06.29.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:24 am by Greg Landgraf
One of the earliest requests we had when we started AL Focus was to include transcripts of videos. We looked for an easy, elegant way to provide them… and didn’t find any.
We did, eventually, find a more mundane way, thanks to John Chrastka, ALA’s director of Membership Development, and Molly Sasajima of ALA Conference Services, who actually did the transcribing work. As a result, all of the AL Focus videos now have transcripts. To access them, simply click on the “Transcript” link in each video’s description. The transcript will open in a new tab or window, so the video will not be interrupted.
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06.24.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:46 pm by Bev Goldberg
It’s been nine days since Pres. Obama announced his administration’s nationwide “United We Serve” volunteer initiative, mentioning “reading to kids at your local library” as an example of how individuals and groups can boost local efforts toward improving education and community renewal, among other worthwhile projects. The library community, of course, is no stranger to harnessing volunteer energy; in fact, quite a few libraries big and small have passionate bibliophiles to thank for their beginnings.
What’s different today about library workers heeding the president’s call to recruit constituents to roll up their sleeves is the economic upheaval that has pushed libraries across the country—most recently in Ohio—into crisis mode. It’s abundantly clear that people love their libraries more than ever, and Wall Street ought to be envying the charts and graphs documenting the surge in libraries’ gate count and circulation stats.
What better time to channel that library love into sweat equity and spin it into advocacy?
That’s the meme of the visionary Carla Lehn of California State Library, who talked with American Libraries about that fiscally beleaguered state’s burgeoning library volunteer movement. Her nascent interest in retooling library volunteerism “all came to a head” when she read the 2005 “Long Overdue” report issued by Public Agenda with support from the Americans for Libraries Council and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Lehn was particularly struck by this finding: “Americans who are active in the community and vote regularly are more likely to have a library card and favor taxes to support libraries. These are also the people who local politicians are most likely to listen to. However, these highly engaged citizens are generally unaware of funding issues that threaten library services.”
So: People who are most likely support libraries at the ballot box are engaged in the community and more likely to get heard by local politicians. But those citizen-dynamos don’t realize how badly libraries need them.
Wow.
Another a-ha moment came when Lehn connected that “Long Overdue” finding to unrelated research indicating that, beginning with the graying baby boomer generation and continuing through successive generations, people are now volunteering at a greater rate than ever—but they are only interested in what they consider to be “meaningful work” related (unsurprisingly) to their hobbies and professional talents and skill sets.
Long story short, about a year after Lehn started training California librarians to “expand the way we think about volunteerism and bring people on that can do things we can’t done otherwise,” the ”Get Involved: Powered by Your Library” campaign launched its library link to the Volunteer Match database May 6. Within a month, Lehn revealed proudly, 100 California library systems (half of the public libraries statewide) had registered more than 500 volunteer opportunities. The project’s goal? Getting 50 libraries involved within a year. Not bad.
The California initiative places libraries at the virtual heart of service opportunities by providing citizens with a one-stop-shopping link to projects that suit their interests and talents. So, participating libraries burnish their cred as community information hubs as well as gaining team players to keep the library humming.
Obama’s “United We Serve” project can do the same on a larger scale. What are we waiting for?
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06.23.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:31 pm by Leonard Kniffel
Fresh from the launch of “
United We Serve” at the Fanwood Memorial Library in New Jersey, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan took time to do a “Newsmaker” interview for
American Libraries yesterday afternoon.
Arne Duncan
I chatted with Duncan for about 20 minutes, and he talked with conviction about the value of libraries and about the threats to funding they are facing across the country. He noted that funding cuts are ironically in inverse proportion to the rising demand for their services, which are essential to solving America’s financial and social problems.
The father of a 7-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son, Duncan’s faith in libraries and education is firm, but “our children today need more than we are giving them,” he said. Collaboration with other social service and nonprofit organizations is the key to library success, he believes. What a lot of young people need more than money, he added, “is our time.”
Calling it “a 19th-century concept . . . based on the agrarian economy,” Duncan talked about what a waste it is for schools to be in use only during the six-hour school day and the nine-month school year. What are schools trying to accomplish? he asked. “We have schools in every community in the country; they all have libraries, computer labs, gyms, some have pools,” and “they don’t belong to me or the principal, they belong to the community.”
Summer reading, as Duncan sees it, is a large part of the “Summer of Service” volunteering concept embodied in “United We Serve,” to avoid the “reading loss” that students typically experience over the summer months.
Duncan spoke eloquently about the value of libraries and the commitment of the Department of Education to supporting them, but when I pressed him about specific ways the Department of Education can really prevent plug-pulling on the state and local level, the best answer he could give was a sort of “we’ll do all we can.” There’s no denying that the federal agency has no real control over local decisions, and Duncan characterized the “tough economic times” as “a real test of leadership at every level” that would bring out innovation as well as struggle.
I asked Duncan how librarians and teachers can lobby for library services without seeming self-serving. “It’s not about being selfish or self-serving,” he responded. “It’s about demonstrating the difference you are making our students’ lives . . . in the lives of families and the community.” He said the Department of Education would “do whatever we can to let folks know that we have to keep . . . libraries open and staffed.”
A transcript of the interview will be published on American Libraries Online; the Newsmaker Q&A is scheduled for the August-September print issue of American Libraries.
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06.02.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:26 pm by Bev Goldberg
As the editor of American Libraries Online, I’m always on the lookout for news stories to research and develop about libraries and trends affecting them. Because libraries impact just about every aspect of society, there’s an impressive daily deluge to sort through, as the abundance of annotated links in our weekly e-newsletter American Libraries Direct attests.
However, the global economic crisis has turned that deluge into a fiscal tsunami for libraries, and has raised the threshold for what is newsworthy rather tellingly. There was a time when American Libraries would cover just about every threatened library service cutback or closure that the editors got wind of. In fact, libraries threatened with closure made national headlines in the general press: Even the New York Times covered the near-demise in 2005 of the Salinas (Calif.) Public Libraries, while American Libraries Online trumpeted its subsequent return to fiscal health after voters relented and agreed to properly fund the three-branch system. The library world was similarly startled by the six-month shutdown in 2007 of the Jackson County (Oreg.) Libraries due to the loss of federal logging-industry subsidies.
What makes news in any field is the unusual, the unimaginable, the offbeat. That’s what rivets readers. For the time being in libraryland, however, what used to be unimaginable has become all too commonplace. Several times a week, the editors of American Libraries see headlines and postings about yet another local governing authority looking to make ends meet by slashing library service hours, laying off staff—or even closing one or more branches. Closure threats come and go in cities like Hartford, San Diego, Concord, Memphis, Trenton, and Philadelphia. For those who like their crises serialized, there’s the annual deficit dance in New York City, which is currently in full swing.
Well, the ante has risen again on what constitutes a newsworthy library crisis. This month, American Libraries is following the quest for stable library funding at the state level in New Jersey, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, California, and Connecticut—with no telling where else red ink may run. New Jersey legislators are considering a bill backed by a municipal league to halve a barely sufficient third-of-a-mill funding formula only a year after the library community averted a similar attempt. Pennsylvania lawmakers have before them a choice of slashing state library aid by 50% or 5%; the state library association is willing to consider it a victory to retain FY2009 funding levels. In California, the May 19 defeat of five ballot initiatives has created budget chaos for public, academic, and school libraries as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger looks to balance the state books by taking back some local aid amid other cuts.
And so it goes. But there’s another aspect of all this that makes news each and every time: grassroots activism. That’s what kept the doors open in Philadelphia, Memphis, San Diego, and Trenton; what budget-makers in Concord and New York City are up against; and what state library associations elsewhere are tapping into as lawmakers wrangle over priorities. It’s what got the school librarians of Washngton State into the (albeit unfunded) definition of what constitutes a basic education and has lit a fire in the bellies of other library lovers. In this regard, public libraries are following hard on the heels of school library media programs, whose dedicated media specialists and aides have been fighting marginalization for decades. They may lose battles along the way, but always seem to come back swinging.
May the time soon come when I can once again regard as a man-bites-dog anomaly the occasional news tip about a threat to library funding.
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