What is a librarian? Who is a library user?

I am in Sumy, Ukraine. I spent last night at a beautiful lake watching some ducks get excited about the nuts my translator was feeding them until it started raining. The night before there were fireworks and nobody can tell me why. Over the past week in Izmail, and now in Sumy, I have learned too much to even begin trying to make a blog post. There are two interesting translation issues though, that I think are informative and I want to discuss. I think they are interesting because I didn’t even think about the possibility when I was writing up my focus group and interview guides. Both of them are related to the people involved in the library. Who is the library user and who is the librarian?

The Librarian by Guiseppe Arcimboldo. In Stokholm, Sweden, Skokloster Castle.

When I first started doing my focus groups in Izmail I used the word “patron” to refer to a library user. This seemed obvious, as that is how one refers to the library user in many library journals. I didn’t even think about the word. However my translator continually translated library patron as шеф (shef), or chief, patron, or supporter of the library. When I wanted to ask about the library users, my translated asked about the library financers and I kept having to backtrack until I finally began using a word that both the translator and I understood to mean the library user: читатель (chitatel’) or reader. In  Ukraine, the primary function of the library user is to read; he or she sits in the reading hall, or takes books from the lending library and then reads them and returns them. The focus here is on what users do with the library. Whereas, the word “patron” for library user, makes the library user into a library supporter. I had never thought about the reason that we use the word patron, and how odd a choice it truly is in English for library user. Why we use “patron” I do not know. For public libraries it may be because the library is funded by taxes and in a way the library users are also the ones that pay for the library operations. Whereas this is not always the case in Ukrainian libraries. While I thought it was obvious who a library user was, that is a person that uses the library, I’ve realized how much more complicated it is.

The answer to the other question “Who is a librarian?” seemed obvious to me. A librarian is someone who has been trained as and works as a librarian. When I was creating my scenarios to discuss with the library users and the librarians, this is what I had in mind. I figured there would only be a couple per library and I would interview them. I ended up having accidental focus groups with the librarians instead of interviews. In the United States there are different levels of library workers: the staff that does not have an MLS, MIS, or MLIS, and the staff that does. Librarians can get tenure in academic libraries, but they need to have this training to do so. A librarian can only be called a librarian once he or she has obtained the degree.

This is not so in Ukraine at all. The work for librarian translates roughly to “he that works with books.” And this is what you need to be a librarian in Ukraine. So where I make the distinction in my head between a staff person who may assist library users and a librarian, this distinction is completely foreign to Ukraine. But what does this difference mean? For one I think that we have a more hierarchical structure to our libraries in the United States than they do in Ukraine. For another I think that we put more emphasis on university education than on on-the-job learning in the United States. Librarianship has always seemed to me the kind of field that would benefit from an apprenticeship structure.

Neither of these differences show Ukrainian or American libraries to be better or worse than the other. I think that they highlight different mindsets. I don’t know what exactly it means that the term “library patron” doesn’t translate or that a Ukrainian “librarian” is anyone who works in the library. I don’t think there is one meaning. Still, this cultural translation is one thing that has been fascinating to me during my entire trip.

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Dispatch from Romania

I am one week into my two weeks of fieldwork researching the Community Participation Contest. I’ve spent the first week in Judet Vrancea, in the beautiful region of Moldova. I have been overwhelmed by the hospitality of the libraries I have visited, and everyone has been eager to share their experiences. Most days are filled with interviews, tours and discussions about everything from Romanian rap music to recruiting volunteers for libraries, but the librarians of Vrancea have made sure to give me a chance to put down my notebook and see the area.

Yesterday I was lucky to have the opportunity to visit the commune of Naruja to learn about their library and the culture and history of the area. Once we arrived, I was surprised to learn that we were invited to participate in the presentation! Here I am being outfitted in a traditional ensemble by the librarian of the commune. After this, we enjoyed a performance by some very talented students and had a full day of sightseeing and conversation. I will leave Vrancea tomorrow with fond memories, and can’t wait to see what’s next!

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Part of Life is Death: The Library Is Vamp

ALA Ambassadors are used to attendees asking FAQ. Image by @librarian

Attending the ALA Annual Conference these last weeks here in D.C. gave me much food for thought (chomp chomp). Firstly, it was exhilarating to be surrounded on all sides by fellow librarians, and I relished the fact that – no matter what the stereotypes suggest – we do come in all shapes and sizes (and with all manner of ‘personalities’ to match). And it *is* a truth universally acknowledged that when a group of librarians are in need of geographic direction, and there’s only one map between them, everyone will decide *they* know the best way to help figure it out. But that’s only because we’re so desperate to help! My Librarian hero, S. R. Ranganathan, is right when he writes that the role of the librarian is to help someone to help themselves. I’ve never been offered so much librarian-help in my life as when I was wandering round the Washington Convention Center, looking a little lost (which in fairness, I was). ALA even had a cohort of Ambassadors whose job it was to help first-time conference attendees feel more welcome (and not so confused)! One spotted me and helpfully sent me in the direction I was accidentally attempting to get lost in going to…

So, while tramping amongst the lines of librarians milling about the seminars, talks and workshops, one of the places I stopped off to visit was the President’s Program, where Eppo Van Nispen tot Sevenaer was giving his keynote speech: ‘Libraries Wanted: Dead or Alive’. When it comes to understanding libraries, Eppo and I have clearly been on the same page for some time, negotiating as we do the idea that both the user and the fun are integral accoutrements when it comes to library accomplishment. What I liked best, however, about his talk (i.e. the bit I didn’t already know) was when he briefly talked about his own librarian background. That is, he doesn’t have one. Instead, in effect, he’s a self-made librarian: helping kick-start the DOK Library Concept Centre in Delft as Library Director and turning it into the official “best library in the Netherlands” by 2009.

Now, what I’m *not* doing here is advocating for librarians to suddenly turn their backs on the concept of *Professional Status* – no, bear with me a second here. Instead, what I’m talking about, and what Eppo surfed the audience-question wave within his brief response to this topic, is that to be a better librarian, or rather, to be a better librarian of the 21st Century, you need to understand that people are the core of a library’s collection, not books. You need to understand that to interact and connect and bring people together with: themselves, each other, experiences and things – this is what libraries of this ‘future’ we are always talking about are in fact going to *be* all about (and that still *does* includes real books, and there will be more and more emphasis on haptics too I suspect).

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Does closing one gap widen another?

The New York Times published an interesting piece this weekend called Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality. The article reviewed three studies that suggest that providing low-income students with a personal computer does not lead to increased academic achievement, and actually appears to have a negative impact on their grades in school. This research was done in Romania, North Carolina and Texas between 2004-2009.

Although this article deals with personal computers rather than computers in libraries, I found it thought-provoking. As a former middle school teacher and future librarian, the digital divide and its impact on education is of great interest to me. It is difficult to come to any conclusions without reviewing the studies individually, but it has raised some questions that I think are worthy of discussion.

The idea that giving someone a computer will be a panacea for their problems is something that I think most people see as being overly simplistic. At the same time, access to information is vital for the well-being of individuals and society, and more and more of that information has moved online. When job applications can only be submitted electronically, or homework assignments require use of the internet, those without access to technology are at a huge disadvantage. There are a variety of ways that the digital divide is being addressed, but what happens when the results of expanding access are unexpected?

The studies found that having a personal computer did not improve the educational achievements of adolescents. In Romania, scores in English, math and Romanian decreased, while in Texas writing scores dropped. One suggested reason is that teens are using the computers for games and entertainment, decreasing the time they have available for studying.  The educational value of gaming and how to measure outcomes that may not be reflected in quantitative statistics like grades are both important debates, but what I want to know most is how information literacy and training was built into these programs.

Like any of us, secondary students are adept at finding distractions on the internet. Educators respond by blocking entertainment and social networking sites, with the unintended consequence of teaching teens how to get around those barriers. If students are expected to use the computers for complex tasks like finding and evaluating sources for research or developing multimedia presentations, training in information literacy is essential. We can’t confuse the high interest that young people often show for technology with an innate understanding of how to use that technology to extend their learning.

This training and guidance has a natural home in libraries, both in schools and communities. It is quite possible that the programs that these studies examined included a training component, but as we consider if closing the digital divide may widen the achievement gap, I think a natural place to look is how educators and students are being taught to use new technologies to support classroom activities. The suggestion that home computers may be disproportionately harmful to the achievement of low-income students is troubling, but rather than discounting investment in improved access to technology in low-income communities, it demonstrates how important it is to consider and plan for what comes after the computers are delivered.

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A Methodology to My Madness

I have a not-so-secret secret: most of the research I have ever done has been document-based. I am an academic and a librarian; the written word and I have an intimate codependence. Because of this, the idea of performing research based on data from human beings both enthralls and terrifies me. Thankfully, my university has a form to fill out to ensure the safety of my subjects. Between this form and some wonderful guidance from various IREX staff members, I have developed a plan to help me create the tools for my research in Ukraine and have begun to create these tools.

The first trick for figuring out how to collect my data, is figuring out what data I need to collect and from whom. One of the most helpful articles I’ve read in the past weeks for defining the needs of my research has been Susan Beatty and Hester Mountifield’s “Collaboration in an Information Commons: key elements for successful support of e-literacy.” In addition to an Information Commons overview, the article provides an extensive set of questions that the architect of a library Information Commons should ask him or herself. The end-goal of all of these questions is “to create a holistic student-centered environment,” or in the case of public libraries, a patron-centered one. In order to do this, there are three overarching facets for exploration: the physical/technical requirements of an IC, the personnel to support an IC, and the patrons to use one. Thus the data I will need will center on the space, how the space is supported, and who uses it. Additionally, this directs my questioning toward the librarians stewarding the library space and the patrons.

Knowing that I need to ask questions about space, service, and technology integration of librarians and patrons is one part of the problem. The other part is determining how to ask these questions. This is where my unfamiliarity with research methods bore its head. My first idea was to do one-on-one interviews with librarians and do a survey of patrons. Then, I met with Katie Sheketoff who coordinates the impact work for both Biblionet and Bibliomist and who was full of more creative ideas, and Meghan let me borrow a library methodology textbook, Barbara Wildemuth’s Applications of Social Research Methods to Questions in Information and Library Science (2009), which was full of advice on their implementation. From here I found examples of vignettes and focus groups. With vignettes I could present patrons with different library stories, incorporating elements from established Information Commons, and gather patron reactions. With focus groups I could see in a collaborative environment how patrons viewed library collaboration.

At present I am constructing my research tools for my trip that begins in a little over a week. While this feels a little later than I should be working on them, I think the most important aspect of my tools needs to be their fluidity. As I wrote in my last post, my expectations may be completely overturned when I arrive, and the tools I make now may turn out to be useless. Still, I think that envisioning a goal for the type of data needed will allow me to create flexible and useful tools based on collecting librarian and patron opinion.

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Unexpecting the Expected: Some Thoughts on the Research Process

While considering my research methodology, I have been racking my brain about what to write for this week. While I could write about my research method plans alone, I felt that my posts have been library-focused to the detriment of the other part of my research, Ukraine. This is entirely understandable, since most of the work that I can do from my desk revolves around streaking my red pen over articles from library journals. But, I wanted to take a moment to talk about one of the funny conundrums of research: developing expectations revolving around unknowns.

This has been on my mind lately, since not much has been written in English on libraries in Ukraine and I have only just been attempting the Ukrainian and Russian literature. I’ve found multiple articles by Ukrainian-born Maria Haigh, whose work covers file-sharing, library education, and the historical place of libraries in Ukrainian identity-building. Susan Benz spent ten months in Ukraine on a Fulbright grant to lecture on digital libraries. In addition to providing her impressions in the form of an article, Benz kept a blog of her travels, complete with supplementary links that may be helpful to anyone wishing to study Ukrainian libraries. Additionally, the journal Slavic & East European Information Resources, while primarily interested in problems of academic librarianship, often has articles from and about a number of Slavic and East European locales, including Ukraine.

Between the output of English-language scholars and the wealth of data IREX has collected in the orchestration of Bibliomist, I have begun to wonder what to expect in my research, and these expectations have colored my choices in terms of my research plans. For example, I expect my experience in Eastern Ukraine to be different from my experience in Western Ukraine, and my experience in a larger library to be different from that of a smaller one. Despite the fact that I have not yet done research in Ukraine, I have to make my decisions on where to conduct my research based on these expectations. Similarly, the content of the research tools revolves around which questions I believe will provide the most fruitful expansion on the topics that may or may not actually get to the heart of the question I am attempting to answer. IREX’s qualitative surveying of librarians, for example, suggests that many public librarians in Ukraine want more people to use the library, a universal cry amongst librarians. With this in mind, my interview questions will likely probe librarian opinion on bringing people into the library.

My expectations are presently academic, and I predict a great many will be overturned as I begin speaking with librarians and patrons in Ukraine (perhaps not the ones I have listed above). Despite this, my methodology construction is teaching me that many of these expectations must be formed for the research to move forward. Thus, I have been grateful to those who have been helping me create informed expectations. However, I look forward to taking my well-constructed surveys and interview questions to Ukraine and “unexpecting the expected.”

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The Library is a Growing Organism

Travelling internationally and running the gamut of visa regulations and officialdom is luckily something I’m quite used to, so I’m happy to report that I, the final IREX International Librarianship Fellow, have arrived safe and sound, albeit a week later than my US-based colleagues. Hitting the ground running is additionally something I regularly partake in, so within 24 hours of arrival I’d become a member of D.C. Public Libraries and also discovered the benefits of Dupont Circle Farmers Market – free leftover spinach pastries – thus, to coin an appropriate Americanism: Awesome!

Alongside my fellow Fellows (so to speak) Margaret and Meghan -and their individual research topics- I will be spending this summer investigating Romanian public libraries and the role of the public librarian, with the additional aim of unifying our respective research projects to negotiate this fascinating terrain of bordering territories: Ukraine and Romania, through the lens of public library development.

My personal public librarianship ethos is founded on a very simple principle: I see public libraries as the bedrock of world citizenship, and I’d like to posit that by nurturing and appropriately tending this organic mind-seed that we thereby nurture and tend ourselves. I’m inspired by the work of IREX in its many incarnations, and am very much looking forward to participating in evolving the work of the Global Libraries programme, which, at its end-user point, aims to “help all people lead healthy, productive lives.”[1] In particular, my research focuses around unfurling such aims in the context of public libraries and public librarians.

Arguably, at the core of what we mean when we cite social capital as part and parcel of civil society are the intangibles which make up a healthy, productive citizenry: trust, respect, sharing and reciprocity… All these, and more, are values which are fundamental to the library science domain and which we’ve been encouraged to accommodate via traditional forms of measures and analysis. How we tangibly assess and quantify such intangibles, is, of course, still part of an ongoing debate, and my research here at IREX will negotiate this metrical landscape. The work of the librarian scholar, S. R. Ranganathan, particularly informs my research and philosophies, and so Library Science Law #5, ‘The Library is a Growing Organism’ has influenced me to concentrate on investigating how the growth of a public library system in Romania may affect the development of professional networks, skill-sharing and community engagement initiatives by, between and among Romanian public librarians. I’m interested to see how growth-lines and growth-factors can be mapped in this process, and how this may help us understand the development of the public library system through the theory of organisms as living systems, with their own subsystems and processes which may be interdependent, in flux, and adaptive.

Library as cell-life: a cycle by @librarian

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[1] ‘Planning for impact, assessing for sustainability’, S. Fried, M. Kochanowicz, M. Chiranov, Performance Measurement and Metrics, Vol. 11 No. 1, 2010, pp. 56-74

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The potential of partnerships

Libraries across the world are undergoing major transitions, and information professionals have been called upon to use strategies new and old to prove their relevance to their communities. The American Library Association will meet in Washington, D.C. next week, with the need for advocacy at the forefront of many discussions. On the eve of that conference, I’ve been thinking about the ways that partnerships can bolster both the position of the library and its ability to provide services to its community.

flickr user @cquarles

Partnerships have been an integral part of the Community Participation Contest. Applicants are encouraged to find partners to work with, and new relationships have been forged at all stages of the process. Some projects, like “The 0 Kilometer of the Community” in Filiasi, collaborated with schools and cultural institutions. Others worked with NGOs, or founded their own organizations after the program was over. Both Infopitici in Simian and CLIO in Jurilovca (pdf) have generated new NGOs seeking to address the needs of their communities. How have these partnerships transformed the way that librarians think about their role, and their ability to reach out to a broader audience? What are the challenges and benefits of using this strategy in Romania?

These questions are part of what I’ll be researching this summer. Beth Hovius’ 2006 article, “Public Library Partnerships which Add Value to the Community: The Hamilton Public Library experience” has offered valuable insight into the many ways that partnerships can affect a library. Hovius reviews several projects that her Canadian library has done in collaboration with others, and points out lessons from each. Some of the points that stood out to me:

• Librarians should recognize the value that they bring to the table. One of the benefits of working with others is that each person has different expertise. Highlighting the unique skills that the library can offer shows the natural role that the library can play in many community initiatives.
• Communication is critical. The beginning of any partnership will come with a great deal of conversation about what each stakeholder can offer and expects. Ensuring that there is trust and a common language will prepare the partners for the hard work ahead.
• Use the strengths in your community. There are many ideas that are too big to be taken on by one institution or person. Hamilton worked with the school board and local immigrant groups to complete a family literacy project that required the knowledge and skills of each group to succeed.

A successful partnership can bring new patrons, new ideas, and new visibility to a library. It can be an opportunity to showcase the many ways that libraries support literacy, learning, and access to information. It can also be an avenue for seeking funding and sustaining or re-imagining a project. The creativity that these collaborations generate, in both the participants and organizers, is inspirational. The DC Public Libraries project “Your Story has a Home Here” is an excellent example of the types of innovations that are possible, and reminds me of several of the CPC projects. I look forward to learning more about how this opportunity for outreach and cooperation has been realized in Romania.

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