In a
poetry class that I took as an undergraduate at Slippery Rock University, a
student named Abby wrote a very thought-provoking short poem about standing on
the regal staircase outside of a Harvard library in the setting dusk. In her poem, Abby extracted all of the implicit
metadata that surrounded her as she stood on the ivory league campuses’ iconic
building. It filled the poem with an
atmosphere of foreboding, unwelcoming, out-of-touch, and basically inaccessible
to most of us. The signs here were grey,
dark, and made of stone. They were embedded in the staircase itself, in the Greek-style
columns, and in the expansive Harvard skyline that seemed worlds apart from anywhere
that she could locate herself.
When
people think about libraries today, I wonder how many people still have
something like this Harvard vision in mind.
This is a vision where the library is something other, something a world apart, belonging to a wholly different
class of people, and somewhere that the individual feels that there is nothing
for her or him inside. How many people’s
visions of libraries involve technology, games, DVDs, music, social spaces, and
an engaged and approachable professional staff?
The
image of a library as reflecting some Greek ideal of dusty-knowledge hidden
away in ancient books might work for the members of the Harvard elite, but for
everyone else this image is anything but inviting. If libraries are to be a cornerstone of
communities, with their doors wide open for all of its members, then the
library’s metadata needs to communicate that message. What is important in this idea is that there
is no one image that a library should be molded to, but rather, when this
happens it creates a negative stereotype of the library as either a solely
academic, or even government controlled, institution that only allows
membership to a select population. In
order to set itself free of these stereotypes, the image of the library is one
that needs to be able to adapt to its community.
The
semester before taking that poetry class, I was fortunate enough to take a trip
to San Francisco in order to tutor at an elementary school in a predominately Spanish
speaking neighborhood. What was striking
about this elementary building was how welcoming it was to its students. In order to achieve this, the school turned
to local, amateur artists from its own neighborhood to make mural paintings on
both the inside and outside walls. The
result was a tremendously beautifully and vibrantly colorful building that
reflected the diversity in the community. This building was one that the
community took part in shaping and defining. The result was a place that welcomed all
members of its community and one that students found identified with who they are
and their needs without trying to reform them. It was somewhere that they
belonged.
If
libraries are to be about their communities, then they could take a lesson from
both Abby’s poem and the elementary school in a Spanish neighborhood in San
Francisco. We do not need to re-shape
our communities. If we try to do this,
we will find that our communities will not want to support us, they will find
us out-of-touch, and they will not want to use our services. We will become some other that is stealing their tax dollars.
Instead, advertising to our
community that we want them as our patrons and that we do have services that
reflect today’s needs means that our image needs to reflect this. This does not have to be done by building a
new building, as this may not always be feasible. Instead, it can be done by community art
projects, interior spaces that are comfortable and inviting, having media that
is in-touch with what our patrons require us to have, and by engaging with our
patrons. Being a welcoming, community
institution cannot just be left as implicit in existing as a library, but rather it needs to be made explicit the library’s
image and attitude visible to the community.
#lis60001
No comments:
Post a Comment