The Very Heart of It. Keynote at Urban Libraries Unite (ULU) Conference (text version w/slides)

Urban Libraries Unite Keynote: The Very Heart of It: The Timeless, Nourishing Value of Libraries April 5, 2013, Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn, NY

Peter Bromberg | http://peterbromberg.com | Slidedeck available at: http://slideshare.net/pbromberg (CC BY‐SA 3.0 US, Except “Andy’s Love Letter”, copyright W. Andrew Woodworth, All Rights Reserved

Good Morning everyone. It is such an honor and a pleasure to be here with you all this morning. What an incredible day we have planned. Can we start with a round of applause for Lauren Comito, Christian Zabriskie and everyone who helped put this day together. Before we begin, I’d like to try something a little different. Rather than begin by making a number of bold assertions about libraries and then spending an hour trying to convince you how right I am, I’d like to simply offer you three concepts, [Context | Revolution | Love] and over the next hour or so share some stories, some ideas,



some perspectives that – I don’t know – back into these ideas, or weave them together and see what we’ve got. If that’s ok, I’d like to ask your indulgence as we begin by taking a little time to create some context. To develop a shared perspective for the discussion to follow, and more importantly perhaps, to get us into a certain mindset – to open ourselves to the experience we’re going to share today. CONTEXT And I’d like to do that by asking a question. Why are we here today? It’s a seemingly simple question, and one I personally try to ask and answer for myself every day. So take a moment, and think about the question. Why are we here today at the Urban Libraries Unite conference in Brooklyn, NY. Why are YOU here? A story I heard a few years ago on NPR led me to think a little differently about this question. Maybe you heard it. It was a story about the Hohokam.



The what??? The Hohokum. They were a civilization that lived – thrived really-- from about 2000 years ago until about 500 years ago in what is now Phoenix, Arizona. They were a fully formed civilization with art, culture, organized sports--- they’ve uncovered gaming courts of some sort… and they thrived for 1500 years and then… then they disappeared. This is a picture of what’s left of their great civilization that spanned 1500 years. To put that in perspective, that’s about 6 ½ times longer than the United States has been around. What happened? Why did they disappear? It’s unclear. There’s speculation that it might have been a flood; it might have been drought. Or it might have been they started cutting funding for libraries and it was quickly downhill from there… Here’s an artist’s rendering of what their civilization looked like. And just for fun,… A thousand year’s from now, an artist may render their interpretation of the ruins of the Casa Grande visitor center… (maybe wondering what ancient ruins we were honoring)

Ok, some more perspective. Let’s further define some terms…What do we mean by “here”



For a little more perspective… What do we mean by today?



And finally, What do we mean by “We”

In all of time there have been about 108 billion people who have ever lived. Of that, 7 billion of us are somewhere on the planet right now. Of that, we get to interact in any real way with maybe a few hundred. Look around you. Look to your left and right. Think about the people you work with, and the customers you serve. These are the people you get to spend your time with. These are the people whose lives you most directly impact through our choices and behaviors and through the quality of our being.



So I will ask again: Why are we here today? Here’s my answer: 1. Life is relatively short 2. Our time together is precious 3. I want to use my time here to make a difference 4. I want to be awake and fully present and make choices that enrich my life and the

lives of those around me. 5. And, like you, I choose to do that through library service.

Ok, so we’ve shifted our perspective a little bit and hopefully created a bit of context for the day. THE PACE OF CHANGE Now I’d like to get a little more specific and look at the context that that libraries are operating in with regard to change…or what I call the absolutely crazy and historically unprecedented, accelerating pace of change.



Michael Edson, the Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian, suggests that things are about to get deeply weird. I’ve modified that to suggest that they already are. Let’s explore this in a little more detail. So when we talk about change what do we mean? Great change is often brought on by the introduction of a new technology. The technology often brings great benefits: Those benefits may include: Increasing productivity, better communication, improvement in health, increase in leisure time, etc. Regardless of the benefit though, these technologies disrupt the standard ways of doing things, and can lead to fundamental upheavals in how we live our lives. It’s easy enough for us to reflect on the upheavals created by the printing press, automobiles, television, and even twitter. Oh, and by the way, these disruptive technologies, and the upheavals they bring… you may have noticed that they are happening with increasing frequency; exponential frequency in fact.

Here is a chart that demonstrates the exponential pace of change brought on by disruptive technology. You can see that disruptive technologies and the major shifts that they bring continue to happen with increasing frequency. What does this mean? Well, it means that my great-grandfather’s life was virtually indistinguishable from his father’s life. They both lived in a make shift house, with a dirt



floor, a wood burning oven, and no plumbing. And it means that the first 13 years of my grandfather’s life were the same as his father’s. How many of you in this room can say that? The first 13 years of my father’s life were 1929-1942. He lived in the Bronx – in the city -- but still had a guy with a horse/carriage delivering a big hunk of ice for the “icebox”. There was no TV, no air conditioning, no land line phone in the home. This wasn’t that long ago, but it’s pretty different than the first 13 years of my life. Ok, back to granddad. So my grandfather left Russia in 1921 and came to America and the next 80 years of his life saw: Automobiles, Indoor plumbing, Telephones, Heart surgery, Air travel, Satellites in orbit, Space travel, A moon landing, Television, Microwaves, Portable radios, CDs, Computers, and on, and on. In other words, my grandfather saw more significant change in his life than his ancestors saw in the 500 years previous, and more change than his ancestors’ ancestors saw in the previous 4500 years before that. In sum: There has never been a time in human history where there has been so much disruptive change in so short a time— and in fact the pace of change continues to accelerate.

One affect of this crazy pace of change is the impact it has on our expectations. Louis C.K. discussed this on Conan a few years ago.



Louie first observes how impatient people get when their cell phones are a little slow saying, “Will you give it a minute, it’s going to space! Give it a minute to get back from space. Is the speed of light too slow for you?” He then tells the story of being on plane with high speed wireless Internet — the newest thing that he knew existed. He’s watching Youtube clips, and it’s super fast. And then the flight attendant announces that the Internet is down and his seatmate exclaims, “This is bullshit.” Louie says to Conan, “How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago...” Funny right, but he captures something there, about how our expectations shift very quickly when they are exposed to new technologies. The fact is that technology shifts our expectations and the expectations and needs of our customers. Which means we have to be continually evaluating and shifting our role as librarians to respond to the shifting needs and expectations of those that we serve. But responding to those changing expectations isn’t the only challenge brought on by this incredible pace of change…



Let’s look again at that chart. What we see is that for long periods of time, nothing happened. Then a disruptive technology hits the scene and leads to major changes, but then things settle down and then for another long period of time nothing changes. In Change Management, this was referred to as the Unfreeze/Change/Refreeze model. (Kurt Lewin, 1947)

Up until recently, this was an accepted model of how change happens in societies, in communities, and in organizations: This model suggests that:

1. Our structures, our organizations, and therefore our shared experience of reality, remain fairly stable (or frozen) for long periods of time.

2. This also means that our structures, strategies, and decision models continue to be effective as the world remains fundamentally the same.

3. Then along comes a disruptive technology (i.e printing press, airplane, computer, washing machine)and for a period of time, things unfreeze and change happens.

4. The ramifications of the change play out, we adjust, recalibrate, and we settle into the new normal. We refreeze.

When Lewin introduced this concept in 1947 it was a fairly valid model of change, but over the last 100 years, the periods between each significant change have continually gotten smaller and smaller, until…we no longer actually get to a refreeze point. With regard to change we are now more in a state of continual fluidity. Back in 1996, Peter Vaill, a Professor of Mgmt. at Antioch Univ. observed this phenomena and suggested a new model for understanding the pace of change.



I think we are now in a state of Permanent whitewater. Whitewater suggests a number of things:

1. It suggests a fast-pace

2. It suggests that the situation changes by the second

3. It suggests that we need to aware and responsive moment by moment.

4. It also suggests that we can have a general sense of shape of the river—the direction of current; maybe know where the really big rocks are.

5. We can’t control the ride, but we can make choices and influence it.



PERMANENT REVOLUTION I’ve been thinking about this lately less in terms of permanent whitewater and more in terms of permanent revolution. Revolution implies massive disruptive change; major shifts in our bedrock assumptions and behaviors. But a permanent revolution also implies that none of the major changes, or revolutions are themselves permanent. Think about the relatively recent graveyard of disruptive technologies.

Can you identify these? [Beeper, Discman, VHS Cassette, Caller ID, Google Reader, Modem, Floppy Disk, Encarta, Landline phone.] With the exception of the land line, these all came and went in my adult life. Perhaps like Andy Warhol’s famous prediction that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, each disruptive technology, revolutionary though it may be, only gets to enjoy the proverbial 15 minutes of fame before being edged out by the next, next big thing. It’s worth noting that even when there is a revolutionary disruption, not everything changes. We are forced to adjust in certain areas of our lives and jobs, but other areas remain untouched. So here’s what I’ve been pondering with regard to libraries and this permanent revolution brought about by the disruption that is exponential change:



In thinking about this, and about the many disruptive technologies that have come and gone in so short a time, I was reminded of a conversation had with my friend Dave back when we were working for the Spokane County Library in 1993.

VIRTUAL LIBRARIANSHIP AND FUNNY NOSES

Dave and I were working on a staff day presentation and got into a discussion on the future of librarianship. It was an exciting time for us because we had recently upgraded to a 9600 baud modem and had figured out how configure our Trumpet Winsock so it worked most of the time. Internet search tools like Archie, Veronica and Gopher were blowing our young librarian minds. There was no Web yet, and only the beginnings of email -- we had a shared email through our library’s Compuserve account. So we’re talking about how technology is going to change librarianship and Dave comes out with this prediction that someday all of our reference will be virtual. Completely electronic. He pictured us wearing virtual goggles, and virtual gloves, and pulling virtual “ebooks” off of virtual shelves. Really what he was describing was not unlike Second Life. Minus the visual interface, his prediction that reference would become virtual -- communicating electronically, and relying on electronic resources, is pretty much a reality today, as we do chat and skype reference, and answer most questions with electronic resources. We achieved that in fewer than 20 years. Now here's a strange coincidence: I worked with Dave in Spokane until 1996 when I left to come back east. In fact, I was working not too far away at the EPA library across the Brooklyn Bridge there on Broadway. Dave and I didn’t keep in touch. But on October 3, 1999, I ran into him in a toy store in Portland, OR. He was there with his wife to run a marathon. And I happen to remember the date because I was there with my wife to marry her (we were eloping.) And we were doing what anyone would be doing the day before their wedding 3000 miles from home--we were in a toy store trying on funny noses.



So we’re trying on these different noses and laughing at how ridiculous we look, but there’s no mirror so we can’t see ourselves. Thinking out loud, I said, "I wish there was a mirror” and from around a blind corner comes a voice that says, “there's a mirror over here.” I turn the corner to discover that the voice belonged to Dave. He’s there with his wife. They were on the other side of the fixture, trying on funny noses. So Dave hears a disembodied voice asking for help from around a corner, and he responds with some assistance. He wasn’t an employee of the store, but he chose to respond to a customer’s need. And this is important because I think that what he did illustrates something about who we are as librarians. We are the ones who randomly help strangers. We are the ones doing guerrilla reference in funny nose sections of retail establishments across the land. Yes, we are the ones who offer help to strangers, but we’re also the ones that random strangers ask for help, aren’t we? Do you have this experience too? If you’re out somewhere in public, in a store, on a street, on the subway, people sense something about you and ask you for help. There is a pheromone we are putting out. I'm convinced that researchers will one day identify it, connect it to a helping gene in our DNA. That would explain what attracts people to us in Best Buy, asking if we can help them wire their sound systems. We don’t work there, but we still help them! We pull out our iphones, start drawing wiring diagrams. In department stores and supermarkets. Always, people picking up on our as-yet-unidentified helping pheromone and approaching us for assistance. "Where are the garbonzo beans?” Aisle 3, I'll walk you over. “How much off on this blouse? Let's see, the purple tag is 33%, so... And we help them, right? Why? Because we LOVE to help people. It’s what we do. It’s genetic. That's what they sense about us. That we like to help, to solve problems, to provide information. They sense that we CARE THE LIFE-SAVING POWER OF CARING: ANNA’S STORY And we can’t underestimate the life-saving power of caring. And I know that “life-saving” is a pretty bold way to characterize what we do, but there’s a reason I say “life-saving”, and it has to do with my Great Aunt Anna. I’d like to tell you a bit about her.



On the left is a picture of her (in the lower left) circa 1909. She’s about 4 ½ years old. That’s my great-grandma Esther behind her, and my grandfather Israel in the high chair. On the right are some pictures of her throughout her life. Anna passed away in 1993, the same year, coincidentally that I started my first full time job as a librarian and had that conversation with Dave about the future of libraries. In 2003, ten years after her death, ten years after I entered librarianship, I became aware that my Great Aunt Anna had written an unpublished autobiography.

Let me tell you a little bit about her life.

She was born in 1904 in Badragi a small peasant town in the province of Bessarabia—a province that changed hands between back and forth between Russian and Romanian control. Badragi had no paved streets, no sewage, no plumbing, no running water, no electricity. It was a primitive village of thatched roof huts, and Anna and her family lived in the poorest section with the other Jewish families.

In 1904, the same year she was born, Anna’s father Joseph (my great grandfather) left for America to make money to bring his family over. The family would rarely see or hear from Joseph over the next 17 years as he worked to save money to bring over his family.

Anna managed to survive a number of serious childhood illnesses, and was a happy and curious child, with a deep desire to learn. Valuing education was part of the Jewish culture and she may have absorbed something from the lullaby that her mother sang to her at night, which roughly translates as…”hush my baby, stop your crying, for some day you will be a great scholar.”

Unlike most of the poor peasant girls, Anna began school at 7 years old because she was passionate about learning even at that young age, and had the support of her mom.



One day, during a freezing winter, she came home with frostbitten toes and fingers, crying that her galoshes had been stolen and thrown in the outhouse toilet. Without galoshes she was unable to make the cold walk to school. And thus, her brief experience with formal education was ended.

But over the years Anna’s mother hired tutors (young boys, some barely adolescents) to ensure that she and her brothers received some education. One of these tutors, Yitzhak, would later help get the family to America, and even later, become Anna’s husband.

My great grandfather Joseph continued to toil away in the garment district in NY for years, dreadfully homesick. Between 1914-1918 (World War I) the family heard nothing from him. Had he been conscripted? Started a new family? They didn’t know. But when the war ended, they received correspondence that he was OK.

Finally, in 1921, Anna's father sent word to his family that he had finally raised money to bring them over to the United States. When Anna heard the news that she would be going to America, she fantasized about being about being able to go to school, maybe even college. And this fantasy of being able to learn, she wrote, had her “swimming in a cloud of hope.”

And soon, Anna and her mother and brothers made their way to America (a story in itself…) docking at Ellis Island on June 30, 1921. When she got to America Anna was a literate, but not-very-well-educated girl of almost 17, who spoke no English, and soon found herself working in a garment factory 6 days a week to help support the family. It was a difficult life.

And then one day a neighbor, Mrs. Berman, told her about the New York Public Library on 116th street. It sounded to her like a dream. Anna wrote in her autobiography,

“When I found it and entered, I was stunned. It was the first time in my life I saw such treasure. You could get any book in any language you wanted!”

And she lugged out books by the armload; Dostievsky, Tolstoy! Working six days a week, long days, for little pay and living in a small cramped apartment she was able to immerse herself in other worlds, broaden her mind with new ideas. But still she was reading in Russian.

Mrs. Berman noticed this and told Anna that she needn’t be embarrassed to ask the Librarian to help her find books to help her learn English, which would help her to navigate and acclimate to her new home. Anna did ask the librarian for help learning English and as Mrs. Berman had said, there was no need to be embarrassed.

The librarian was soon helping Anna find the books she needed and she was soon learning to read, pronounce and spell in her new language. Of this experience, Anna wrote, quite simply,



“The library saved my life.” The Library Saved My Life.

The library saved Anna's life not only because of the materials they offered, but because there was a librarian there who cared, who made her feel welcomed and unashamed, and who helped her connect to a world beyond herself, and find her way in the world, to lift herself up.

And I wonder how many others have experienced this? How many other lives have we saved? Because Anna’s story is an immigrant’s story. It certainly isn’t unique.

LOVE

So when we talk about Dave offering help in the toy store, and the “caring gene” that I suspect we have, and when we talk about my Great Aunt writing that the library saved her life, I think the underlying truth here is that we’re talking love.

When my great aunt wrote in her autobiography, “The Library Saved My Life”, I think she was writing a love letter. That love letter was written years ago, many miles from here, but it has traveled across time and space, and it was addressed to you, my fellow librarians, to you, and it’s an honor to be here today to deliver it.

And now I would now like to share another love letter. It is written not by a customer, but by our colleague, and my friend, Andy Woodworth. Andy posted this letter to his blog Agnostic, Maybe as part of the “Librarian Day in the Life” meme that has gone around the biblioblogosphere a few times.









While Andy addresses this love letter to you, I’d also like to think that in some way it is a response to my Aunt Anna. That this is his love letter back to her across time and space.

What I really connect to in this letter is how Andy gives such eloquent voice to our deep commitment to and love of libraries. Our love of service. Our joy in using our talents, our energies, for a noble purpose.

That we have the opportunity to do so makes us the luckiest people. The luckiest people.

So I’d like to suggest that if you celebrate this letter, you’re celebrating every librarian who gets up in the morning and looks forward to devoting their time and energy to enriching the lives of others. I’d like to suggest that we are celebrating ourselves, and celebrating the importance and nobility of what we do every day, and the very real difference we make in people’s lives.

I mentioned my wife (who is somewhere in Brooklyn right now and will be joining us at the after conference social – so you can fact-check me on this) On our first sorta date, I told her my secret of customer service.

I told her that in all of my jobs, whether I was serving pizza, or selling clothes, or answering reference questions, what I was really doing was giving little bits of love. It looked like I was answering a reference question, but in my mind I was offering a little piece of myself- a little bit of love.

I later found out that she thought this was a little freaky, but also interesting enough that I warranted a 2nd date.

You know, we don’t talk about love much in the professional literature, or in our conferences. We may talk of caring, but isn't love really why we do what we do? I believe that we librarians are great lovers. And we express and share that love through library service.



Look at these pictures.

- What I see when I look at the great work that ULU is doing is love. - Love for others, for people. For community. For connection. - Lovers of people, of other people taking this journey with us

Love puts us in a transformative place. These are pictures of people who are giving of themselves, unconditionally, and that’s what love is.

COMMUNITY

Retuning to Anna for a moment:

The other thing I’d like to point up in her story is how the library helped to bring her, and so many like her, into community. How the library in welcoming her, and helping her learn the language, also helped her to feel a sense of belonging in her new community. And the library’s key role in helping to build community is just as true 90 years later. In fact there has been quite a renewed awareness of the libraries value in community-building.

We’ve always known this and I am really pleased with Maureen Sullivan and the American Library Association devoting resources to the topic. But it’s also great to see so many outside of libraries are also taking note of the critical role we have to play in fostering strong communities.

For instance in their January 2013 report, “Branches of Opportunity” , The Center for and Urban Future argues that libraries are Uniquely positioned to help address the urban economic and social challenges for years to come. Some highlights:



- Key component of human capital system - Critical role: Skills development - Critical role: Job preparation - Critical role: Reading skills for young - Importance of technology access - Support for freelance economy

A recent report from the Urban Institute (in partnership with Urban Libraries Council) also argues for the important role libraries play in creating and supporting community.

1. Public libraries build a community’s capacity for economic activity and resiliency.

2. Many families and caregivers rely on the library to provide important pre-school reading and learning.

3. Many people entering the workforce rely on libraries to get them online.

4. Local businesses are increasingly tapping into the library’s online databases to keep themselves competitive and to find new business opportunities.

5. Library facilities often anchor downtown and commercial developments, and are attractive neighborhood amenities

Again, we know all this. It’s not new. Which returns us to the two questions I asked earlier:



In a state of permanent revolution, what changes and what stays the same? And I think we’ve answered the first question. What stays the same is our way of being. By that I mean the caring that we express though our work. Our core values rooted in love.

But the accelerating pace of change brought on by disruptive technology creates some fundamental changes in the world that we do need to respond to if libraries are to remain healthy and effective institutions. Which means some our ways of doing need to change.

First off, in a world where disruptive change is increasingly the norm, we need to structure our organizations for maximum flexibility and innovation.



For most of us, this requires some flattening of our organizations. We need to reduce hierarchy, and increase decision-making power for individuals and small groups.

We cannot afford to study things to the nth degree, and wait for ideas to get through layers of approval. By the time it’s approved the idea will be halfway to obsolete.

How many of you seen the Valve Employee Handbook?

1. Valve has NO hierarchy 2. No management 3. No structure 4. Anyone can hire or initiate a new project

I’m not suggesting that libraries can or should have absolutely no hierarchy like Valve. But we should look at what they’re doing and think of it as runway fashion. It’s far out there, but some of those far out ideas can be used as inspiration, scaled back, and implemented.

Here’s the thing… A flat organization also requires a new type of employee – a flat association requires a new type of member.



We need “one buttock players”! What’s a one buttock player you ask? (And no, it’s not someone who does things half-assed.) I’ll tell you. (btw, you should see the first image I had selected for this slide…) A one buttock player is what conductor and music teacher Benjamin Zander calls people who play piano with such passion, that as they play, one buttock lifts off of the seat.

I also like Peter Northouses concept of “emergent leadership”. Emergent Leaders

- Have No formal authority - Are passionate and involved - Motivate others - Initiate new ideas - Seek others’ opinions

I suspect we have a lot of emergent leaders – a lot of one buttock players -- in the room with us today… And that’s good, you are desperately needed! People who get that we can’t sit around and wait for leadership. Be your own damn leader! Right?



MAKE SOMETHING UP AND STEAL THE REST

As I said in this fast-paced world we don’t have time to perfect and refine every new idea before launch. But here’s the good news: There has never been a better time in history to simply make something up and steal the rest. We have so many ways to quickly connect with each other, support each other, and share and improve on good ideas. Here are a few examples

- Mini Libraries (ULU) - Six Word Memoirs (Emily Lloyd, Minneapolis Public Library) - Alternative Teen Fashion Show (Fayetteville, Arkansas) Public Library) - The Human Library (Edmonton Public Library) - Library Box (Jason Griffey) - Knit in Publid Day (Princeton Public Library) - Civic Discourse (PPL) - Library Sleevefacing (Bowling Green State University LIbrary)



Again, there has never been a better time in the history of humanity to steal the rest. We are lucky that we have so many ways to connect with and support each other. These are just the ones I could fit on a slide.

WebJunction Social Media Associations ALADirect | ALA Connect Consortia Blogs Literature Facebook Groups Personal Network LinkedIn Groups Slideshare.net Webinars Vendors Listservs/Forums



TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF

The last thing I want to share with you before we conclude is this.

The world needs you. So it’s vitally important that you find ways of renewing your energy and your spirit. Some ways that work for

1. Optimism 2. Mindfulness Meditation 3. Nature 4. Exercise 5. Celebration and appreciation 6. Community Support (that’s what ULU is)

…And lastly

7. Hope



And I say hope with the recognition that hope can have a painful side. When we hope, we can also be let down. There is a wonderful scene in the HBO show “Enlightened”, beautifully written by Mike White.

Amy Jelicoe (Laura Dern) asks, “Am I crazy?” “ And her ex-husband Levi (Luke Wilson) responds: No. You’re just full of hope. You’ve got more hope than most people do.” It’s a beautiful thing to have a little hope for the world.”

It is a beautiful thing. Hope can energize us. Especially when we share that hope—when we hope together.

I have a lot of hope for the world. I have hope for libraries. The amazing work and depth of caring that I see in ULU feeds my hope. And I don’t think you would be here today unless you felt that too. And that’s a beautiful thing. I see hope as a small flame that we each keep burning in our hearts.

I’d like to leave you with this challenge. As you go through your days, as you come up against challenges, and frustrations, remember to keep connecting your own small flame to the central flames of life and the world.

We cannot predict the exact details of the future, but we can have a hand in shaping the heart of the future, including its context of meaning and our commitment and courage in advancing into the unknown.

Thank you!

Date post:	19-Oct-2014
Category:	Education
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The Very Heart of It. Keynote at Urban Libraries Unite (ULU) Conference (text version w/slides)

Education