The Once and Future Library

TEN WAYS TO CREATE LIBRARIES THAT WILL MEET THE NEEDS OF TOMORROW'S CHILDREN

CHILDREN'S LIBRARIANS ARE PRACTICAL PEOPLE. WE ARE VERY GOOD AT SOLVING DAY-TO-DAY PROBLEMS. We can find the book about the old man with the ladder for a five-year-old reader who has forgotten everything else about this title. We can keep a rugful of toddlers busily engaged with stories for a reasonable length of time. We can tactfully divert the attention of an overbearing parent and help an anxious child find the book that's just right for her school report. We can disinfect headsets and teach a group of fifth graders how to play library quidditch. We can communicate effectively with library directors, elected officials, children's book editors, and preschoolers.

What we don't do so well, probably because we don't have the time, is reflect on what we do and why we do it. As the first step to getting things right for the future, I urge all of us to reflect hard on what libraries can mean to tomorrow's children. What follows are some guidelines to help you do that.

In his book The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (Basic, 1984), Donald A. Schon called the kind of problem solving that children's librarians and other professionals do so well "thinking in action." The innovation of toddler story times is a good example. Many librarians were taught that preschool story hours should be conducted as a first listening experience in a group setting without parents present. This was the conventional wisdom from at least the 1950s through the 1970s. As more mothers went to work in the 1980s, the preschool story hour audience shrank. Some librarians responded by shifting preschool story hour from the traditional morning time to early evening and inviting the whole family to participate. Librarians observed the value of including parents in their early childhood programs and found that little brothers and sisters could enjoy the story time experience if they didn't have to be separated from their parent or caregiver. After research underscored the importance of early childhood involvement with stories as a foundation for later reading success, librarians refrained their understanding of preschool story hours and promoted some of their story times as opportunities for parents to learn how to share books with their babies and toddlers.

What is required now is to extend the reflecting in action that good children's librarians do every day on the job to a more collective reflection. We need to begin a serious dialogue about what our profession and our institutions should mean to children in the generations to come.

The end result of this should not be a homogeneous, one-dimensional vision of the future library for future kids. Rather, it should allow for multiple improvisations on a theme. After we have crafted a vision we can all support, we need to determine how to communicate it to the world beyond our small professional circle.

In his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little, Brown, 2000), New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell speculates about the causes of sudden, unexpected social change--fashion trends, innovations in children's television, sudden upswings or downturns in crime.

Gladwell found that there were a few critical people behind all of the mass social phenomena he investigated. He places these few people into three categories: connectors, mavens, and salespeople. We need all three to create the right libraries for future kids.

Connectors are the virtuosos of the Rolodex, the people who know everybody. They are the supreme networkers who find making social connections both easy and natural. They often occupy places in overlapping worlds. We will need those connectors to start a revolution in library services for children.

We will also need the people Gladwell calls mavens. Mavens collect information. They are often experts on a particular topic. They are also passionate about their area of expertise and share their knowledge eagerly. Think about the friend you automatically go to for a restaurant recommendation or advice on a new car purchase. You know that his or her information will be reliable.

In some cases, we can depend on institutions such as the Americn Library Association (ALA) to act as information mavens for all of us. But we also need to identify mavens with particular specialties who can keep us abreast of critical issues. Is there a library school professor who can apprise us of research that links libraries with children's reading abilities? Who is the best source for current data on children's demographics, library usage, or library budgets? Who is most likely to be aware of innovative practices around the country?

We also need salespeople. These are the great communicators, the ones who will take our vision out into the world and persuade people to believe in it. The best salespeople are natural optimists who genuinely believe in their product or message. They tend to be charismatic leaders whose personalities compel us to follow them--or at least to trust them.

Although children's librarians believe in the goodness of their work, they are often too defensive about it to be good salespeople. They are able to motivate a child to read a great book but feel less sure about their ability to motivate another adult to support good library service for kids. We can learn to do this, though. We have the basic communication skills; we just need to apply them to a different audience with a different purpose.

We can begin to think of ourselves as connectors, mavens, and salespeople. If each of us found one role that fit well and practiced it, we would have the cadre we need to begin creating libraries for the children of the future.

Talking to ourselves is something else children's librarians are very good at. We genuinely like each other, and we like getting together to talk about our work. But we need to extend the discussion beyond our inner circle. We need to win allies who will come to care as much about good libraries for children as we do.

There are some obvious categories of people we want on our side. These include library administrators, ALA leaders, foundation staff, government officials, philanthropists, public interest lawyers, marketing experts, key people in education, and children's advocacy organizations.

To reach each group will require a different strategy, but we must find ways to tell our story so that each will want to listen. Then we must be ready with ways for all of these people to take action. We might have to create organizations for them to join, similar to the library "friends" groups we have now. Or we might find it effective to develop loose networks and project-oriented task forces. What is essential is that we win allies and give them jobs to do.

It's a cliche in library circles: "The library is the best-kept secret in town." This has got to change if we want to make big changes in library services for kids. We need to get much better at spreading the word. People need to know what a good job we are doing now and what a fabulous job we will do in the future, with their help and support.

Some of this can be accomplished through more effective public relations efforts. In our heart of hearts, we know that our photocopied brochures and the public service announcements that air at midnight are not doing the job. Usually we blame a lack of money for our failure to do more creative and effective promotion. True, more money would enable us to contract with more established consultants, hire better production companies, design better graphics, and buy more useful air time. And we should make every effort to raise that kind of money.

But money isn't the only answer. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell talks about the importance of "stickiness." For an idea or a service or a product to catch on, it needs to be so memorable that it sticks in the mind and so irresistible that it stirs people to action. This can be accomplished by an advertising slogan: "Got milk?" "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should." "You deserve a break today." Stickiness can be built into a concept, such as the Sesame Street notion that television could teach little kids to read. The secret to getting the right stickiness is often a matter of tiny adjustments in language, operations, or appearance. The Sesame Street creators found that all they needed to keep kids' attention on live actors was to add one interesting fantasy character--Big Bird. Many commentators have observed that the secret of the stickiness of the old Winston slogan was the ungrammatical substitution of "like" for "as." As Gladwell says, "There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it."

Easier said than done, of course, but we must keep searching for the sticky messages--the sound bites and slogans, images and metaphors--that will communicate our vision of future libraries for future kids. ALA's Public Information Office has found, for example, that an effective way to communicate its belief that it is better to give children information literacy skills than to install imperfect software filters is to say: "We think kids can be trained to be their own filters."

We need to develop more messages like that and put them in the hands of the great salespeople among us and our supporters.

Anthony Downs is a political scientist who formulated a classic theory called the issue-attention cycle. The idea is that key domestic problems move in and out of the public eye all the time. The longer an issue stays at the forefront of public attention, the more likely it is to command political action.

Downs describes five typical stages in this cycle. At the pre-problem stage, a major problem has developed, but the only people who are aware of it are a few policy experts or special-interest groups. In the second stage, some dramatic event attracts media attention, and politicians react with expressions of alarm. The special-interest groups involved with the issue are euphoric at this point because they think the politicians might act at last. At the third stage, politicians realize how much it would cost to actually solve the problem and begin to back off from the kinds of action they may have promised during the second stage. The fourth stage is a gradual decline of public interest. People may be less enthusiastic about solutions when they understand their cost. They may be more interested in new issues that command the headlines. Finally, in the post-problem stage, the issue has moved off center stage. Some programs and policies may have been put into place, and the insiders, bureaucrats, and special-interest groups now have a platform for action.

The lesson for us is that we need to be ready at stage two, when there is intense public interest in an issue we care about. When the newscasters report on children's failure to read, we need to be ready with library programs that support early childhood literacy. When politicians point with alarm to youth violence and alienation, we need to demonstrate how public libraries can support positive youth development with sound after-school programs. When conservative talk radio hosts create hysteria about children and the Internet, we need to persuade people that public libraries can guide children and families safely through cyberspace. Once we learn to speak with authority and conviction about policies that work for children, we can take our places at the table where decisions are made.

The thought of changing the organizations we work for can seem even more daunting than changing national policies. This is not surprising. Every public library I know is structured as a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies were designed for permanence, not for change. The folks who work in the lower or middle ranks aren't the only ones who despair of making significant changes in their organization. Ask any library director how easy it is to move an organization in new directions or to change an entrenched organizational culture.

And yet, public libraries must change if we are going to achieve the vision of excellent library services for children. Though children's librarians can do some things on our own, for more systemic changes, the library must change as well. Here is my short list of changes that need to be made in our public libraries if we are going to accomplish even a small part of our vision:

new career ladders for children's librarians, which would provide rewards not only to those who take on management responsibilities but also to those who have increased expertise;

new position descriptions for specialists in different aspects of children's librarianship, such as early childhood specialists, computer technicians, homework center aides, and community outreach workers;

new reward structures that will entice the best and the brightest to become children's librarians;

family-friendly operating hours;

family-friendly and child-friendly facilities;

child-friendly library catalogs;

better channels of communication between children's library staff and administrative staff.

How might we accomplish the kinds of organizational change we would like to see in our public libraries on behalf of future kids? First of all, if we have taken steps one and two, reflecting on our work and identifying leaders, we will be ready with a vision, a plan, and the leaders to articulate and implement them. In fact, some of us may have moved out of the children's library community into more general positions of leadership as library directors, deans, and ALA presidents. From this position, we can recruit allies to our cause and put policies in place to support the organizational changes we require.

But it is also possible to effect organizational change from the middle or even the bottom of the hierarchy. All organizations generate informal, as well as formal, leaders. The informal leaders are instrumental in generating the organizational culture.

All of us can work to create a culture that is welcoming to children and families, that supports the work we do, that nurtures our creativity and commitment. To do this effectively, we must do our own work well and support our colleagues in their efforts. We need to be effective salespeople of our vision and communicate its importance through our behavior as well as our words.

They don't call it library school in many places any more. At UCLA, where I work, it's the Department of Information Studies, located in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Never mind. We still have ALA accreditation, and we still educate librarians. But our graduate programs need to evolve to support changes in library services for children.

First, they need to recruit far more children's librarians than they do at present. Second, they need to ensure that their curricula provide the basic knowledge that new children's librarians need to bring to their first jobs. Finally, they need to work with children's librarians to determine their continuing-education needs and develop classes to meet those needs.

Library schools cannot accomplish the recruiting objective by themselves. The profession as a whole needs to share the responsibility for this. Our national associations must mount an aggressive recruitment campaign that targets the areas of most critical need--children's librarians being the first of these. We need to generate bountiful scholarship funds, through public policy initiatives and private philanthropy. Then, public libraries must offer salaries and working conditions that are competitive in a hot job market. Professionals working for government will probably never earn the salaries that attract entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley, but we can offer much more than we do at present. We can also ensure that our children's librarians enjoy intangible rewards, such as good working conditions, opportunities for promotion, opportunities to grow and develop, the respect of our peers and community, the ability to make decisions about the aspects of our job that affect us most.

Most of the good library schools in this country reevaluate their curriculum constantly and try to offer courses that are relevant to the jobs their students will take upon graduation. They face some significant barriers, however, when it comes to meeting the needs of future children's librarians. First of all, there is a shortfall of tenured professors who specialize in children's services. The consequence is that too many library schools must rely on temporary adjunct faculty to teach the courses devoted to children's library work. Most of them are dedicated, competent professionals who bring current work experiences into the classroom, but as adjunct faculty they are marginal in the overall governance of the program. They have little input into curriculum design. They are usually not available to serve as advisors to students. They tend to have more limited office hours and fewer informal contacts with students outside of class.

A highly visible tenured professor--or, better yet, a critical mass of tenured professors--is more likely to be able to provide leadership and support for library school students who want to specialize in children's services. Tenured faculty also introduce new courses. They may even recruit students who thought they wanted to be catalogers or university librarians to the noble profession of children's librarian.

So, more of us need to get that Ph.D. and embark on careers as academicians. The future of library education may depend on it.

I frequently get calls from colleagues who want to know if there is any research that supports the value of summer reading programs, youth participation, intergenerational programming, or other library services for young people. They are usually working on a grant proposal or a budget request and need justification for their project. Unfortunately, there is very little research that backs up what they want to do.

The reasons for the lack of research related to library services for children are both very obvious and very subtle. The obvious reason is that, as I pointed out above, there are too few tenured professors specializing in children's services. Still, you would expect that at least the handful of us who specialize in children's library services would publish research that our colleagues in public libraries would find useful. After all, doing research and having it published in prestigious, scholarly journals is key to getting tenure and being promoted. That brings me to the more subtle reason for the scarcity of research about children and libraries: the perception in some academic circles that this is a less valid topic for scholarly inquiry than others. This perception dampens the spirits of untenured assistant professors looking to publish research that will establish their reputations and build the foundation for their tenure cases.

It is certainly possible to publish articles about research related to children in general-interest, peer-reviewed journals such as Library Quarterly and Library and Information Science Research. Unfortunately, few practitioners ever see those journals, and the research findings are lost to those who could really use them. Articles published in School Library Journal, on the other hand, are read by children's librarians but may actually detract from an assistant professor's tenure case because the journal is not perceived as a "scholarly" publication.

Some of us in academia do, in fact, publish research that you can use (if you can find it). But more work needs to be done. I see the greatest research needs in two areas. One is the codification of best practices in our field. We need more than anecdotal evidence and common sense to determine what works and what doesn't. The second need is for tangible evidence of the outcomes of our work. This would include rigorous studies to establish the results of our basic services: summer reading programs, reference and readers' advisory services, Internet access and instruction, preschool story programs. These kind of studies are expensive but, if done well, they will arm children's librarians around the country with evidence that service to children is important and has results.

As reflective professionals, children's librarians need to constantly monitor their own performance and the needs of their clients. Do our services still match the children's needs? Can we improve our operations or practices? Can we do things more effectively? We can't answer those questions without having some data about the work we do.

Most children's librarians do try to evaluate their services. Yet there is a subtle strain of resistance to formal evaluation that runs through our profession. Many of us believe that the most important services we provide are intangible and therefore unquantifiable. After all, how do you measure a child's delight at story time or the satisfaction of reading the right book at the right time?

Others say they are overworked and have no time for ambitious evaluation efforts.

But evaluation need not be complex. For instance, my book Output Measures for Public Library Service to Children (ALA, 1992) gives children's librarians some easy-to-use tools for defining and measuring the outputs--the tangible results--of their work, along with tips for interpreting and communicating the results. It includes measurement techniques that any librarian could adopt to evaluate aspects of services to children. Whatever evaluative strategies you use, what's key is that they become second nature, business as usual, rather than special activities that are laid on top of regular duties.

Children's librarians do good work. Evaluation allows us to prove it. It is important to remember, as we calculate the annual children's "fill rate"--a technical term for the percentage of successful searches for materials--or design a parent satisfaction survey, that children will be the ultimate winners if we play the evaluation game.

Whatever we do, we must stay focused on children all the time. We are not working so hard just to make the library directors and politicians happy, although that may be a consequence of our work. We are not learning new skills and gaining new knowledge just to enhance our own professional development, although that will inevitably result. We do what we do to benefit children. We must keep our eyes on the prize. The goal is good libraries for the children of today and better libraries for the children of tomorrow. We must constantly remember what excellent library services can do for children. We give children hope, dreams, words to think with, inspiration, information, positive role models, cultural validation, self-esteem, personal attention, a listening ear, opportunities to participate in the life of their community, moments of delight, answers to questions, and questions to answer. What other public agency can offer so much?

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By Virginia Walter

Virginia Walter is associate professor at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. She is also the current president of the Association for Library Service to Children. This article is adapted from the book Children and Libraries: Getting It Right, published in November by the American Library Association.