This is a quick review/reflection of the Opening Keynote Address (given Tuesday, March 26, 2013) by R. David Lankes, Professor and Dean’s Scholar for the New Librarianship, Syracuse University School of Information Studies
The talk is titled “Awesome Librarians” here is a link to the video.
Librarians must build more than a collection: they must build communities and conversations.
This address seems directed at the I LEAD U community and he exhorts the audience to take advantage of the opportunity and to learn to enjoy ambiguity. Throughout the opening of this talk, he is focused on building awesome librarians and not just awesome projects. The projects are important but are one part of the bigger picture. He shifts the focus from products and services (websites, videos, collections) to the fundamental mission of librarians, which he defines like this:
Our mission: to improve society. How do we do it? By facilitating knowledge creation in our communities.
I was quite refreshing hearing Professor Lankes repeat the actions of libraries – improve, learn, teach, engage – because it painted such a wonderful and broad perspective of what libraries are and what librarians do.
We are here to make our communities better.
Libraries build tools to allow this happen. This personally convicted me in a number of ways; I often think that my job is to make our electronic resources more accessible, or a user interface slightly better, or hidden collections more accessible. I think Lankes would say this is fine…so long as the most important goal is guiding these efforts.
Avoid talking about “the user” – only computer scientists and drug dealers have users. Don’t call them “consumers” or “customers” either. Don’t “use” the library but “join” the library in terms of shared activity. Measure the success of the library in terms of success of the community – not in spite of the community! He claims we approach too many problems with the mindset “my community doesn’t read enough” and then try and solve the problem like that. Don’t promote collections – ask “what do you want?” and “what do you want to be?” instead. Our communities have problems – but they also have dreams and aspirations and goals; the job of libraries is not to fix the problems – it is help people achieve their dreams and aspirations and goals.
To be an “awesome librarian” or an “epic librarian” don’t just do your job – understand why you do your job! This will help you determine when something different is needed. We are about human to human connection, conversation, and learning. What does learning require? Answers to this question will vary but are the most important parts of library service.
Help the community. The is the goal. The community is the collection.
My goals for I LEAD U: one, become awesome and, two, do awesome things.