"What if they don't care about the library?"

"What if they don't care about library?" For me, this is one of the biggest questions of Participatory Librarianship/New Librarianship.

Based on my old America/China dichotomy, American libraries shouldn't have this problem, because libraries here have a much bigger user base. But after I came here, I realized that this was actually a problem here. I even heard this question in IST511 given by Professor Lankes.

But even so, this is a larger problem in China.

I heard a lot about how Chinese people don't care about libraries, public or academic ones. For example, some people just complain about why the libraries cannot offer some very specific resources, which, in fact, are offered by these libraries. This case is far from the worst. What's worse is that a huge number of people have no idea what a library is; they come to the libraries to buy books. Or worse, they don't know anything about a library.

Chinese libraries are doing marketing, in various ways. But even the best examples may not work effectively, because, guess what, people don't care. That's what I heard from some librarians from Tsinghua University Library, which is one of the best libraries in China and just won the 10th IFLA International Marketing Award earlier this year. Moreover, a large number of Chinese libraries are using Sina Weibo as a way to promote the libraries. Except for few ones, most of these libraries are suffering from either "echo chamber effect" or meaninglessly few followers. In this term, I definitely agree with Dave that marketing itself cannot make a difference.

Back to 511. In class, when one of my classmates asked Dave what if library members don't care about the library. I think Dave made a good point that we should try to find a way to make them care, either by working harder, or by finding what they need or care about, beyond libraries. So here comes the boundary of 511, since it's only about the worldview rather than any real world skills needed by a librarian, I still don't know how to actually make members care, but at least I know there is a direction that may work. That's why I look forward to the "Library Planning, Marketing, and Assessment" class next semester.

On Oakland's people's library

I may have read this piece of news earlier this week, but when I read about the story that the people's library in Oakland was shut down by the police yesterday, I was both excited by the efforts of the volunteers who established the library and was kind of sad about the result.

According to the news, some activists in Oakland took over the building of an abandoned library in the morning of this Monday, which was one of the Carnegie's donations originally established in 1918 and has been closed since 1970s until this Monday.

After occupying the library, the volunteers coming from everywhere filled the library with donated books and erected banners to make it working again. But that's not all. They tried to get the community to engage! According to one of the occupiers' narration:

the organizers also put out a press release, went door-knocking in the neighborhood to inform and invite the community, and built a gardening program that invited youth to come and develop the blighted space.

And they even planned to host a poetry reading program according to the news! In short, they did it, and they did it like awesome librarians.

As I mentioned earlier, I have been reading Professor Lankes' Atlas of New Librarian recently. This event made me excited not only because it is a perfect example of how libraries can help to improve the society in a broader sense, but also because it illustrates what librarians are.

Definitely, librarians are not only those people who work in a library. On the one hand, if one is working in a library in a "wrong" manner, I don't think he is qualified to be a librarian (I am certainly not unbiased toward this issue). On the other hand, as Professor Lankes puts, people with an MLIS degree, no matter where he/she works, he/she can still do the job like a librarian. But here, this story may extend Professor Lankes' statement further. Because there is little information about these activists' professional backgrounds, it's safe to assume that little of them have a MLIS degree. So we can say, even if you do not work in a library nor have an MLIS degree, you can still be a librarian by doing things like this, to sharing information to promote knowledge creation in your community.

Sadly, according to the news, this library was closed by the police last night. But on the other hand, even this library being open for less than a week, we can still expect the little changes it posed to the local community and the society as a whole will turn out to be something great. Just like we can see the influences of Occupy Wall Street Library in this library by its name "people's library", we can expect this library inspire other people to make our society better in the future.

For more information, you can follow Twitter hashtag: #peopleslibrary