civic engagement in the context of public libraries

November 22, 2011November 22, 2011 / shannonbarniskis / 1 Comment

I’ve spent most of my graduate school time thinking about civic engagement and libraries. Nearly all of my papers, including my thesis, have revolved around the concept of civic engagement. I’m not alone in this–Nancy Kranich and many other library rock stars are thinking about it as well. When I attended the Beyond Books summit at MIT last April, the conversation revolved around how libraries and journalists could support on another and their communities via civic engagement.

What I’m realizing is that there are a gazillion definitions of what civic engagement is. Most people see it as a behavior, or set of actions. A lot of the conversations at Beyond Books was about how to “get” people (especially kids) engaged. This feels like elitist do-gooder talk to me. I personally don’t want to “get” anyone to do anything (well, actually, I do, but I nobly attempt to repress this, at least at work. At home it’s “fetch my slippers, lackey!” Or at least I wish it were.)

Trust is the key to real, enduring engagement, because engagement can’t be forced. And trust scares a lot of people, because we don’t recognize a lot of what teens (and adults) do as civic engagement. It’s hard to trust that people will get from following a band to intelligent participatory democracy, but Putnam, Lin, Bordieau, etc. say that one leads to another. How can we be patient and trust this process without being pushy, judgmental, didactic? I heard a lot of questions at the conference that sounded like: “How do we get people to…” (emphasis mine). This may just be a loose language thing, but to me the use of the verbs like “get” implies force or coercion. (from my session notes from Beyond Books)

I’m more interested in facilitating engagement. As in “facility” or ease. I want to make it easy for people to engage, without forcing them to do anything. I want them to trust that I won’t manipulate them “for their own good.” I like how Erlich defines civic engagement as:

Working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes (p. vi).

The knowledge, skills, values and motivation for engagement are things that I can directly affect with library services. I can promote the quality of life in a community and make it easy for others to do so as well. I can also facilitate engagement behaviors and actions when I ask for volunteers, donations, advocacy, etc. In fact, I think public libraries are the gateway drug to civic engagement, or could be, if we as librarians worried less about the stinking books we offer and more about the possibilities of a free institution based on the concept of sharing.

So I get kind of crazy when I hear people talking about revenue and ROI and entrepeneurial librarianship. The whole model of libraries is that it’s not going to make money, but make community. I wrote a letter to the editor of Library Journal (which they didn’t publish, mind) when they printed this lame article called “for love or money.” I said libraries are what we have money FOR, and that talking about how libraries could MAKE money was missing the point entirely.

As an example (or an aside) let me rant about libraries that include “buy this book now” links in their catalog. They are certainly supporting an individualistic need for instant gratification (or a desire to own a great book, which is fine), but may be missing the community welfare aspect of sharing (which sometimes means that you WAIT YOUR FREAKING TURN). Individualism needs to be balanced with the needs of the community. In other words, buy enough copies of the book so your patrons don’t need to buy their own copy. If you don’t have enough money to buy the copies, the solution is not to sell things, but to facilitate engagement so your patrons will work on the behalf of the library to ensure that we have enough funding. We need to remind our patrons and communities why the public library version of “socialism” is far superior for everyone than the individualism that means only well-off people have access to information.

Anyway, it makes me particularly happy to see that CIRCLE came out with a study showing that civic engagement can strengthen the economy. How about love AND money? By building social capital and engaging, people network, gain skills, increase social trust which can lead to investment, etc. This is another way public libraries can economically support their communities: aside from the education, job training, business support, and resume assistance we all do everyday, we can also make it easy for people to engage.

If your library doesn’t already have a volunteer program, make one available. I don’t care about your union rules, just find a way for people to chip in. Can they write reviews, do fundraisers, offer training or lead programs?

If you don’t request donations, start. At our library we have a “wishlist” tree on our front desk every winter, where we have ornaments spelling out what we wish we could offer and someone can donate–magazine subscriptions, videogames, movies, etc.

Ask people to write letters to the editor (my situation the last few weeks was NOT based on this advice, but was accidental. Nevertheless, it was a great advocacy opportunity) and attend city council meetings on your behalf. Most people will be more willing to write letters than to speak up at a meeting.

Like many libraries, HPL does “food for fines” each year. We get many donations of food even from people who have no fines, and the often financially-strapped people with big fines can start the new year with a blank slate and use the library again. Some local librarians are irritated that we would accept their patron’s food donations in lieu of fines, so this year we’ve stopped clearing fines from other libraries. This is dumb. Not only is it a waste of staff time, it misses the points of food for fines: getting food for hungry people, and library materials for poor people. In my opinion, a librarian should not be so concerned about whether they are her poor people, or poor people from the next town over. I could list another 10 reasons why it’s ridiculous to not want fines to be paid this way, but I’ll save that for another post. Let me just say that food for fines is a good way to get people engaged in ensuring that everyone has enough to eat.

Sometimes facilitating engagement is extra work for already over-burdened librarians. But if our missions are something like this:

Our Mission: To enrich the lives of all our community members with free access to programs, materials and services that empower, educate and inspire.

than we should consider ways we can enrich, empower, educate and inspire engagement as part of our day-to-day jobs.

Subscribe to ALA’s Civic Engagement listserv:

Go to: http://lists.ala.org/wws
Click on “View All Lists”
Scroll down to “deliberate@ala.org”
Click on “Subscribe”

Imagining America

July 16, 2011July 16, 2011 / shannonbarniskis / 2 Comments

Very cool conference coming up:

Imagining America: What Sustains Us?
Macalester College and the University of Minnesota
September 22-24, 2011

I think I’ll be going. Some of the excellent sounding workshops include:

Community Knowledge Collaboratory Workshop
Sustaining Sustenance: Engaging Food in Community Design Collaboration
Tertiary Artists Training and the Public Practice of Art for the 21st Century
Sustaining Culture and Local Economies through Public Engagement in Rural Communities

My only quibble: As always, libraries appear to be left out of the mix. It’s frustrating that libraries are the forgotten institution. During the protests in Madison, the only people mentioning libraries were librarians. During exciting discussions of how civic engagement can be facilitated in our communities, libraries are rarely mentioned (with the exception of the fantastic Beyond Books summit at MIT this April, which I was thrilled to be able to attend–thanks IMLS fellowship!)

It’s our own stupid fault–as librarians we have latched so firmly onto the codex book as our raison d’être that other institutions and the public have a hard time seeing us in any other context. While librarians know how important civic engagement has been in the public library mission, guess how many people in the general populace know that? Or, if they’re teens, how many even know what civic engagement is (right now in my research the teens, ages 12-18 are 0 and 09 for even knowing the definition of civic engagement!)

Oh well. Anyone want to go to this conference with me?

Why art in libraries?

July 13, 2011November 30, 2013 / shannonbarniskis / 3 Comments

In my rural public library and in libraries nationwide, the arts are alive for teens, adults, and children. Librarians are fostering engagement through creation, offering the resources for people to come together to create both art and community. Libraries are shifting from content aggregates to content creation spaces. They’re spotlighting the talents and vision of the people who live in the community.

In rural communities libraries are waiting in the wings where there are often no other arts or economic development institutions in place. In urban communities, libraries are increasingly acting as a meeting place for people to find new inspiration, to create things together, and to spark ideas off of one another. The result: everything from small businesses to hand-knit sweaters.

I am currently working on research examining how art programs in public libraries affect teens, specifically their sense of civic and community engagement. In my library I’ve observed teens coming together to make things—sushi, or paintings, or jewelry, it doesn’t matter—and finding an affinity with people they’ve never interacted with before. They construct clans of active, curious people. No apathetic cartoon teens here; they are fully engaged with each other and their community through the library.

I am convinced that the public library, an institution ideally unmediated by pedagogy, consumerism and religion, is in a position to ensure that access to information and transformation is available to all. Once community members realize that the library is about ideas, not books, they can use the resources and public spaces in the ways that serve them best. One example of this use is illustrated by the executive director of the Progressive Technology Product, speaking at the Brooklyn Public Library about empowering people to be “generators of governance rather than consumers of government” during a Brooklyn Public Library food festival that honored culinary skill and the ethnic history of the neighborhood. Hill wrote that the library was the perfect venue for programs on both creative endeavors and community organizing because:

“Public space is a rarity, and the library is an apt symbol of freedom, democracy, and access to the information that community organizers need. Generally, people perceive libraries to be buildings full of knowledge stored in volumes, but at this event the knowledge was really stored in people’s heads…Librarians have the skills to engage their community by designing the information resources they need. Librarians also have the skills to train their patrons to make their own information resources.”

For sustainable economic and cultural abundance in rural and urban communities, libraries offer an infrastructure that is already in place, and librarians that are passionate about ideas. I’m one of those librarians, and I believe that the intersection of art, local knowledge and libraries is the perfect storm for empowering communities, economically and culturally, that otherwise struggle with their identities.

at the same time

a public library-focused blog discussing policy, research, creative spaces, social justice, and whatever else I feel like talking about

civic engagement

civic engagement in the context of public libraries

Imagining America

Why art in libraries?