WebJunction

A supplement to The Storied Library, going into more detail on some of the points in the column and providing some links for further reading and ideas.

“The Storied Library” is the first in a series of columns on the general theme, “What’s Your Story?” My aim in the series is to encourage you to think about your library’s story, explore what that story really is (and what it should be), engage others in exploring your library’s story and find ways to tell your story to your community—and, in turn, help your community (individual patrons and the community as a whole) tell their stories.

If you’re marketing-oriented, you can substitute “brand” for “library’s story” and “market” or “advocate” or “promote” for “tell your story.” These are necessary and beneficial activities for all libraries. They are not activities that require you to commercialize your library or think like a salesperson. If you’re uncomfortable with the commercial aspects of “marketing,” you may find “telling your story” more appropriate.

All marketing is story-telling, but not all story-telling is marketing. My hope is that a story perspective—both in terms of many of your library’s functions and how you go about reaching out to your community of patrons—will prove useful in finding and using your most effective stories.

How could you use story in telling your story? Consider the following hypothetical library situation (based on real library numbers).

Brandville Library: Three Stories Tall and 113,000 Stories Deep—Or Is That Sixteen Million Stories?

Brandville Library serves Brandville, a town (or city, depending on the state it’s in) of 18,000 people. “Serves” is the right word—95% of the residents have library cards, so the patrons really are the community. Brandville Library is three stories tall. It’s a library that tries to understand the community’s story: There’s an in-depth community profile created by the library and available on the library’s website.

How many stories does Brandville have? That depends:

• The most conservative count would be 113,000:
  80,000 stories in 77,000 books
  5,000 stories on 5,000 videos and DVDs
  20,000 stories on 3,500 sound recordings (this assumes that half are song-based)
  2,000 stories told in 2,000 local history photos
  6,000 stories in the local history collection of 5,000 books and 1,000 documents
• But what about the story hours and other programs, averaging 150 programs per year and serving 2,000 patrons per year?
• And the 10,000 reference transactions?
• And an average of 55,000 new stories each year in 230 magazine subscriptions?
• What about the microfilm archives of local newspapers, which conservatively add up to 1.5 million stories over the last century?
• Then there are licensed databases and special local databases and digital collections.
  Digitized local collections add up to 20,000 items
  Licensed databases total at least 15 million stories in full-text databases
• There are also 15 public-access computers and Wi-fi network providing access to, what, eight billion stories on the open web?

How many stories does Brandville offer its patrons—and where does it offer them? Patrons can use those licensed databases and local digital collections 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, if they have computers and internet access—and they can search Brandville’s catalog and reserve physical items to pick up next time they’re at the library.

Here’s a different story with a trifle more than 110,000 stories:

Brandville Library: Three Stories Tall, Sixteen Million Stories Deep

That’s just the start of a campaign. Would it work in your community? Is 110,000 the more realistic number—or something in between?

Your library’s story needs to address your patrons, your community, your strengths and weaknesses. Brandville funds its library acceptably well, but doesn’t use it as much as you’d hope. Maybe the power and availability of Brandville’s stories isn’t the story it needs to tell—but those stories could be part of its story.

The next few columns are specifically about finding and telling your library’s story. First, let’s consider why it might make sense to think of your library as primarily (certainly not exclusively) a place of stories.

Why Story?

What’s a story? Merriam-Webster Online offers these definitions for the first form of “story”:

1 archaic a : HISTORY 1 b : HISTORY 3

2 a : an account of incidents or events b : a statement regarding the facts pertinent to a situation in question c : ANECDOTE; especially : an amusing one

3 a : a fictional narrative shorter than a novel; specifically : SHORT STORY b : the intrigue or plot of a narrative or dramatic work

4 : a widely circulated rumor

5 : LIE, FALSEHOOD

6 : LEGEND, ROMANCE

7 : a news article or broadcast

8 : MATTER, SITUATION

I’m using the broadest set of meanings for the stories a library deals with. That certainly includes history, stories of the past. It includes nonfiction narratives (“an account of incidents or events”). It includes all fictional narratives—novels are long stories. And it certainly includes matter and situation—the story of your library is the substance of what you are, what you do and how that places you in your surroundings and in the lives of your patrons.

Collecting and Telling Stories

Most of what your library does falls into the realm of story. Most books you acquire offer single stories or gather many related stories. Some are fictional; some are history, description, instruction or argumentation; some may fall in between.

Even books consisting mostly of facts become their own stories by collocating those facts, although that may be stretching the point since there’s no evident narrative thread. “Here’s how to” probably begins as many stories as “once upon a time”: informational stories may be some of the most valuable stories in your library.

Cataloging and organizing books enhances their individual stories by connecting them to other stories, either through shelf adjacency or other access points. It also makes them more readily available to patrons wishing to be educated, enlightened or entertained by the stories.

Books are only the beginning, to be sure. The magazines and newspapers you subscribe to are chock-full of stories. Most magazines consist entirely of stories, while newspapers mix straight facts (stock listings, weather pages) with stories—but in most cases, it’s the stories that make collected newspapers worth having. Almost all sound recordings contain single or multiple stories, although you could argue that some music lacks narrative content. Do you have any DVDs or other videos that don’t contain stories?

If you maintain a local history collection, chances are it’s mostly a set of stories, or in some cases pieces of information that can be crafted into stories. Consider some facts: Your town had 1,000 people in 1900, 2,000 in 1910, 4,000 in 1920, 9,000 in 1930, 15,000 in 1940, and 25,000 in 1950—but 22,000 in 1960, 21,000 in 1970, 20,000 in 1980, 18,000 in 1990 and 15,000 in 2000. Those are facts. What’s interesting and worth preserving is the story behind those facts. Chances are, that story builds on many smaller stories, including the oral histories you may be collecting.

Then there’s the web. Huge heaps of information (and misinformation), but also millions of stories. Wikipedia, for good and bad, is a collection of stories—as are traditional encyclopedias such as the Encyclopædia Britannica, Encarta and  World Book. Most blogs are ongoing sets of stories. Search engines may lead you to specific facts, but more likely you’ll wind up with many stories, including commercial stories and those offered by individuals and institutions.

Story hours are quintessentially about stories, to be sure, as are other story services. You’re definitely in the business of helping your patrons and your community create and expand their own stories—but you may also be creating and disseminating new stories as part of library services.

The Value of Stories

Can you count the stories in your library? Partly, yes, and that might be a good exercise. (See the last section of this essay.) You can count your books (simplify by assuming one book per story, although that’s a substantial undercount). You can count your sound recordings, which probably average about 12 stories per song-oriented CD, fewer for classical and jazz. Figure one story per movie DVD, more for TV series.

Then it gets interesting. How many stories are in your local history center? Those are important stories; can you estimate the count? How many stories are in your local newspaper archives? What about your magazine and newspaper collections? When I’ve checked, our local newspaper averaged about 80 stories per day (more on Sundays), even leaving out comic strips and syndicated features. I’d guesstimate a typical magazine at 20 stories per issue, conservatively, including features and stories.

Then there are your licensed databases and the open web—and there counts become nearly impossible and possibly pointless. You may have an estimate of the full-text resources in licensed databases and it’s almost certainly in the millions. The open web? Essentially uncountable.

As with library statistics in general, it’s not the number of stories that matters the most. It’s their value.

Those articles in your small business reference center that helped a prematurely-retired citizen found a new business: What’s the value of those stories? The story hour and successive children’s books that turned a reluctant reader into an enthusiastic reader—and a likely school dropout into a college graduate: Put a dollar amount on that one. The novel that inspired a patron to start writing her own stories: What’s that worth? And, more locally, the odd little story of a family in 1890 that filled in the pieces for someone researching their own family history: As the ad would say, “Priceless.”

There are online calculators for measuring the market value of the library stories and other services a patron uses. They provide a good baseline and generally show a pretty impressive community return on library funding.

The Limits of Story

Your library is a place of stories—but that’s not all it is. There’s a limit to every simple formulation of a good public library’s missions. You do so many things and serve so many roles as a place that even “story” can’t cover them all. I could try, but it would be a stretch. You could think of a reference interview as trying to get from the patron’s question to the story behind that question—but that’s silly. You may be providing stories in response to the question, but that’s also not a given. Sometimes a fact is just what the patron needs.

Your community information file is probably just that—a file of information. You probably don’t ask (or want to know) the story behind a patron’s request for the name and address of a community resource; that is generally none of your business. You need just enough information from them to provide the right resources; that’s a pure information transfer. Similarly, place-related functions don’t necessarily involve either information or story, although they frequently involve either or both. Some community programs are all about stories; some aren’t. You’re not only about stories—but it’s a safe bet that stories are at the heart of most of what you do.

Why Not Information?

Libraries are certainly about information, at least in part. Libraries serve to bring resources to people for their education, enlightenment and entertainment. A big part of that service is the right information at the right time and place.

There are several problems with the concept that a public library is an “information place” or, worse, the information place. The notion is semantically difficult, tends toward a limited view of what public libraries do and leads librarians to worry about competitions that they can’t win rather than focusing on the services that they provide better than anyone else.

Semantics: What Do You Mean by Information?

“Information” is a tricky term that means different things to different people. Let’s go back to Merriam-Webster Online. Here are the first two primary definitions, noting that the second has several subdefinitions. (The other primary definitions are narrow and have little to do with libraries.)

1 : the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence

2 a (1) : knowledge obtained from investigation, study, or instruction (2) : INTELLIGENCE, NEWS (3) : FACTS, DATA b : the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (as nucleotides in DNA or binary digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects c (1) : a signal or character (as in a communication system or computer) representing data (2) : something (as a message, experimental data, or a picture) which justifies change in a construct (as a plan or theory) that represents physical or mental experience or another construct d : a quantitative measure of the content of information; specifically : a numerical quantity that measures the uncertainty in the outcome of an experiment to be performed.

The first definition certainly applies to some library activities, but it’s narrow. It doesn’t apply to fiction and it’s concerned with “communication or reception” rather than the resources themselves. Reference service may be information, using this meaning, but not much else.

When most people talk about libraries as information places, they probably mean definition 2a. But which part of 2a do you think of when you think of “information”? 2a(1) deals with what I’d call factual stories—or, literally, the result of a factual story in the mind of the reader. Knowledge can only occur in the mind of the reader or listener; the book, website, article or lecture can convey the results of study, but doesn’t itself constitute knowledge. The biggest problem with “information” as a term is 2a(3), which may also be the most common meaning--it becomes synonymous with facts or data.

Limiting a Library’s Scope and Falsifying its Role

Traditionally, the biggest problem with “information” is that it impoverishes the scope of public libraries and misstates a library’s collection and services. Is your library really all about information?

Fine. There goes the fiction, almost all of your sound recordings, the bulk of your DVDs and VHS collection. So much for story hour: You’re not presenting facts or data to those kids.

Worse yet, any sense that public libraries are the information place is just wrong. I discussed this at length in Being Analog: Creating Tomorrow’s Libraries—and it isn’t news, if you think about it. To quote:

“How many patrons call their public libraries to check on current traffic conditions? What percentage of daily newspaper readership takes place at the public library? Have businesspeople trying to keep up with an industry ever relied on the library for the latest information—or have they subscribed to the industry weeklies, specialized newsletters, and, lately, online services?...

“Most people don’t rely on the public library for the most current facts: that’s what newspapers, television, and radio are for. Most middle- and upper-class people don’t get their primary information in their key areas of interest from the public libraries: That’s what personal magazine subscriptions, bookstores, and online services are for…

“But most people…do use their public libraries for pleasure reading, adventures in new areas, and many other aspects of life… Libraries also serve as safety nets for the displaced and primary places where young people learn to love reading and knowledge.[1]”

Libraries “fill in the pieces” and expand horizons as well as being safety nets. That’s important, frequently vital—but you’re not and never were the first place most people go for most information.

Competing with Google, Yahoo, Ask, Live and the Rest

For librarians, the biggest problem today with “information” as a public library paradigm is that it seems to make you a competitor to Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, Ask and many other fast, convenient ways to find stuff. That causes some librarians to fear for their future: How can you out-Google Google? Some community members may use this competition as a way to undermine libraries: You can’t out-Google Google, so why are you still around?

That formulation is half right. You can’t out-Google Google. It’s foolish to try. It’s also not what public libraries are all about. If your primary function is providing immediate (and frequently incorrect or misleading) answers to questions just as they’re asked, you’re in trouble. You’re not as fast, you’re not as convenient (for most users) and while the information you can provide may be superior, that’s frequently not an issue. (“May be” is tricky: How many of you, dealing with quick factual reference questions, don’t use Ask or Windows Live or Yahoo! or Google as a tool?)

It’s an unwinnable competition. Fortunately, it’s also a false competition. Google’s not a competitor. If anything, it’s a partner. You provide local stories. You provide factual stories—information in context—in a way that’s difficult for any software. Through reference interviews either in person, via IM or virtual reference, on the phone or—a little less rapidly—over email, you can put the patron in touch with their real needs, rather than just answering the immediate question.

And, of course, you provide a wealth of stories, organized resources to enrich your patrons and community—and all the other services a web search engine can’t touch. Your library won’t be better than Google at being Google, but you’re much better than Google at being a public library—and that’s the story you should be concerned with.

Stories and Conversations

R. David Lankes, Joanne Silverstein and Scott Nicholson of Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies propose that we view the library as conversation, in a 39-page document produced for ALA ’s Office for Information Technology Policy.

The thrust of the report is a desire to involve libraries more heavily in, or as, “participatory conversations”—social networks, tagging and user reviews in catalogs, blogs and the like. The report attempts to define all library collections and services as conversations with libraries as facilitators.

I won’t argue the merits and defects of this perspective here. I was one of four people who submitted comments on the draft version. At the time, I found the concept of “library as conversation” unsatisfying. Nothing in the final document changes my opinion. But you may find the concept compelling or at least useful.

But will your patrons and community understand the perspective that the library is a conversation or a set of conversations? I doubt it. The perspective requires rethinking linguistic concepts. Most of us just don’t think of reading a book by a dead author as being any sort of conversation. On the other hand, we do know that we’re reading a story, whether fiction or nonfiction.

The document’s comments on participatory networks may be valuable, but you don’t need the “conversation” perspective to think about new ways to interact with your patrons. Should you be carrying on more kinds of conversations with your patrons and your community? Almost certainly—and there are many ways to do so, including wikis, blogs, “social online catalogs,” photo-sharing sites and more.

WebJunction has a few resources on social software and will be adding more. The web itself (and especially library people who blog) offer more stories than you could possibly use.   In the interests of space and coherence, I’ll just mention one common tool and one cautionary note here.

Almost certainly, more libraries now use blogs than any other form of social software—although if your library blog doesn’t allow comments, it’s not exactly participatory. George Needham talked about blogs in his January 2007 column and here’s a quick guide to starting a blog. As the age of that guide suggests, blogs aren’t all that new.

Discussions of social software overlap with discussions of library technology. Here one key resource is TechAtlas which has its own blog. As you think about new technologies—and social software is a set of technologies, even if it’s all on the web—you need to focus on the results you hope to achieve within your community. Here’s one thoughtful discussion toward that end.

We’ll discuss some forms of social software more in a later installment, as we discuss ways to tell your library’s story. See What's Your Story.