Tag Archives: refugees

More on ECHO Refugee library and “supply chain” library management

I read this week about Simon Cloudesley, who “strode 114 miles from the Bodleian in Oxford, England, to the British Library in central London to raise thousands of pounds” for ECHO, the library for refugees in Greece that I wrote about in my last post.  I thought that was really wonderful and wanted to pass the story along to all of you.

The other thing I want to share is an article in American Libraries about how Georgia Tech’s dean of libraries has reorganized the technical services department using “supply chain” theory. Dean Murray-Rust explains, “Staff members will be able to switch from managing interlibrary loans to creating basic archival records, from processing reserves to ordering online, as demand necessitates. Employees are learning how to manage more than 10 library systems, rather than one or two.” Quick aside for you non tech services types: that’s the department in a library that manages the acquisition, cataloging, and processing (labeling, covering, barcoding, security taping, etc.) of print and digital materials, including purchases, patron-driven acquisitions (which are sort of temporary loans that trigger a purchase if patrons use the item 3 times), and subscriptions, including newspapers, magazines, and databases.

Obviously Georgia Tech is much larger than my university and has more libraries, but I was intrigued by this. We have a pretty small staff, and we often face having to come up with backup plan for tasks that only one or two people know how to do when someone is out on vacation. We’ve improved on this with a lot of cross training, but people mostly still work on just one aspect of technical services on a day to day basis. I’m thinking this supply chain style would mean total cross training. Anyone could do anything. It sort of sounds like what people do on a given day would depend on the greatest need that day.

On the user services side, they’re going with “portfolio management,” and transitioning their entire organizational structure, “The biggest challenge to our transformation was organizational. We soon saw that we had to change the culture of the library from passive to active, and we had to retire models that focused narrowly on the library rather than those that supported the larger institution. We had to commit to organizing in a way that envisions a future that is digital.”

She goes on to say, “Our goal is to make the transactional parts of the library’s work as efficient as possible in order to free up resources to sustain new services such as intelligent agents, visualization, and data science.” And “Most of our work is managed in a portfolio framework of 10 programs and more than 60 projects. More than half of our librarians are subject specialists who report to senior librarians who act as coaches, mentors, and performance evaluators.”

No more generalist reference librarians, and it sounds like librarians are not as involved in the traditional “transactions” that take place at service desks in many libraries. Instead, they are outside the library working with faculty and students and specializing in data management, intellectual property, and the digital preservation of research. It all sounds very interesting, and relevant to Georgia Tech.

That part of the restructuring doesn’t sound nearly as applicable to my university which is more of a teaching/learning institution than a research hub. But there may be ideas from this transformation that we could adapt to our use. It’s all very intriguing and worth thinking about as it becomes common even in academia for people to question why libraries are necessary. Just this week I ran circulation numbers to show faculty at one of our largest departments that their students are in fact using books.

If you work in a library, what are you doing to transform?

 

 

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Three ways libraries are serving the world

I read three stories this week that caught my eye — at the same time that I was asked to answer some questions about why I work in my library for a display going up later this month to help students at my university get to know library staff. In doing this I noticed that the university’s mission, “Transforming hearts and minds to serve the world,” is actually similar to core values of librarianship, a profession also dedicated to transforming and serving the world.

In Kokomo, Indiana, the public library is serving the world by displaying a rescued piece of street art by Banksy. The unusual exhibit is bringing people together to talk about street art and its place in culture. Fostering this kind of public conversation is definitely a transforming act.  Getting people to talk — especially about something controversial like Banksy’s art — is valuable public service.

In Germany, several libraries are welcoming “provenance research,” which is the ongoing work of locating art and other cultural and personal property looted by the Nazis, determining who it belonged to and returning it to victims and their family members.  The Lost Art Foundation is conducting the work, which is publicly funded. Imagine the U.S. government funding a massive effort to return items seized from other cultures. Yeah, I can’t imagine that either. Anyway, the German efforts are another example of libraries at the forefront of cultural and social transformation — serving as a conduit of reconciliation for their communities and the family members of those whose property was stolen.

Finally, two young women have managed to start a bookmobile style library in Greece to serve refugee communities. They kitted out the mobile library and stocked it entirely with donations, and run it for free. I was shocked to read that there are communities where their efforts are not welcome — I assume because some people must resent the presence of refugees, but who shuts down a library? Not only do these lovely human beings continue their work, but they also dream of this idea taking off throughout the world wherever displaced people are living. Two quotes in this story caught my eye: “Naude and Zijthoff were determined to provide a quiet space, amid the upheaval and uncertainty, where people could use their time rather than just fill it. ” And, “But those who come to the library love it: children say it feels like home . . . .”

Julian Sheather, the Guardian reporter who wrote those words, is spot on — the article really sums up the essence of what a library is for me. In fact, in my response to “Why I work in the library” for the display I mentioned, I used those exact words: Libraries feel like home to me. And libraries of all kinds, public, academic, private, mobile, current and past, intact or lost to conflict or other disasters, represent the transformation of lives — the lives of people who come together in libraries to learn, find quiet, pursue their hopes, strengthen their communities. Whenever I feel bogged down by everyday librarianship (hey, it happens, it’s not all glamorous, you know), I recall this sense I have that what we do is powerful, transformative, and in many ways radical service.

 

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Civil rights in libraries

This Fourth of July holiday weekend I’ve been thinking about our country. Specifically I have been examining how little I really know about racism and other types of bias (directed at women, transgender people, native American people, muslims, immigrants) in America. Not that I don’t know it exists, but I’m a glass half-full kind of person and until the most recent national elections, I bought into the “it gets better” narrative. Look at the progress we’ve made, I thought. A black president! Better protections for women, transgender kids in school. Support for refugees. It was easy for me, a privileged white professional, to assume that the rash of police shootings of unarmed black people was a blight on progress, not a sign that the progress I felt proud to support was really like a shiny coat of paint on a rotting porch — it covered up what had never been fixed underneath.

For me, that’s been the most eye-opening realization these past several months — not that our government has changed direction, but that institutions and systems of all kinds — political, commercial, social — and also communities of all kinds are hobbled by implicit bias. And that seems overwhelming, especially when I’ve seen myself as part of the solution, not just because I tried to raise my kids to do better, because I vote, pay attention, write letters, and sometimes protest, but also because I am a librarian.

What does that have to do with anything? If you’ve read Nocturnal Librarian over the years you know that I was a public librarian before I moved back into academia, and I have frequently championed the role of libraries as places of radical hospitality, the last public institutions truly open to all. Our professional organization, the American Library Association, actively works for the freedom to use libraries without fear of government intrusion — ALA and its members has for over a decade spoken up about immigrant and refugee rights, resisted the Patriot Act, spoke up about hate crimes, and more recently, opposed both the rolling back of protections for transgender students, and the Dakota Access Pipeline. Librarians are the good guys! Right?

In the most recent ALA magazine, American Libraries, there is an article about the Tougaloo Nine, and several other protests during the civil rights era where black people, often students, tried to use white only public and academic libraries. I knew in a I-learned-it-in-school kind of way that libraries were segregated like everywhere else, but these articles really grabbed me. These were librarians who told black students they had to go and couldn’t use the library or read library books. I cannot imagine ever denying anyone a book. Through this little thought experiment, picturing myself in that situation, I realized I have never really truly learned about the civil rights era struggles. I’ve read about that time, sure, I have shaken my head and wondered how on earth the South (because I always think of it as the South where institutionalized racism was born and where the vestiges of that infect society, another false perceptions I am trying to correct) could have been like that. I’ve felt ashamed that people were so terribly mistreated in my country.

But I’ve never placed myself in the stories. I’ve never tried to imagine wanting a book and ending up being beaten my police. I’ve never tried imagining denying someone that book. Not that imagining is experiencing, I don’t mean that at all, but imagining is stronger than just learning. I hope that making the mental leap to put myself right into someone else’s perspective will help me break down the implicit bias I, like all Americans, carry. I hope it makes me a better librarian, better able to truly serve every person who comes through our doors. I’m grateful that my professional association walks that walk, provides members with information about challenges to freedom, and expects that standing for “liberty and justice for all” is a part of what we do.

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