I'm Engaged!

Review book reading, management team facilitation, a chat with the stranger next to me on the flight home, an 8 am web-based meeting I attend from my physical location in the neighborhood coffee shop--those have been the identities of some of my past few hours' worth of engagement(s) with a sampling of the communities that form and inform "my community." A decade ago, a library world peer argued with me that narrative has limitations; she was willing to admit to the universe of narrative comics, but games--nope. We dropped the argument then, and today I see that the shortsightedness was as much mine as hers. I continue to hold that games create narrative but, way more important, is that effective narrative--the book, the game, the film, the story--is effective when it is subject to engagement, just as conversations become true only when each conversant listens as well as speaks.

While working in Canada, I got to see just how basic the difference is between the American (US) cultural posture of community identity is from the Canadian. Americans prioritize their individualism, while Canadians perceive themselves as relevant parts of a "we." Blood mobiles that park in neighborhoods to encourage public donation in the US may sit unvisited for stretches of time--unless an identified individual from that community is publicly championed as the beneficiary of walkby donors. In Canada, reservations were doled out for appointments before the upcoming visit of the blood donation station to the library, yet the hall outside the donation room overflowed with those waiting to donate. Blood donation is viewed as an element of community support that underlies any local member's cultural identity. In short, engagement is communal rather than individualized and selective.

My new argument for my decade old interlocutor around the omnipresence of narrative is that it is only in the act of engagement that narratives, information, customer service, curation and any other
library-esque value is realized. Library service that suppresses engagement, demanding or at best suggesting that the "user" be a passive consumer, subvert the engagement required for any individual to understand her or his community value as well as the value of her or his various communities to the individual's own health and welfare.

Let Those Who Have Eyes

The announcement in PW of Lio's creator and cartoonist Mark Tatulli having a new middle grades graphic novel published has brought a nearly immediate knee jerk comment to the PW blog: why, the commenter doesn't wonder, do kids get yet another "dumbed down" offering in lieu of a "real" book?  announcement in PW

Such comments are rife, have been rife, and I suppose will continue to be rife wherever those who lack even an iota of imagination cannot make the step from literary text to literary image, from one artform to another. And damn both in their inability to be themselves "real" readers.

Readers bathe in a creation that provides information, story, image, pulse. Readers decode without consciously removing themselves from the what with which marks present themselves as being guideposts to the "real" meaning they provide. As Art Spiegelman is fond of noting, sequential art imitates the life of the mind by portraying through a flow that combines word and image, the very same as our thoughts wander from thought to reflection to question to insight.

Real readers don't denigrate other readers' experiential contact with the mind's eye.

A New View Refreshes Ugly Weeding Stories

I'm prepping to teach a weeding course again, an activity (the teaching about the why's and how's of weeding) I've undertaken at least annually during the past decade. This is a library training need that I wear like a hair shirt: I righteously believe in weeding and believe that it's possible and beneficial to teach as a set of skills--and confronting 50+ learners' anxieties and hatreds of the topic makes me burst out in a painful rash.

Blessed be, then, my discovery today of a somewhat off-topic infographic that might--might--ramp the next round of the course up a notch in the hearts and viewpoints of those who are sent to learn because they must weed. Published in the Digital Curation Centre's blog, it goes a good colorful way toward replacing images of dusty, ravaged and/or politically anachronistic books to show the life cycle of viable data itself.  Instead of arguing from the point of moral and geometric needs, it presents a course of habitual appraisal and reappraisal, with the community toward the center of the need to weed as well as to acquire.

Thanks, you smart folks across the Puddle!  I needed that!

The Power of Fiction

As a long time promoter of expert readers' advisory work requiring the advisor to move beyond "read alikes" that simplistically focus on genre alone, I am intrigued by this intelligent and insight provoking post by the author of serial killer novels. John Verdon gives consideration to the why and how beyond the popularity this subgenre within mystery and detection offers so many casual readers. His analysis reminds me, once again, that the power of fiction to address our needs to explore truths too complex or frightening to meet headon has been the underpinning of Greek tragedy, Biblical parables (including that LSD-like Book of the Revelation), and government propaganda writers from every political leaning. Narrative occurs in time sequence and it is through time that we train our brains to come to terms with what we wish vs what we know. Chasing through the pages (or screens) of a serial killer thriller gives the read the time to struggle with his or her own knowledge that death is inevitable but perhaps not an inevitable erasure of our lived experiences.

Diversity Isn't a Limitation

"Diversity," applied to information flow and management, is not less tricky and loaded a term than when used in the parlance of HR managers, history teachers, or mass transit planners. In the library world, my own concept of the slippery term is that every person, platform, media stream, language, capacity and motivation plays a role in a never-to-be-completed stram of possibilities. The stream, however, always requires refreshing from new tributaries. This week, I have come across two such feeders that require the attention of anyone seeking to walk a balanced beam across the diversity flood. The local TV station, KPIX, continues to upload videos to their Black Panthers archives (local source, originally local folks. And across the Atlantic, The European Library, a brilliant and broad consortium, opened its new website. Diversity=Think Global+Act Local.

Is Teamwork in Your Skill Set?

First, the where-I-am-coming-from context: in my library career, I've been supervised, supervised, managed (both collaboratively and top down), directed, gone freelance (at different ages and stages in my life),served on task forces, committees at the regional, state and national levels, chaired committees at the state and national levels, and served after being elected to regional, state and national boards, and executive committees of boards. Specific association and organization offices I have held and from which I have carried out regional, state and national responsibilities include President, Vice President, and Secretary (the last in several associations, probably as my just desserts for having been gobsmacked when, upon entering first grade, I learned that "secretary," a career named as future plan by a handful of classmates, was not a word applied only to a certain piece of mahogany furniture). Each of these functions has demanded the employment and refining of skills that may overlap, but don't just mirror, those of the other functions. Leadership has demands and responsibilities; working on a team, where leadership sits with another, or others, demands taking up different responsibilities. The demands on and responsibilities of those in library leadership positions(whether workplace or volunteer) consume tomes and gigabytes. What is entailed in being active and responsible team member has received less. Some of the skills a team member needs are defined by the policies and procedures of the workplace, the committee, the board, the whatever where a leader leads those members: maintaining one's responsibilities on public service points, making and keeping appointments on interview panels, speaking up when identified concerns are being addressed or plans for future projects are on the drawing table. Others, however, are subtle enough that those on professional teams--not leading them--may forget that there are, indeed, skills that require use. Among these: *Listening with an open mind to how the team leader interprets the team's charge *Speaking respectfully when in disagreement with the team leader and asking for clarity or consideration of alternatives *Keeping to the specifics of the team's purpose, rather than getting lost in the trees of discord, thereby withdrawing or subverting the team as such *Building bridges with other team members, as well as the team leader who, in truth, is more likely to be building bridges of her or his own rather than erecting stumbling blocks for those being led in a team effort In the best teams with a leader (and not all teams have elected or appointed leaders), that person's role differs from those of the members of the team. The leader/chair/executive/supervisor hasn't been annointed as greater among equals but is charged with tasks the members don't have, such as outward communication on the pace and shape of the task, responsibility for gaining tools or materials needed for team success, and yes, reminding the team about the project on the collective table, with all its parameters and connecting points to the work of others within the organization, however loose or formal that organization may be. I have yet to meet a team leader from whom I have learned nothing that I could take forward (although there have been a few team leaders who taught me stuff I should be on guard against ever using in her or his position). We are social animals, but, unlike bees, we aren't born to be queens or drones, so we need to make sure our toolbelts hold a wider range of experiences which we can use skillfully.

"wisest is he who knows that he does not know" (Socrates)

Diversity, equitable service and unbiased reception of the community have long been goals of public library service--so long, it sometimes seems, that policies, procedures and staff too frequently equate enunciating these terms with acting on them. Talking with public library staff about majority and minority culture, unconscious bias that leads to tangibly prejudiced behavior, and the differences between status and behavior has not lost a bit of its shiney newness across the past three decades. I teach a basic reference fundamentals course twice annually, and have for years, and I am thrilled to find that in the current cohort, there has been some deeper thinking about the differences between the status of homelessness and obstructive acts within the library building; between the diagnosis of mental illness and the willingness to help (or refuse to help) a client zero in on an information need/want. To the end of bringing more library staff aboard the reflective bus, I'm calling attention to Project Implicit, a research and training group tackling the thorny reality of unconscious thoughts, beliefs and behaviors that may render what we imagine to be acceptable standards into expressions of prejudice. Apply some rigorous self examination and explore the demonstration site, or even librarian up to add to the research data bank. You have nothing to lose but some hubris, and whatever community your library serves will be well served by some library staff self awareness.