All Things to All People
I know it's not possible for libraries to be everything we would like them to be, yet I can still dream. I see a huge mission for what we could ideally accomplish. Unfortunately, reality may force us to choose. As part of our library's long-term planning, we were just asked to take a short survey. First we needed to select five of the following we consider most important and then the one we consider the absolute most important. I had a lot of trouble with this.
Help students succeed in school by providing homework help
Provide public internet access
Provide genealogy and local history resources
Teach people of all ages how to find, evaluate, and use information
Create young readers by supporting emergent literacy
Help citizens be informed about local, national, and world affairs
Provide comfortable public and virtual spaces for people to visit
Support the development of businesses and nonprofit organizations
Help people express their creativity and share content--both online and in the 'real' world
Reading, listening, and viewing for pleasure: Provide resources for reader, viewer, and listeners to stimulate their imaginations and enjoy
Help people find fast facts
Help people find jobs and develop their careers
Help people make informed decisions about managing their health, finances, and make other life choices
Help adults, teens, and families learn to read and write
Help lifelong learners satisfy their curiosity about whatever they want to know
Provide information about local community resources and services
Help new immigrants succeed
(When I went back to copy-paste these for this post, they were in a different order; apparently it's random each time.)
posted by Degolar @ 11:28 AM
2 Comments:
I didn't like the available options. Call me lazy, but I think we provide access to information, not career counseling, etc. Options like "Help people find jobs and develop their careers" and "Support the development of businesses and nonprofit organizations" smacks a little too much of somebody else's job to me. I don't have a magic Vocational Guidance Counselor wand [/Monty Python] to speed you on your way and I don't think the library is an employment agency. I'll show you books on resumes, but I'm not about to help you write one. The options on that survey seem to be pointing us in the direction of general gopher and dogsbody.
I agree that it seems like some of these are specialties of certain segments of the staff. I have to admit, one of my five was emergent literacy because it's what I do and believe in. I would suspect others are voting for their core functions as well.
Yet despite my beliefs that we do need to provide a comfortable environment and promote "reading, listening, and viewing for pleasure" and the like, I couldn't vote for them. There were other options I consider even more essential to our basic mission.
But I don't get that message from our patrons. Far and away, what I get is that they are looking for that exact kind of recreational pursuit. Two timely examples: we don't get too many comment forms at our branches--maybe one every couple of weeks. Last night at the gym an acquaintance stopped me to let me know he dropped a comment in the box yesterday complaining that he has to wait too long for bestsellers. He's paying good tax money and we should buy more copies of the books (we already get 50 to 150 copies of many titles distributed among our 13 locations). And this morning there was a comment form complaining that we don't have the latest software on our PCs for her to watch TV shows at abc.com. These are just two examples and the message seems clear and consistent--the taxpayers see us as a recreational location.
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