State of America’s Libraries: Open (Online) For National Library Week 2020

If I weren’t so busy using library services online and staying in touch with library colleagues across the United States, I might actually be feeling the loss of all that they usually offer onsite—a set of resources, services, and possibilities nicely summarized in the newly released State of America’s Libraries 2020 report from the American Library Association’s American Libraries magazine.

Anyone taking the time to read this wonderful yearly summary of why libraries remain cherished community resources (even when the buildings themselves are closed  because of shelter- in-place guidelines designed to fight the spread of the 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic) can’t help but be impressed by and grateful, as we celebrate National Library Week (April 19-25, 2020), for all that libraries and library staff contribute to our communities—onsite as well as online.  

Libraries, those who wrote or otherwise contributed to the report remind us, actively support “learning and parent engagement” in the learning process; they offer wellness and health resources and activities beyond what many of us assume is in place, including “materials on healthy lifestyles, cookbooks that address medical dietary needs, multimedia for physical exercise instruction, and self-help mental health materials. Some libraries take healthy lifestyle services even further by offering walking, hiking, bicycling, or running programs that take place outside the library building. Nearly 23% of public libraries host fitness or yoga classes.” Most offer “digital literacy training programs, through which community members can learn résumé development and job searching and gain new skills to aid in career advancement. Nearly half of the more than 16,000 public libraries in the US provide free services for small businesses and entrepreneurs…”

And there is plenty onsite that goes beyond our traditional views of what libraries provide: “The best proof that public libraries are about more than just books is their evolution into libraries of things, offering nontraditional collections that are community-specific and imaginative. The wide array of items available to check out includes mattresses, dolls, bicycles, binoculars, and accordions. At the Beaverton (Oreg.) City Library, patrons can check out kitchenware, outdoor equipment, and games.”

For me, the “library” is a cohesive blend of onsite and online resources, services, possibilities—and people. (Never forget those wonderful people who make the library what it is—including staff as well as the people who use libraries and interact within and through libraries.) Before shelter-in-place guidelines were imposed here in San Francisco last month in response to the spread of the coronavirus, I was in San Francisco’s Main Library at least once a week; occasionally visited branches throughout the city; and did a substantial amount of my work through library resources (e.g., access to journal articles) online. Those buildings—and the all-important people who make them what they are—created homes away from home for me and the thousands of other people who visited them every day; temporary office and research sites whenever I used my laptop or tablet, through library Wi-Fi access; and cherished community centers where I would unexpectedly run into people I knew or participate in community-based conversations that were of interest to me and those I serve. Above all, they were places where I consistently came across unexpected treasures—a newly-released book by an author I admire, a DVD featuring a movie I wanted to see, or even an art exhibition that temporarily transported me into another world and left me entertained or immersed in thought about a subject or a place to which the exhibition provided access. And the conversations: seeing colleagues who would ask me what I had been doing recently or tell me what they had been exploring so we all grew through those wonderful exchanges of anecdotes and information made those onsite library visits an extremely important part of my training-teaching-learning landscape.

So, the move to a library that existed only online was a bit of a jolt. But one that has been accompanied by pleasant surprises. Never one to spend much time “going to the movies” online, I suddenly found myself enjoying access to kanopy (which gives me access to up to 15 free movies a month) and Hoopla (a streaming service providing access to audio books, comics, e-books, movies, music, and television programs) through my library account. Prompted by a promotion on the library’s home page, I followed a link to virtual storytimes and enjoyed watching San Francisco Mayor London Breed read Dave Egger’s book What Can a Citizen Do?, San Francisco City Librarian Michael Lambert read Alison Farrell’s The Hike, and Librarian Anna Cvitkovic’s continuing additions to the series. And because I am immersed in training-teaching-learning, I’m beginning to explore the free access my library provides to LinkedIn Learning’s Lynda.com, a great resource I have previously paid to use through a private account. Thinking about those wonderful exchanges of information through face-to-face conversations during my onsite visits, I’ve worked to transform them into “face-to-face online” conversations through the use of Zoom and any other videoconferencing tool we can easily use to remain connected to each other.

Circling back to State of America’s Libraries 2020, I once again admire what publication editor Steve Zalusky and our other colleagues at American Libraries have produced, and couldn’t agree more Zalusky’s introductory remarks: “As the State of America’s Libraries report goes to press, the coronavirus pandemic has upended our nation and our profession, so much so that aspects of this report —which provides a snapshot of our industry in 2019—now read like dispatches from a distant era. What hasn’t changed is our belief that service and stewardship to our communities are core to the library profession. We continue to see this every day even as library buildings close to the public but often sustain or grow their virtual services and make their resources freely available to all. Today and everyday, our nation’s libraries are on the front lines, playing an invaluable role in keeping communities connected.”

–N.B.: This is the fifth in a series of reflections inspired by colleagues’ reactions to the coronavirus and shelter-in-place experiences and our continuing interactions online.

Shaping Education Unconference 2018: Moving Into the Neighborhood (Pt. 2 of 4)

One of the more playful and productive exercises at the Unconference for Dreamers, Doers, & Drivers Shaping the Future of Learning in Tempe and Scottsdale, Arizona late last week involved building neighborhoods. We weren’t using hammers and nails, and no hardhats were required. This was an exercise in identifying key issues in higher education and other learning environments; pulling tables together to create neighborhoods of conversation within the conference room in which we were meeting; and then diving into those conversations designed to identify what the residents of the newly-established Unconference neighborhoods held as their unifying dream, what we hoped to do in one-, three-, and five-year periods (horizons, anyone?) of time, and what was driving us toward those dreams and actions.

Because of my ongoing interest in finding ways to nurture and sustain a global online community (FOEcast—the Future of Education forecast group unified through a “Beyond The Horizon” group on Slack) that has emerged from the closing and Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings initiated by New Media Consortium (NMC) board members in December 2017, I immediately moved into FOEcastville and dove into planning with others inspired by this post-NMC community which is evolving with the addition of members who had no direct, previous connections.

Defining our dream was a fairly easy undertaking because the effort had already been underway for a few months: developing a highly-functioning, sustainable community of action that will extend to sectors beyond higher education and will include spin-offs to connect to other learning organizations worldwide.

Establishing a list of actions to be completed within one-, three-, and five-year periods also was straightforward. Our year one goals include engaging in strategic planning; continuing to establish mission, vision, and value statements that will guide us and others who join our efforts to identify and promote positive changes within the various lifelong-learning environments in which we work; producing documents that will be useful to those joining us in our efforts to continue contributing to global efforts to shape the future of learning—and make those documents available under Creative Commons licensing; and seeking ways to continue working together online (e.g., through the Slack “Beyond the Horizon” group) and onsite (e.g., through gatherings including the Unconference for Dreamers, Doers, & Drivers Shaping the Future of Learning).

Our three- and five-year goals contained an implicit acknowledgment that this is still very much a rapidly-evolving community that draws from the community that existed under the auspices of the NMC and also draws from the extended, rhizomatically-growing community of our non-NMC colleagues who share an interest in collaborating to have a positive impact on lifelong learning throughout the world. With that in mind, a major item on our list is to continually engage in revisions of our implantation plans so we can react to the changes that will undoubtedly occur in our learning environments. We also made the commitment to look for opportunities to establish and/or work with organizations tackling parts of the effort to reshape learning (e.g., those focused on higher education—like EDUCAUSE, which obtained the NMC’s assets through the Chapter 7 proceedings and is proceeding with plans to publish the 2018 Horizon Report > Higher Ed Edition halted by the closing of the NMC—as well as others working in our extended lifelong-learning playground: colleagues in the K-12 sector, community colleges and vocational schools, museums, libraries, and the extensive network of workplace learning and performance (talent development) colleagues. (Those that come to mind for me include colleagues who gather under the auspices of first-rate learning organizations such as ATD—the Association for Talent Development or who are filling unmet learning needs through opportunities provided by LinkedIn/Lynda.com).

It was heartening to see so many representatives from so many of these organizations and industries working together during the Unconference to develop plans of action to help reshape learning; Arizona State University Chief Information Officer Lev Gonick did an amazing job of pulling together a broad coalition of stakeholders in the conversation from a variety of countries. Our colleagues from EDUCAUSE were active participants in the process of attempting to determine how our post-NMC world will take shape. Several members of the former NMC community accepted the invitation to present lightning talks to stimulate the conversations. The result of these combined efforts and commitment to innovation was that any participant interested in being part of our ongoing efforts to better serve our learners had plenty of opportunities to find a place to engage in what will be an ongoing, dynamic shaping process—with an eye on producing concrete, measurable results.

It’s worth paying attention to how and why the Beyond the Horizon/FOEcast conversation—and so many others—progressed so quickly. This was a group that already had been interacting online for a few months and was drawing upon years of experience as a community of teacher-trainer-learner-doers (learning facilitators as activists in the best sense of that word). We approached our work with a sense of collaboration and a commitment to positive action; there was very little argument, but, on the other hand, this was far from an exercise in groupthink—plenty of ideas surfaced, and those which appeared most promising seemed to find advocates willing to carry them further in the weeks, months, and years ahead of us, while those ideas which did not immediately catch fire can certainly resurface as needed. The space itself, on the Arizona State University campus in Scottsdale, was conducive to the types of interactions Lev and others did so much to foster: the room had plenty of natural light flowing in from outside; the room itself was spacious and had furniture that could easily be moved to create the best possible set-up for an exchange of ideas. (The FOEcast group quickly created a T-shaped arrangement of tables that made it possible for most people to hear each other easily and contribute to the conversation.)

We also need to acknowledge the importance of the conversation facilitators in an endeavor at the level of the Unconference and those neighborhood-development sessions. FOEcast co-founder Bryan Alexander led our FOEcast neighborhood’s discussion. Lev contributed tremendously through his facilitation of the entire Unconference. And graphic facilitator Karina Branson seemed to have the ability to be in the right place at the right time to keep conversations progressing in positive directions throughout the entire Unconference.

As our highly-motivated group of Edunauts reached the end of a day of dreaming, sharing, and planning for a future we very much want to help create, we did exactly what the event was designed to stimulate: continued our conversations well into the evening in small groups over dinner. And when we reconvened Friday morning for our final hours together onsite, we were ready to take our efforts even further.

N.B. — This is the second of four sets of reflections inspired by the Unconference for Dreamers, Doers, & Drivers Shaping the Future of Learning in April 2018.

Next: Exploding the Classroom