Sunday, June 24, 2012

Musings from ALA 12


 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.

No comments:

Post a Comment