Ooh, another mahoosive topic to blog about this week!
As Lauren said, speaking up for libraries has become really crucial in the UK in the last few years. As a bit of an indicator, this was the first topic chosen for #uklibchat, a fortnightly Twitter chat for UK librarians. I'd recommend taking a look at the chat summary if you're interested in this topic.
While I don't greet every new person I meet with "Hi, I'm a librarian,
isn't that awesome?!" (which would be a little strange), when people
find out what I do this generally prompts a "why...?" or "you needed a
degree to do that?" At first I would kind of laugh awkwardly and
go "um, yeah...". After a while I started to take the opportunity to do a
little advocacy and re-education. I haven't exactly got an elevator
pitch to fire back at them now, but I usually explain how rewarding it
is, what I do all day besides stamping books and that yes, most
librarians have degrees, plural.
I work in a university library which seems fairly stable...for now at least. With the trend among a large proportion of the public being that everything is available online, you would hope that students and academics know better than this, right? Unfortunately most students will still head to Google first and won't make the most of the scholarly databases provided by their library. If you can get a quick fix from Google, why bother going to the library? In the future the academic libraries might be the ones needing all the campaigning help they can get.
Meanwhile, many public librarians can't speak up for their jobs for fear of losing their jobs... pretty rubbish really. So most campaigns will need to rely on other library sectors for their manpower. On Save Our Libraries Day last February, I took part in a Read Aloud flash mob in a shopping centre in Cambridge, reading from Roald Dahl's Matilda and handing out leaflets about what the library provides and what cuts are being proposed. This was organised by Emma Coonan, a university librarian and most of us there were academic librarians.
So I do dabble in activism, and I frequently end up speaking up for my profession amongst small groups of people. Of course this pales in comparison to the tireless efforts of some library campaigners! I look at people like Lauren, Johanna, and Ian and then look back at myself and think "must try harder".
Thank you so much for the mention Annie.
ReplyDeleteThe flash mob read aloud was a great idea! I wish I could organise more creative things like that but it is difficult for me to do time wise, what with all of the letter writing and campaign organising I have been doing etc. I would love to be more involved in the fun and creative side of things. That is what grabs attention after all!
It would be great if library advocates just picked a random day and did something like anyway, regardless of whether or not it was Save our Libraries Day, to remind people how great libraries are. It would also be great if libraries themselves did something like this for some quirky advocacy.
We were talking in the pub after our Voices for the Library meeting about "Performance Librarians" as Adrienne said some ideas had been flying about about such an idea.
It might even work to do something along these lines in my university library to make people more aware of what we do and to add some fun to proceedings!
"It would be great if library advocates just picked a random day and did something like anyway, regardless of whether or not it was Save our Libraries Day, to remind people how great libraries are. It would also be great if libraries themselves did something like this for some quirky advocacy [...] It might even work to do something along these lines in my university library to make people more aware of what we do and to add some fun to proceedings!"
ReplyDeleteI love these ideas! As you say, fun and attention grabbing events (stunts even) are often a good way to go, so long as they're backed up with *sigh* the lobbying and letter-writing side of things!
Have you seen this Women's Institute press release?
ReplyDelete16 September 2011 - WI BIRTHDAY LIBRARY ACTION DAY - "The 16 September 2011 marks the 96th anniversary of the first WI meeting. Many members have already started to take action on the Love Your Libraries campaign and as a next step, in recognition of the continued importance of the WI’s early vision to widen educational opportunities and the long-standing commitment of WI members to promote libraries, we are asking members to celebrate this year’s WI birthday by taking the simple step of borrowing a book from your local library"-