Your side of the boat is sinking

Reading the posts of conference bloggers is like looking into a window – you can see what’s going on, sometimes you can hear the loudest voices, but you’re left salivating for the scrumptious dinner on the table, which is definitely out of reach for the window peeper. That’s what’s happening to me as I read the blogs of those lucky enough to be at ALA.

Thank you Jennie Levine for this post from “Who Controls the Future of Search?” with Stephen Abram and Joe Janes, narrated by Roy Tennant. Roy asks: “What is your worst nightmare and your finest vision for the future of library search services, and what is your level of confidence in achieving either?” Stephen’s response is that his worst nightmare is that everyone in the field keeps looking at the other and saying “your side of the boat is sinking.” He says we’re perceiving millennials wrong, we're fighting internally (school libraries aren't teaching the kids properly) instead of banding together to fight the external problems (like politicans who cut funding) and we have to get better at advocacy and be willing to say cutting library funding is stupid.

Wow, I love the analogy of the sinking boat. His words echo what our State Librarian Suzanne Miller said the first time I heard her speak when she came to Minnesota. She said that we librarians need to speak with a united voice. She chastised us for being splintered and fragmented and not presenting a clear message.

I see too many libraries competing instead of complimenting the services of other libraries in the same community, who are serving the same citizens (especially kids), being financed by the same tax payers. It makes me irate as a taxpayer, saddened as a library professional to see libraries and schools or counties and cities engaged in bitter battle over who provides service or funding. I wish that every single community had a common library advisory group that met regularly to advise and support all the libraries in that community. A library group that worked to find efficiencies, economies of scale, and ways to streamline services to provide for a well-informed community of life-long learners.