns that hosting such things would be considered partisan and against the idea that libraries are neutral. That is another matter, but I don't think libraries have ever been neutral. Nonpartisan is probably the best to aspire to.) It took my own system nearly eighteen months before they decided that perhaps that's needed to be a group that would react and provide programs and lists for when something like a massive amount of sex scandals drop. Because we can be remarkably...something about believing that such things as police shootings are one-offs.
We were a little quicker about the increased attention being given to science education in schools and the general uptick in STEM as the next great fad, but that doesn't necessarily mean that every public library went out and trained their staff on science programming and rearranged their spaces to accommodate places to make and do creative works work various levels of technology. Not every place would necessarily need a three-dimensional printer, but plenty of places did a lot of looking at what they were doing and seeing if they could rebrand it as a STEM program, because they didn't have the budget to get anything new. (Because people seem to think public libraries can survive perfectly well with a budget that would make any other civic agency curl up in the fetal position and cry, in addition to the other parts about being a generally conservative agency.) But it was still mostly a youth-led thing - and youth services and teen services are usually more forward-looking than other departments, because we have to keep up with what the kids and teens are doing, and that includes trying to make coherent sense of Tumblr culture while it resembles an electron cloud governed by the Uncertainty Principle.
Library school likes to assume that people are coming in for well-defined information needs that are either timeless or well-documented. The actual reality is that people often come to the library because there's something there that's immediately relevant to their lives there. One of the best things a public library can do is figure out how to have something relevant to as many people as possible as much as possible.
