| Convocation on Providing Public Library Service to California’s 21st Century Population | [Back] [Contents] [Next] |
Why are we talking about promoting the value of libraries? Doesn't everyone know how valuable our services are? Isn't it evident that libraries have a substantial value to their communities? Doesn't every intelligent person understand what we do and how valuable it is?
You know the answer to all these questions. We take it for granted that everyone recognizes the value of libraries, but the fact is that, despite a vast reservoir of good will and positive feelings about public libraries, few people - even the best educated - can define what the value of a library really is to their community. They have a vague idea that we do something good for kids and seniors.
The first major issue involved in improving how we promote the value of libraries is that we need to recognize that we cannot just sit back and assume everyone knows how valuable we are. We need to think seriously about how to promote knowledge and understanding of our value, so that when communities decide how to allocate their resources, they will be fully aware of the value libraries offer.
The second major issue is to ensure that we can do a good job of promoting the value of libraries. We must first make sure that libraries really do provide value to their communities. We need to contribute resources, time and money to the value of libraries and then promote community awareness of that value.
California's 21st century population will be older and more culturally diverse, with a growing proportion of youth in poverty, a greater need for services and resources in different languages, an increasing use of and reliance on technology by more and more people (but not everyone), and more affluence. These are conflicting trends with increasing extremes of both wealth and poverty, and a reliance or non-reliance on technology. In other words, we will be continually more diverse in every way.
Each of our communities is unique. Some will continue to be more affluent and more knowledgeable about technology. Others will reflect the growing number of youth in poverty and be technologically poor. Increasing cultural diversity will be found connected with both extremes of poverty and wealth. The larger the library jurisdiction, the more likely that it will be a microcosm of the state and reflect all these conflicting trends. The smaller the library jurisdiction, the more likely that it will be more homogeneous.
Since our first priority must be to ensure that our libraries truly are valuable to our communities, we must understand those communities and recognize that the value of libraries to different communities may be very different. The focus and emphasis of services in one community may need to be quite different from those in another community. We will need to focus on more intensive community analysis and planning than ever before to be sure that our libraries remain valuable or develop new value for our changing communities.
We all know how difficult this is, particularly in a time of fiscal constraints and other obstacles such as rigid civil service systems and a normal reluctance to change. Yet in order to respond to California's increasing diversity in every sense of the word, we must become more flexible and more responsive as organizations to the unique needs of our communities.
For the individual public library, the challenge is to study the community, engage in dialogue with the community, and integrate both our study and the dialogue into the planning process. We can learn a great deal from planning and community involvement techniques fostered by the Partnerships for Change Program. We must be willing to devote resources to these efforts, or we will not be able to determine and respond to the unique needs of our changing communities.
Then we must devote resources to ensuring that we do change in appropriate ways, retaining and reinforcing our traditional value to communities, but also enhancing and developing new value for our communities. Services and traditional methods of operation will need to change. How can only be defined in the context of each community's unique needs.
Once we have ensured that our libraries do have value to our communities, then we need to think about promoting that value. We know all the traditional ways to do that - standard public relations techniques, speaking engagements with clubs and organizations in the community, newsletters mailed to key opinion leaders in communities, media spots and appearances and publicity materials. Using these techniques, we need to be able to state the economic, educational and cultural value of the library which emerges from our planning processes with the community.
The State Library can help in a variety of ways. To support our first priority, the State Library can sponsor training for local library staff on how to do community-based planning to ensure the value of libraries. It can commission a study about the economic value of libraries and provide training to library managers about how to determine that economic value.
To support our second priority, the State Library can fund and sponsor a statewide media campaign about the value of libraries. I do not mean media spots to be sent to individual libraries to customize and distribute to their local television and radio stations, but instead, media productions that would be general enough to use statewide. I am talking about a campaign similar to the statewide media campaign against smoking. This would be very expensive, but could be a critical investment in public understanding of the value of libraries. Perhaps corporate sponsorship through the State Library Foundation would be an appropriate way to fund and sponsor such a statewide media campaign. Hopefully, it could be ongoing, not a one-time-only production. Television is the best means to reach the most people, so I would recommend using it, even though it is expensive.
If we really focus at the local level on planning to ensure the value of libraries, then by getting the word out, using all the classic methods of public information and adapting them as needed to our changing communities, more people will be able to answer the questions, "Why does your community need a library, and what is the value of the library to your community?"
In the long run, most of the other topics we are talking about at this Convocation - access, collection development and resource sharing, community collaboration and outreach, staff, and technology - are means to the end of providing value to our communities. Community-based planning, which is needed to ensure our value, is the process that will provide guidance for us in all these areas.