Turn the World Around

Do you know who I am

Do I know who you are

See we one another clearly

Do we know who we are

Between ALA Annual in New Orleans and TEDxLibrariansTO in Toronto, I feel I am missing out on two important librarian gatherings going on right now. In my perspective, the importance is in their timing in the scheme of things.

[Originally, this was one post talking about both ALA and TEDx. Upon review, I broke it out to two separate posts. You can read the other part here. -A]

For the TEDx conference, I was reading fellow Mover & Shaker classmate Eric Riley’s recap of the event. It sounds like it was a great event but Eric hit something that I have been stirring in the back of my brain for a long time.

But honestly, I think there is a gem in this idea, and Fiacre and Shelly really nailed it. There is a desire in libraryland to have a more engaging conversation about the profession.  Something that is driven from the ground up, from researchers, from visionaries, from people who are out there in the field working to shape the profession into something new.  We need this conversation as a profession.

On the heels of my “Why, How, What” advocacy post, I’ve been thinking that the profession needs what can only be described as an old fashioned spiritual revival. The almost Vulcan-like focus on the statistics and studies about the effectiveness of the library in various settings (public, school, academic) turns the conversation around the library into a business-like bottom line discussion. It’s just wrong, really. For myself, it loses the sense of wonder and curiosity that this information age can now accommodate.

Indeed, where is the noble sense of purpose? Where is the irrepressible sense of being? Why are those intangibles, those glorious personal intangibles being so roughly cast aside? For the people who love the profession, who see it through when times are tough, days are long, and patrons are just driving you nuts, it is not the cost/benefit calculus of salary and benefits that sees us through another day. To steal a phrase, it’s the love of the game.

This is not simply the time of an information renaissance; it is a new age of connectivity and communication, an information exchange at multitude of levels from the dry academic to intensely personal. Our communities comes for the emotional experience, whether it is the profound sadness or joy in books, music, and movies or the sense of accomplishment in learning or the feeling of belonging in reaching out online. They aren’t vessels awaiting a cargo of knowledge; they have come to feel, to experience, and to be.

Perhaps this is a continuation of the ‘why’ aspect of the advocacy post, but I think it gets lost in the mix very easily. The profession seems to slip when it portrays the library as a sterile, non-judgmental destination, acting under the premise that the only think people seek is an intellectual safe harbor. Rather, it is a cacophony of viewpoints and expression, a dangerous mix of prose written by potentially unsavory individuals in the distant and immediate past. It is about straining to hear through a chorus of voices that mark many experience paths and finding one’s way.

That is where librarians come in.

Once more, it has to be about the joy. It has to be about the excitement of discovery. It has to be about the sense of service. It has to be about the wonder of what lies on the next page, the next website, or the next program. It has to be rooted in the emotional, the feeling, the very essence of the spirit.

What will see the profession through into the future is neither money nor professional organizations nor studies and statistics nor even well written statements of support from library supporters but the spirit that brought us to the profession in the first place. It’s time to get back in touch with that most basic of force in our lives.

We are of the spirit

Truly of the spirit

Only can the spirit

Turn the world around