I'm in wonderful sunny Anaheim, and while I'm filling my days with meeting people and sessions about leadership and technology, I seem to keep coming across the importance of stories.
I’ve deduced that part of the reason librarians love author
talks, is that sometime in most of these talks, in front of audiences full of
librarians, they say something like ‘I went to the library when I was 4 or 7 or
13 and we had no money/I had trouble finding friends/I was a kid with a big imagination
who grown ups didn’t understand and
the library was there for me with books/ a helpful librarian .
And it’s a fantastic story. It’s heartwarming. It makes you feel like you’re doing
something useful, contributing to the next George RR Martin every time you hand someone a book. But
it’s a story from a different age. It’s a story from when books were the main
way of conveying stories, after the oral tradition was squashed and before bits
and bytes became fast and cheap enough for streaming video.
But books have company now. Story creators have options. And those options should be at
the library, so that the next generation of storytellers can say “I went to the
library when I was 4 or 7 or 13, or 25 or 67and we had no money/I had trouble finding friends/I
was a kid with a big imagination who grown ups didn’t understand / I needed a new skill / I
had something inside me that needed it’s own space in the world; and the
library was there for me with books, and video editing classes, and open mic
nights and computers where I could write code and … and … and… they gave me a
way to tell my story.
We need to give up the idea of being repositories of
information, and find ways to cultivate, create, and curate information,
stories and ideas.
