Not only are we hearing this message from outside of the profession, but we are also hearing it in our own messaging within the profession.  I think my biggest objection to this line of thinking is that it doesn’t honestly reflect the complexity of changes going on inside libraries or information management today.

Our role in the new media

 An excellent article in the current issue of Harvard Magazine , Gutenberg 2.0 offers up fascinating insights into the  evolution of library services, as so many of us in the field try to look forward and consider what the future of library services for students and patrons might look like.  Changes in media are affecting all of our services, and the way we interact with print and with our patrons, as Dan Hazen of Harvard College points out.

“Internet search engines like Google Books fundamentally challenge our understanding of where we add value to this process,” says Dan Hazen, associate librarian of collection development for Harvard College. Librarians have worked hard to assemble materials of all kinds so that it is “not a random bunch of stuff, but can actually support and sustain some kind of meaningful inquiry,” he explains. “The result was a collection that was a consciously created, carefully crafted, deliberately maintained, constrained body of material.”

I love the wording he chooses here–that materials can be assembled to support and sustain meaningful inquiry.  When we are working with students, while we both acknowledge and value the contributions of Google to our ability to offer resources to students, we also know that it broadens their choices in a somewhat haphazard fashion with little structure or form.  (Which of course can be a good and a bad thing.)   As users, web 2.0 tools allow us to impose our own structure and organization to those materials, which is a plus in terms of flexibility.  But when working with  students whose ability to sort flotsam from jetsum is somewhat unsophisticated, this can be challenging.

Hazen puts it eloquently:

“Internet search explodes the notion of a curated collection in which the quality of the sources has been assured. ‘What we’re seeing now with Google Scholar and these mass digitization projects, and the Internet generally,’ says Hazen, ‘is, ‘Everything’s out there.’ And everything has equal weight. If I do a search on Google, I can get a scholarly journal. I can get somebody’s blog posting….The notion of collection that’s implicit in ‘the universe is at my fingertips’ is diametrically opposed, really, to the notion of collection as ‘consciously curated and controlled artifact.’”

As school librarians, we see a tremendous need for helping students sort through that “universe at their fingertips” environment(as do their teachers).   How do students recognize signposts that something is a blog site or a biased think tank or a fradulent site?   How do they sort the ephemera from what’s important on topics they only understand at a surface level?   At the school level, students may be savvy at the tools themselves, but the thinking involved in really analyzing, evaluating and sorting through information are learned, not innate skills.

Hazen goes on to discuss another dilemma our students face as readers–in traditional print sources (newspapers, magazines, books) information was organized on the page in a purposeful way, often in context with other articles or chapters to build a sense of a whole work.

“When you get into the Internet world, you tend to get a gazillion facts, mentions, snippets, and references that don’t organize themselves in that same framework of prominence, and typology, and how stuff came to be, and why it was created, and what the intrinsic logic of that category of materials is. How and whether that kind of structuring logic can apply to this wonderful chaos of information is something that we’re all trying to grapple with. . . .”

And where does this leave us as librarians trying to help students make sense of this environment?   Hazen  :  “For librarians, and the library, trying to straddle these two visions of what we’re about is something that we’re still trying to figure out.”

Embedded librarians?

Some of the Harvard libraries (as we all are) are trying to sort out what that future looks like, both in terms of dealing with the changing organization of the actual materials and in terms of the use of research materials and the librarian’s role in that.

For example, Isaac Kohane, director of the Medical Library at Harvard Medical School, sees a troubling weakness in the abilities of medical professionals to plumb the mounting amounts of information available to them primarily because they aren’t familiar with the ways to extract that information from databases designed to collect such specialized content and in some cases don’t even know these databases are there for them.  This realization has led to:

“growing awareness of the need to have an “information-processing approach to medicine baked into the core education of doctoral and medical students.” Otherwise, Kohane says, “we’re condemning them to perpetual partial ignorance.”

Embedding information searching abilities and knowledge of databases right into the core content of the field reflects a change in librarianship that Harvard is seeing in another areas as well.   Librarian and law professor John Palfrey “scrapped the entire organizational structure”  of the Law Library.  All the librarians turned in their resignations for new roles and the library started over, embedding librarians within the law school, some teaching research alongside professors, some developing new technologies to sort and organize legal data, etc.

Palfrey, who once headed up Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society comments:

“The role of the librarian is much greater in this digital era than it has ever been before.” (italics mine)     Good lawyers need to be good at information processing, and Palfrey found in research for his book Born Digital that students today are not very good at using complex legal databases. “They try to use the same natural-language search techniques” they learned from using Google, he says, rather than thinking about research as “a series of structured queries.

It’s not that we don’t need libraries or librarians,” he continues, “it’s that what we need them for is slightly different. We need them to be guides in this increasingly complex world of information and we need them to convey skills that most kids actually aren’t getting at early ages in their education. I think librarians need to get in front of this mob and call it a parade, to actually help shape it.”

The executive director of knowledge and libraries at Harvard Business School, Mary Kennedy “sees libraries as belonging to a partnership of shared services that support professors and students.”  “We’re all part of the same partnership and we have to figure out how to work better together.”

During a Twitter discussion a few days ago, two of my education colleagues suggested a model of librarianship(and tech coordinator-ship) that were more embedded.

A model

This concept of embedding librarianship within departments is intriguing at best, but problematic from a pragmatic standpoint.  Because as Buffy Hamilton wisely illustrates in her blog post, If It’s Broken, Let’s Fix It, it’s hard to scale the kind of involvement with students it would require across all instructional areas.  

There are schools that have emulated a more workable model, however, like New Trier in the Chicago area.   New Trier has a bank of 8.2 FTE librarians(for over 4000 students at 2 campuses), who are embedded in various departments at the high school, explains librarian Judy Gressel.  Each librarian is considered faculty-librarian and develops “a liason relationship” to a particular department and attends department meetings, facilitating collaboration and working closely with teachers.

Now whether or not that is feasible funding wise for other schools, it is a best practices example of how more embedded librarianship could look at the high school level–where the teacher role and curriculum advisor role of the librarian is of primary importance.

These are issues all of us in the profession are having to consider deeply.  The question isn’t is our profession dying–the question is–what works, and how do we leverage what we do and what we know in the best interest of our students’ education and future information needs?

A conversation worth continuing to have….

You can follow some of the discussion here:

The Uncertainty of Professional Persistence

Touching Some Nerves

Dangerously Irrelevant Libraries

I have more to say about the discussion, but first, I thought it would be enlightening to take a look at statistics about library use. There are presumptions I make, working in a very busy school library, that might not reflect the trends as a whole, for example.  I’m not sharing these to be defensive, but more to inform the discussion and out of my own curiosity about what the research is showing.

A library use survey  of teens conducted by Harris Interactive (2007) sheds some light on the subject.   While the survey is two years old, another study of youth use of libraries shows that young people  have been a significantly high portion of library users for the last 75 years or so, which implies to me that the study is recent enough to consider.

Some interesting details I gleaned from the Harris study:

• only 12% of those surveyed had NOT visited a public or school library in the last year.
• about 60% visit a library website at least once monthly, ( 16 %  of that visit one weekly.)
• about 80% visit their school library at least once a month, while a whopping 40% surveyed visit a couple of times a week or more.

Another report, the 2009 State of America’s Libraries, illumined these statistics:

• “Children are among the heaviest users of public-library resources. Children’s materials accounted for 35 percent of all circulation transactions, and attendance at library-based children’s programs was 57.8 million. “

• “Individual visits to school library media centers increased significantly at the schools that responded to both the 2007 and 2008 surveys: up 22.7 percent for the 50th percentile, up 12.5 percent for the 75th percentile, and up almost 25 percent for the 95th percentile. There were no major year-to-year differences in the responses with regard to the other variables. “

    So, whatever is happening with the future of libraries,  children and young adults are clearly using both public and school  libraries frequently.  So before we conclude that libraries are a dying breed, or going the way of the “buggy whip makers”(grins to Scott McLeod), the statistics do have significant things to tell us about that perception.

I definitely do not deny that we need to be doing serious thinking about what libraries will look like and how we will serve children and young adults as our libraries evolve, as I wrote about in a post a couple of weeks ago.   I think it will be fascinating to see what evolves, what sticks, and what transforms.  But I also want to ground some of the discussion in the present–again, not in a defensive, “libraries will never change” mindset, but just to acknowledge the vivid usage that libraries have by children and young adults currently.

Our roles are already transforming, of course, lest there be some perception that librarians have sat idly by in their buggy while the world whips past them in sports cars  

And in the midst of that, I find myself more of a hybrid these days,  but that is fodder for my next post.

Photo credit:   http://www.flickr.com/photos/bertha/13433635/

One of the most fascinating points they make is that “We have no textbook for what 21st century school library practice looks like.”  And obviously if we have no “textbook” or guide for that, principals, superintendents and other curriculum administrators don’t either.

I’m sure AASL and other professional organizations have been working on gathering this model, conferences like Internet Librarian (Schools)  have also been on the forefront of this mission, and journals like School Library Journal provide a vision. 

But what I’d like to know from you, my readers, is what does a 21st century library or librarian look like to you?  What’s the facility like?  Is there a facility at all?  What does the librarian do?  What skills does he/she have?  What tools does he/she use?  

Share an anecdote, list qualities, point us to some fabulous library webpages–or anything that says 21st century librarian.  I hope whether you are a librarian or not, you will contribute to building this picture.

In his post, “Who are Your Competitors” David Lee King ponders this subject, asking “What are you doing to compete for your patrons’ attention?”

King is a public librarian, but many of the same questions apply to us in school libraries, as evidenced from the conversation last week.  He offers some powerful suggestions such as growing your community, rearranging your “stuff” so that it is easier to find, etc.

That idea of really serving your community or meeting them where they live reminded me of a recent article in the Denver Post about the Adams County libraries giving up the Dewey Decimal system for a more bookstore based shelving system. ( In our newly designed library, we didn’t give up Dewey but we gave up Dewey signage in exchange for bookstore based signage.)  Their choice was based on the needs of their patrons, comments director Pam Sandlian Smith.   “For years, we’ve had focus groups and people consistently tell us, ‘I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how this library works,’ ” Sandlian Smith said. “So we decided to turn things upside down, and so far it seems to work well.”

King similarly writes about the influence of/competition from bookstores to our services, and challenges us to learn from them. I also wonder what bookstores are learning from libraries? I saw evidence of one thing yesterday when I was at Borders and ran across flyers for kids for their summer reading program, encouraging kids to read eight books in exchange for some savings on a purchase. And just marveled again at how sometimes bookstores are doing what we do better than we do it, or because our consumer base is more commercially oriented than it once was, they are attracting the patrons/customers that we once did. And they have the added ambiance of music and coffee
Which really aren’t hard things to bring into our libraries, either.

But then again, when I walk into the public library near my home, it’s as busy if not busier than the bookstore is. And certainly in terms of storytime and reading programs, they are swamped. And our school libraries seem far more involved with engaging patrons via technology than the bookstore which frequently barely has a few working computers. For example, a bookstore could be running book trailer videos on their computers, inviting patrons to review books or post things in the store or create a quick book review video or podcast in the store for other customers to watch–making it a much more interactive experience, which is one thing both school and public libraries excel at.  So we both have things to learn from one another.

King does ask many valuable questions that translate into school library questions.

How do we make things more digitally accessible? How do we reach out to our patrons/staff when they have laptops or computers in every room? How do we build a community either in person or through our websites or emails or whatever method works? How do we make our physical space community oriented? How do we involve teachers more, because that involves our students more by default? What services are wanted? (at our campus, one of our more popular services is having a set of textbooks that students can “borrow” during lunches to use in the library–it can be low tech, too!)   How are we incorporating student interests/habits into our space?  Do we allow access to sites that are their bread and butter?  How do we engage them?

So, what are you doing to compete for your patrons’ attention?

Demise of library services as we know them? Will people still want to go to a place if they can get the item via their mailbox? (of course, it’s not free, you have a monthly fee, so the library is still a better deal !)

Similarly, I read in the NYTimes several articles relating to the demise of newspapers and/or magazines, including a touching one about the importance Bostonians have placed on their beloved and threatened Boston Globe, one about magazines raising their prices, and one about “hyperlocal” websites that bring aggregated local news to you customized for your location, and lastly a very telling one about newspapers and the AP attempting to control online content. Wes Fryer has been writing about this as well.

An armload of signs that are all pointing in the same direction–major change is on the horizon, driven by the economy as the tipping point. What will be telling is what communities fight to save–like the Boston Globe, and what things we let go. It will say something about us as a culture.

But more pertinent to this post is what is all of this going to mean for libraries? We are really at a tipping point? How much print content do we embrace and how much digital? When are our customers ready for what? What should we be willing to pay for if our students/staff mainly use “Google”? What will all this move to digital look like from a profit standpoint from publishers and providers that have excellent content?

So, renting books online….should we be mailing books to our students instead of them coming to us? sending them digital books via email? Only subscribing to magazines and newspapers online and not buying print ones? buying Kindles?

Yet students flock to our doors, check out more books than before, and use digital and books interchangeably. There is some need for a “campfire” to circle around for students. A place to be, to interact with books and knowledge and information….and to talk and hang out and do homework and get help when they need it.

On the other hand, I’ve found the teachers are somewhat more sequestered in their rooms with their own computers, so how do we reach them as well?

This is a mixed-up post which reflects the confusion over what direction to take.  It should be an interesting next few years.

I’d be really interested in views from my online learning community about these questions! What do you think?  Which way DO we go?

crafty184 “I really would like to figure out something I’d need to ask a reference librarian because Google can’t provide the answer.”

I jokingly responded a question Google probably can’t answer: “Where is the pencil sharpener?”

But there’s a point to my joke. Maybe a library is more than just questions we ask a reference librarian?

In any case, I think for our profession, there is both a shift, and not a shift, needed.

What do our patrons want from us as librarians? It’s different for public libraries than school libraries, obviously.

For one thing, in a school, the library serves as a sort of social hub for learning, no matter what that learning looks like. It has areas where large groups of students can gather, lots of computers and other equipment, books for leisure reading or research, etc. And it’s a place to just hang out, which most school buildings don’t have enough of. So maybe one thing they want is an inviting and friendly place with books and tables and chairs and a staff that is fine with them gathering there.

I think the offline dimension to library use is important.

So what else is our role? Does it also become an increasingly online one? Perhaps. As we encounter students on Facebook, our blogs, email, websites, etc.–we do find additional ways to reach out and interact with students.

Chris also tweeted — wondering if librarians just Google the answers and give them to patrons. Yes, sometimes we do because perhaps we know how to find something more effectively, or how to use the advanced search, which not every customer does

There is also somewhat of a presumption in the techno-literate world that students or teachers (or just the general public) knows how to find everything online.

They don’t. Many people do–but many don’t. And I’m not just saying this in defense of librarians.

Sometimes we know to use other tools–like we also know to go to a database for a back-dated magazine article, or we know what book has an incredible day by day timeline of the 1960′s, or we know that to upload a music file to Photostory it has to be an mp3.

It’s one of those things where you start out with a certain expertise, but because it’s what you do all day long, you build this knowledge bank of your own–a skillset of “how-tos’ and a mindset of how to find things the most efficient way.

At a school, our role is also that of educator. We don’t just need to find the information for the patron(student or teacher), but our goal is to help model for them how we found it, and how we think about finding it, so that they can become more independent researchers with more skills of their own.

One example I have is that recently we have been working on our Vietnam Wall project, where sometimes students are trying to piece together information about a soldier’s life with not too much data to go on, since they lived “pre-Internet.” So it’s my job to help them develop detective skills–like using their powers of deduction to figure out where the soldier went to high school, and then trying to locate yearbooks there so someone can scan a picture for the student’s memorial. Or using their powers of deduction to locate a county Veteran’s museum which might have information that could be sent to them.

Because most students just haven’t been through this sort of real research process, they don’t necessarily have the insights into ways to locate the information. So my role is to coach and encourage them to get creative in their research rather than “just” relying on googling the soldier’s name.

When we as librarians help students think, that is a true measure of our success.

Now, does this really answer Chris’s tweet above? Maybe not. But I like to think of reference librarians as the tweet-osphere for non-Tweeters. Throw out a question and you will get an answer from the great library collaborative. Questions that you need help with may be few and far between, but when you need to know, just like Twitter, the “great collaborative” of reference librarians is there, whether in person or virtually.

I take his point though. The world of information is changing very rapidly, allowing more do-it-yourself research. And we do need to be clear on who we are in that world, what our value-added is, and how to tell our story effectively.

Photo Credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cpchen/489108760/

At NECC, I was fortunate enough to meet David Loertscher(guru in library field!), who shared with me his new book, The New Learning Commons:  Where Learners Win, cowritten with Carol Koechlin and Sandi Zwaan, which provides an innovative vision of how to transform a library into a “learning commons.”

The authors suggest a more client-centered space, more “Google” than “Microsoft,” and envision a team of school leaders(librarian, tech coordinator, literacy specialists) working together with students in an ever-changing configuration of services and support.

They describe an “open commons”-a friendly open learning space, where “everyone owns, works, and collaborates in a collegial social environment.”

Another space in the commons is an “experimental learning center” which hosts training and display of exemplary work in the school, supports professional development, and is a “learning lab” for the school.

The website for the Learning Commons is similarly collaborative–supported by the librarian and tech coordinator jointly, but built collaboratively also with the help of students, teachers, etc.

Rather than being supported by one librarian, the center is supported by various staff who make up a leadership team, scaffolding the curriculum.

It reminds me somewhat of the model Kim Cofino has worked on at ISB.

It’s a fascinating model–and in a great web 2.0 model, the authors have established  a wiki for readers to contribute comments or discussion points.

How that trickles down to school libraries is the question? And how do we advocate for the “21st century” library?

Julia Keller had an interesting column in the May issue of American Libraries, “Killed By Kindness,” pointing out that we can’t simply advocate for libraries because of the warm fuzzy memories of the libraries of our past. (Since I misplaced my copy of the magazine at the pool, I’m working from memory, so I hope that attribution is correct!) We need to advocate for the libraries of today–an information commons for students filled with activities, technology use, reading, and connecting with people–a social information network area of sorts.

Fran has shared a great list of resources for library advocacy. But one of the most important things I’ve read regarding advocating for school libraries this year was Debra Kay Logan’s article in American Libraries’ January issue, “Putting Students First.”

Logan points out,

“To become effective advocates, our profession must shift the focus of our messages from speaking out about school libraries to promoting and supporting student learning and achievement. Student success is the business of school. Student learning is at the core of meaningful advocacy messages. To be effective school library advocates, we must advocate for students.”

She points out the importance of our stakeholders understanding the reasons to advocate for our programs–our customers need to see the value that is added.

One strategy she suggests is not just reporting data of achievements, but sharing student feedback and comments in their own words, frequently. When students and teachers know that you are not only interested in what they have to say about learning in the library, but that you are sharing it and honoring their statements, then it can be very powerful.

As Logan points out the benefit is also that: “When students are asked about what they learn and how they are going to use it after instruction, metacognition about learning takes place: students reflect on learning and its importance.”

Students are the point, after all. So, how can we make our library services more 2.0, and then how can we tell that story better?

The other morning, several of us — Kristin Hokanson, Jenny Luca, and Robin Ellis and others were debating how to reach out to librarians (or teachers) who were reluctant adopters of technology.   We concluded that there are several factors at work and some possible solutions:

–encouraging or providing funds for librarians to attend library conferences or tech conferences with library strands that have a high tech presence (like AASL, ALA, NECC, Internet Librarian Schools, Tech Forum, etc.)  and are motivating.

–engaging more reluctant librarians like we would reluctant teachers by sharing how these tools can help them personally–to keep track of their personal stocks, travel info, their child’s college news, whatever that might be helpful to them personally. 

Turning librarians onto supportive environments like Teacher Librarian Ning or Library2.0 Ning or even flickr’s 365 libs projects are ways to get them interested and to help them find supportive colleagues.

–Recognizing that librarians often don’t have any assistance, and are tasked with many roles–from being managers of a facility to teaching to purchasing.  So the tools we entice newbies with need to be ones that add efficiency, build community and support for librarians without staff, and that are easy to use.  

–Starting with one focal point–like what would matter most to their particular library program?  Does the librarian do booktalks–then maybe podcasting is the place to start.  Does the librarian do lots of lists of good websites–then wikis would be a good jumping off point.   Just as with teachers, we have to meet people where their concerns are.

As we talked on Twitter, we also felt like education schools have a part to play, both in training librarians to work with technology(which most of them do) but also, and of importance, in training teachers about 21st century research skills and collaboration with librarians.   

How many teacher training programs address research projects with students and how the library and tech departments on a campus fit into those projects, and the importance of collaboration?   (For that matter, how many administrative programs really train principals in the kinds of support a library program can bring to their curriculum?  How many are trained in using the librarian as a researcher or support person administratively?)

Sometimes it feels as a librarian that you have to convince teachers, even new ones, of how your role can complement and support what they do.   So having new teachers or new administrators come in with a better idea of how the different roles interact is important too.

I tend to think of librarians as a real curricular partner on the campus.  Many campuses have no other curriculum-type generalist–no one else who has an eye on all the curriculum in terms of supporting it at the campus level.    That ability to connect teachers to one another, connect kids to ideas and materials, and to see how curricular areas overlap is fairly unique to the librarian and technology coordinator.   It’s helpful to have some player on campus who can see the “big picture” so to speak, instead of their own individual curriculum, and many librarians play this role for their campuses.

So it is significant that they be involved with understanding the power of embedding different technologies into projects, and that they continue to learn and grow just like every other professional on campus. 

Thanks twittees for the interesting conversation!

   Mitchell Joel’s interesting Six Pixels of Separation blog comments on a fascinating article in the Economist, “The New Oases,” about how people now are much more nomadic in their use of spaces.  (I found Joel’s blog via Garr Reynold’s excellent Presentation Zen blog).

Wi-fi, mobility,  and portability allow people to connect wherever they go, and so people gravitate to both indoor and outdoor spaces where they can conveniently “connect” or gather.

As the architect professor William Mitchell points out:

“The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is ‘a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces’ such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously ‘a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces’. . . . The new architecture, says Mr Mitchell, will ‘make spaces intentionally multifunctional.’

These seem very significant things to be thinking about as we continue to design new libraries and school buildings.   Are they flexible?  Are spaces multi-purpose?  Are there ad-hoc gathering areas?  Separate nooks for individual laptop work?   Wi-fi and open networks?   How are nearby outdoor spaces used? 

School libraries can function as these sort of information commons in schools–providing this sort of flexibility and multi-purposing.

But eventually this sort of design should filter throughout the school–with comfortable learning nooks for students to gather, as the article describes at the new Gehry designed student building at MIT whose “student street”

“ is dotted with nooks and crannies. Cafés and lounges are interspersed with work desks and whiteboards, and there is free Wi-Fi everywhere. Students, teachers and visitors are cramming for exams, flirting, napping, instant-messaging, researching, reading and discussing.”

Sometimes it seems that school building designs are impervious to the changes in the culture outside the building.   But as Mitch Joel points out,

“We have all become Digital Nomads. Able to work wherever we’re feeling most inspired (as long as there is wi-fi). I wonder how the masses will deal with this?”

What I wonder is how schools will deal with this?