Evolving libraries: What's at our core?

Editor's Notes

• #3 This talk was born at another Information today conference, at the John Seeley Brown keynote at Internet Librarian in 2011(Brown, 2011). It was, for me, one of those moments
• #4 It was, for me, one of those moments when everything shifts and all the disparate pieces – and even some you didn’t think were disparate -- came together into a crystalline, sensible structure.  
• #5 It was, for me, one of those moments when everything shifts and all the disparate pieces – and even some you didn’t think were disparate -- came together into a crystalline, sensible structure.  
• #6 So many things made sense At the time, I was looking to leave my position as Learning Commons Librarian, and Staff Trainer, and wanted to get back into instructional librarianship. So, all those BIG pieces were in my head designing spaces for student learning the future of undergraduate educationDeveloping staff skills (at all levels of the library) to allow that future to come into being. The place of technology in learning, and librariesInformation literacy and connecting the library more deeply into curricular developmentSocial media and if it had a viable role in learning, beyond a role in outreach and community building 
• #7 And JSB said “dispositions”(Thomas & Brown, 2011). He talked about participatory learning. And he articulated for me the idea of knowledge of making.  
• #8 And those disparate things gelled into one big picture. I walked around a bit stunned for a while, this big full egg had taken up residence in my head, and wasn’t really aware of all the pieces had that slicked together into this seamless whole, or how to talk about it.  I went home, applied for jobs, did my work, and read things. Lots of things. That articulated a lot of the pieces that gelled together in that egg in my head.  Tweets and blog posts and articles and TED Talks, by Howard Rheingold, Henry Jenkins, John Seely Brown. Slide decks and conference talks and tweets and articles by Char Booth, Buffy Hamilton, David Lankes. So many others.
• #9 And then, I moved into my new position. At a library that wasn’t a library, but was called a Knowledge Center. Because they meant it. They saw library the way I saw library: It’s about supporting researchers from sparking or finding their inspiration all the way through the final, finished product. Whatever it might be. 3D printers. Green screen. Large format printers. Instructional resources, SPSS. Knowledge production happens here, whatever shape the end product might be.  Throughout all this, my inspiration, my movement forward, my embrace of what resonated so deeply with me – libraries are makerspaces. It’s what libraries do.At the same time, libraries struggled with their future identities, with the rise of e-resources and loss of monographic priorityAnd because I had had this paradigmatic moment, I really struggled with that struggle. But THAT struggle is what finally forced me to begin articulating this wordless resonance and action that I was inhabiting. What was I missing? How to understand this stress on the profession, and help move past it?
• #10 Who are we, if we don’t warehouse books?
• #11 Well, let’s define terms:Dispositions: According to JSB – can’t be taught. Can be cultivated. Inclinations in thinking, propensities. Participatory Culture : relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagementstrong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with otherssome type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novicesmembers believe that their contributions mattermembers feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).“Access to this participatory culture functions as a new form of the hidden curriculum, shaping which youth will succeed and which will be left behind as they enter school and the workplace”(Jenkins)Making: A DIY ethic, creating something that didn’t exist before (we’ll get into this more deeply in a moment) Compare with the ethos of Library, Makerspace. Third support
• #12 It’s simple. This is what we do.
• #13 Content: p- or e-, book, monograph, score, video, data, code, people, seeds, …. Does my vs. your ownership matter? Or the physicality of the item? Findable: interfaces, catalogs, shelf lists, shelf labels, taxonomies, classification systems, …Spaces: these buildings. Built environments, designed spaces. Light, space, temp, hours, furniture, noise levels, … since the monks we’ve done this!People. The people!Given this – does physical items on shelves define us? Really?
• #14 Books warehouse – Mathewson Automated retrieval system is a book warehouse. Pretty darn new! Has this ever been who we are?? Built environment, designed to facilitate specific type of use of specific forms of content. Not book warehouse at all! But so much at the core of who and what we have always been!Even our most traditional understandings have been around access to information, not so much about the ownership and storage of the physical content.
• #15 How do people use our built environments> Do these uses challenge our identity so deeply? Or at all? (by the way – one of these is a hackerspace. Not a library. Can you tell which?)
• #19 Why does this parallel work? Because what our users get out of our libraries? Is the creation of something new. A new idea, and newly acquired piece of knowledge, a physical thing that never existed before… Our users *make* in our libraries. (Always have)If making is taking….. Is that so different than writing a paper, or making a video? Or designing a product, or writing code?