Post-modern Libraries: Librarians at the Bend in the Learning Curve

Post-modern Libraries: Librarians at the Bend in the Learning Curve

Jack Alan Hicks

Introduction

Thank you for asking me to speak today. My topic is an examination of where we are on the learning curve when it comes to integrating new technology with old skills and formats to deliver library service today and tomorrow. I am concerned about public libraries today, not because our future is bleak, but because it is so bright and exciting. Yet, there is within our profession a very large group of naysayers with doomsday predictions.

Well the naysayers are wrong. This is a great time to be a librarian. The challenges are great, and there are real advances in library service, but I hope there is not a change in the conception of what a public library can and should be. We must make the new library complement the old. We must resist some subtle and not so subtle pressures from within the profession and from outside to break faith with the institution of the public library. We must never forget what we do is on a very human scale, that our services are very personal, one-to-one, and that the products and materials are in that same personal and human scale.

We must also be aware that no patron walks into our libraries wanting to work his way through five or six screens, or get a computer lesson, or become a surrogate librarian just to get the books, services, or materials he came in for. The machines must get easier and there must be librarians on hand to mediate the services.

I think it is time for librarians to differentiate between the poetry of the profession and the prose of tools and technology. Many librarians feel they enhance their image with their use of technology. This I doubt. All of us use banks and ATM machines, but no one mavels at a bank teller's use of technology. We go there strictly for service, just as library patrons come to the library.

Our dependency on vendors makes me squirm. They are the only people on earth I know who speak about the future in the past tense. It reminds me of Cinderella, only in reverse. We have married the wicked, lying stepmother and are loving it.

Library futurists tell us we have two choices: become the digital library, implying a change of construct as well as a change of concept, or, and it is a big or, be hopelessly mired in the past. My problem is that if I accept the futurist arguments I cannot make a case for the perpetuation of the public library and neither can the futurists. A new era, another dead technology, an unneeded service. Sit down anywhere in front of a terminal, zoom, you're in a public library.

I see a broad middle ground where we succeed, where more, not fewer, librarians will be needed along with newer, larger interactive library buildings to go along with all the new electronic tools that are surely coming. I like the theme of this Conference: Dancing with Change. It seems to me that as a profession we have been dancing with change for the past twenty years. I can't think of a place I would rather be than this dance.

I am going to talk a bit about the past, only to understand where we are now. A review of the past is just that, it tells us where we have been, not where we are going. We have a rare opportunity today. We have the ability to decide for ourselves what that direction will be. I fear that too many decisions in the past have been made by drifting with the current instead of librarians charting the course.

The Paperless Society

It all started with microfilm, this revolution of our profession. From there is quickly spread to photocopy machines. When computers came along, we heard that we were headed for a paperless society. Today I know more about paper than any time in my life: ink jet paper, fax paper, multipart forms, perforated paper, laser paper, recycled paper, plain paper, bond paper, and all kinds of generic paper. Maybe I missed something, but the paperless society is not here today. Now we are confronted with a telecommunication revolution, and we hear everyday how we are going to be left behind. All the technology we have seen so far is mere prologue. We are entering the telecommunications era,

where our Citrix server can't move data over a frame relay, or our hubs and routers can't connect to Telnet. When that telecommunication cloud rains on our parade, no one has the answers. Graphical user interfaces and Windows are clearly the immediate future.Text-based systems have a limited life expectancy, so be prepared to buy a lot of very powerful PCs, and soon. We all know we will need every tool available to us if we are to succeed in our role as public librarians. No one doubts the importance of Internet or any of the tools of access at our disposal today. But I suspect that deep down all of us know that this profession is more than data, more important than mere information and the technology that supports it. Though I do like the image of myself as an information scientist, decked out in a white lab coat, dispensing doses of information to my clients; "Here Mr. Wolff, take two of these printouts and I'll check with you in the morning. "Technology will only get more and more difficult and complex. TCP/IP will become our language, telecommunication our preoccupation, and more complexity will certainly be coming.

Futurists

When there were only a few new machines on the library horizon, there were only a relatively few library futurists. Now, with a lot of machines there are a lot of futurists. The mistake the digital futurists make is that they gaze at the machines and predict the future instead of closely examining what it is we do in libraries and why our residents are willing to pay to support our services. The most important indicator in the world for me is the taxpaying resident who comes in my front door with a reasonable expectation for service. Now we are besieged with the digital futurists. The words on their lips are digital and Internet. They are right about only one thing: we will need all of these tools to fulfill our mission. The biggest negatives in the digital futurist's arsenal are the two words, sentimental and nostalgia. Those slurs are meant to stifle open debate with ridicule and dress up their plea for a digital library with pseudo-science. Well, I am not talking about sentiment or nostalgia, I am talking about reality. The digital futurists never, ever, talk about or examine productivity, work product or cost-benefit. I fail to see that those elements are self-evident, and with that kind of thinking, if we were not tax-supported, we would be bankrupt. Not a comforting thought.

Scanning through the program for the "Computers in Libraries '97 Conference" makes me realize how far I am distanced from current thinking: Web Authoring, Web-based catalogs, Cyberian's guide to Cyber-Marketing, Virtual Library Resources, Digital Libraries, Intranet versus Internet, Groupware, Filtering the Net, HTML Monster, Virtually Changing the Virtual Library, Beyond the Virtual Catalog, Are You Prepared to be Morphed?, Creating the Real Virtual Library, but my favorite is Dead Technology; A View from Tomorrow. I almost never think of these concepts in the day-to-day operation of my library, but then all libraries are different and the digital futurists seem happy in theirs. I think all of this needs to be put into perspective, some kind of human scale. When we develop our information systems we should always remember that at least half of our patrons get all of their information from the friends psychic hotline network and have no need for a reference department at all.

Phenomenon of Change

Libraries have gone through a tremendous amount of change in the past twenty-five years. We tend to think that change is a continuum of improvement and that change is progress. This is not necessarily true. We also tend to think of technology as progress, and this is not always true either. For instance, in 1938 you could ride a steam driven train from New York City to Miami at an average speed approaching one hundred miles per hour. If you tried that today the average speed would be closer to fifty miles per hour and the train would not be on time. That is change, but it is certainly not progress. The tools and elements of change are unimportant; what is important is a willingness on our part to stand in and do the work, learn the techniques and deliver the service. We are the last generation of librarians to be self-taught in the ways of technology; my newer employees come straight from library school capable of doing what it took me years to learn. I know that the high concept of the digital library appeals to many of us, but we must never forget that libraries are very human places, a very human business. We are in the people business, and plopping someone down in front of an Internet terminal does not create a lifetime learner. We must remember that libraries take over where schools leave off. Lifetime learning is more than data collection; it takes skill, leadership, and patience; it takes a librarian.

We have learned about databases, conversion, retro conversion, bar codes and readers, cpu's, multi-tasking, and throughput. We have mastered tape drives, disk drives, modems, tape backup, downtime, real time, online and offline. CD-ROM, towers, and ethernet are familiar terms. The current language includes HTML, URLS, IP addresses, DNS, HTTP, and zip drives. We have also learned to deal with consultants and vendors, though we are still at their mercy. We have seen a lot of vendors come and vanish, sometimes like a revolving door. We have spent a lot of money in our rush to keep up with technology. Almost none of this technology has been market-driven; it has been and continues to be product-driven. Remember the vogue for goal and

role setting that we went through ten years ago? Without fail, both staff and public defined the library as a popular materials collection. I hope our pursuit of technology fulfilled this goal as well as providing access to tomorrow. Amazingly, we have accomplished all these things in an era of flat budgets.

We have embraced both change and technology, but in a drifting fashion, and have followed them to where we are today. If a library is to be effective it must be a barometer of the community it serves, and as society and information delivery and access change, the library must also change. It seems to be the illusion and vanity of every age to think that their time alone is being overwhelmed by change and that to survive people must reinvent themselves. That perspective is a false one; every age is about equally subjected to change. Certainly those people affected by the enclosure laws that preceded the industrial revolution experienced more social dislocation than any of us can imagine. Or consider my parents' generation. They lived through changes that encompassed horse-drawn wagons through nuclear energy with a couple of world wars thrown in. The changes we worry about are form, not content or construct. It is true that every age has points of demarcation, defining points, that mark the transition between how something was before and how it was different afterwards. Scanning current library periodicals reveals an almost narcissistic preoccupation with change. That is only as it should be, we are undergoing tremendous advances in our profession. We have the ability to choose and direct where we go from here.We should be a lot less obsessed with the phenomenon of change and start being much more concerned about our work product and how that work product meets the expectations of our residents.

End of the Beginning

Today libraries are at the bend in the learning curve; we have had our first automated systems, some of us are working on our second or third system. We have added or jettisoned LANs and towers, and we have begun in earnest to understand the emerging telecommunication issues with the implications for Intranet as well as Internet. We have come to a point in time where we are capable of defining our future on a better basis than, "If we don't do it, someone else will." We have reached a breakpoint in our use of technology that clearly marks a transition. Just as many libraries are building LANs, other more savvy libraries are discarding their LANs in favor of TCP/IP and Internet. It is time for librarians to define our future on our terms. Many librarians have said that the technological revolution is the beginning of the end of libraries. To describe where we are today, it is fair to paraphrase Winston Churchill: we are not at the beginning of the end, but we are certainly at the end of the beginning. What will follow I can only call the post-modern library.

Post-modern library

What do I mean when I say post-modern? This speech is too short to give a history lesson in post-modernist thought, but for the purpose of discussion let's assume that it means a fundamental change in our view of our world, in this case our world is the public library. Elements of post-modernism are self-examination, a willingness to reject things that are indeed modern but do not fulfill their promise, an impatience with the producers of change, an effective integration of old and new, and a questioning attitude towards the status quo. Post-modernism is not a revolution against prevailing trends, but it is rather an outlook designed to change ideas and trends that may have become too large or neglected. As I said at the beginning, we tend to think of change and progress as a continuum. Progress and change often occur in stops and starts, in nothing resembling a continuous flow of ideas, change, or results. Modernism says that progress is a continuum, moving inexorably towards perfection. Post-modernism says, "Wait a minute, this isn't working; let's take a look at how we can make this fit our needs and expectations." We can expect to see a discarding or deconstruction of some of what is new because it does not validly fill our needs or our patrons' expectations.

Peter Drucker, leading management expert, says in many of his books that to be effective, any institution must examine what it does and why this makes it special. The digital futurists give us two choices: move to the digital library or stay mired in the past. I reject that current dogma; somewhere between those two extremes there is broad middle ground that defines our mission. More than science and technology, we need an encompassing understanding of who we are and what we do. I wish I had all the answers. I don't. I am only aware of our problems and dilemmas. Overriding the problems, however, are all the positive things we do for and with our patrons. I think the fiasco in San Francisco, where a director who was out of touch with both his staff and his clientele and whose mission and compulsive attachment to technology did not meet the expectations of the patron, the needs of the community, or the mission of a public library, puts the whole process into focus, who are we, what do we do, and why are we special? Instead of being a showplace for our profession, San Francisco has become a curiosity no one quite understands. I do know that the clearest lesson from San Francisco is that if libraries are marginalized in tomorrow's society, it will be librarians that did the marginalizing.

Defining Who We Are

I would like to say the profession is on the threshold of unlimited possibilities. But too many voices don't seem to know who we are and what we do. In many cases these voices are our leaders. For example, we have heard about the death of the book for a long time; all the pundits and visionaries who told us we would be paperless also told us the book was dead. The death of the book has been predicted so many times it has become a cliche; the death of the library is the gloomy extension of that mindset. A standard library piety for the past twenty years has been that, "Nobody reads any more." As librarians we should have known better, but we did not. If you look in the Bowker Annual you will see that book sales have doubled and redoubled over the past twenty years. The mega-bookstore phenomenon tells us that many, many people are buying and reading books, right in the middle of the cauldron of the information revolution. This was not predicted by any of our library thinkers, nor have we as a profession exploited the opportunity presented by the bookstore phenomenon. I would be a lot more comfortable if I felt the digital futurists had spent time at a public service desk, dealt with patrons, done readers' advisory, worked with a flannel board in a story hour, performed puppet shows for 200 screaming five-year-olds, conducted a book discussion group, coped with a hostile reference patron, built a fiction collection, or built anything, or, in fact, if they were familiar at all with the million and one reasons a patron comes into our library. The substitution of machines for human library skills is a crucial mistake. If libraries are to have a bright future, it is because of this key fact: librarians will always be the mediator between the tool and the patron. The format or the medium is not important; we must not confuse library tools with the overarching concept of what a public library is. Just because we do machines does not mean that we are machines.

Elements of Post-modern Outlook

It is time to define ourselves and change direction from the headlong rush we have been in for the past few years. It is also appropriate to grapple with the idea that public libraries will never be strictly technical information centers. But neither will the Internet ever be a self-guided magical mystery tour. Patrons will always need librarians to mediate and instruct them in the wiles of any tool, be it Internet or Buros Mental Measurement Yearbook. It is safe to say a post-modern library will be a mix of old and new and will have a substantial commitment to technology. The post-modern library will be a creative mix of tools and resources, blending digital sources, print sources, and staff expertise in new and ever-changing arrays. A

post-modem library will master and use public relations. A post-modern library will know and understand the needs and expectations of its clients. A post-modern library will be very involved with telecommunication and connectivity and less with hardware. A post-modern library will be client-driven. The post-modern library will not be product-driven in relation to technology. In the post-modern library, decision making will not take place in a vacuum. We must make conscious choices and we must consolidate what we do even as the tools proliferate or we could end up in obscurity.

Why Are We Special?

Just who are we and what do we do as public librarians? First and foremost we are an intellectual property. We are like no one else in our communities, but we seldom think of ourselves in those terms. The Chicago Symphony is an example of what I mean by an intellectual property. Yes, it is one of the best orchestras in the world, but it is more than a collection of people and instruments that make music. They represent excellence, reflect the values of society, and offer a vital intellectual core. Yes, they play modern music, but they have not forsaken the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. I would like to think that libraries clarify information and make it accessible, that we spread culture, teach history, educate, recreate, inspire, inform and otherwise work very closely with our users. We are also custodians of public trust and public property, but that is a role we don't focus on often.

These virtues are almost unique in our society. Do you get these from television or Internet? Does the bookstore do anything to promote culture? I have three mega bookstores within a mile and a half of my library. If they were competing with me on a moral or existential level, they would have ruined my business years ago. Instead of that, I have more and more usage and higher circulation. Those three bookstores have acres and acres of books in them and throngs of eager buyers. Yet there is no reference service, readers' advisory, selection policy, or children's services and there is nothing on the shelf except that which is known to have sales potential, no retrospective collection. That's fine; they're bookstores and we are libraries.

We can learn a lot from the bookstores, some of it good, some not so good. Their book displays, their lighting, their advertising displays, the general feeling of user friendliness, and the illusion of ease and comfort in a commercial setting are all very good. The level of their staff training is a reminder of how hard it is to hire and train good staff. At my library, training is a constant thing. At the bookstores there is a very low level of training and a distinct lack of book expertise on the part of most staff. Reference and readers' advisory

are weak or non-existent; just finding a book can be daunting. The mega bookstores are big and successful, but they are not very good bookstores. Barnes and Noble, Crown, and Borders are not a threat to any well-run library. They are good neighbors and display my posters and co-sponsor programs. They also shamelessly copy my programs and book discussion groups. Their corporate creativity level is very high, but their local talent is often very mediocre.

Successful Libraries

Successful libraries always reflect their users' desires, needs and expectations. Successful libraries are always patron-driven. As I said earlier we have to define ourselves on a better basis than, "If we don't do it, someone else will." We've all heard that statement many times. I have a poster in my office from ALA that says, "Here Comes the Information Superhighway; Could Libraries be Left in the Dust? Yes! As the emerging superhighway sweeps the nation with electronic information, libraries could be pushed aside ...." That could be true. But I have been looking over my shoulder for the past twenty years to see who that "someone" is following behind me to do my job. But there is never anybody there. Why? Because it is absolutely true that if we don't do public library service, no one will do public library service, certainly not the private sector, certainly not bookstores; it's too difficult and there's no money in it.

We do a hard job. We are on our feet all day, dealing with the public, fixing broken drinking fountains, reading reviews to build our collections, mastering the latest in computers, writing press releases, making balance sheets balance, ordering books, troubleshooting snarled computers, training staff, and developing and weeding our collections. We work long and irregular hours often at low pay. My daughter became a librarian three years ago and it has been a revelation for me. She has said to me things I never thought of on my own: how hard the job is, how challenging it can be and how rewarding it is to work with our patrons. We do not need to reinvent ourselves, as so many are fond of saying; we need to reaffirm who we are and what we do in the community that makes us unique, a valuable and an important asset.

We develop the collection and build a useful intellectual property that mirrors the needs of the community. We do programming that entertains and informs. We reach out to the homebound and infirm, review books, hold writing contests, perform puppet shows, do story hours, reference service, library instruction, readers' advisory, children's programs and services of all kinds. We deal with questions our patrons can't answer, recommend books to read, provide magazines or articles, and suggest read-a-likes. Add to that list the videos, compact discs, music collection, CD-ROM services, computer instruction, and Internet guide, and you start to see the range of things we do. There will always be new approaches to the age-old questions that have defined libraries since the library at Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt. That's what makes the job interesting, that's what makes us librarians. Librarians have known these things forever.

Benton Report

The recent report, "Buildings, Books and Bytes; Libraries and Communities in the Digital Age," prepared by the Benton Foundation and funded by the Kellogg Foundation found, through extensive sampling and focus groups, that the public has a high trust in the public library and is pleased with its performance. The Benton Report is interesting because the public named the programs, materials and services that librarians have always stressed as "very important roles" for libraries. These included having reading hours and programs for children, purchasing of new books and materials, maintaining the building, providing computers and online services, and providing a place for librarians to help people find information using computers and online services. The public also favored spending tax dollars to support our operations. Our weakest support was from younger users, in the eighteen to twenty-four year age range. Families with children were strong library supporters. Does any of that come as a surprise?

One of the most interesting comments from the Benton Report is from a nameless "library leader" who said, "One questions the extent to which public library directors, their staff, and their boards actually understand the profound nature of the change that's underway." Is there anyone here today who is not aware of the changes that have taken place, are taking place and are going to take place? The question is not are we aware that change takes place, we all know that, but how can we take advantage of opportunities, expand our service, reconfirm our role in our communities, pay the bills for technology and keep our services up to the level of what the patrons want and expect when they come into our libraries. That comment about practitioners in the field failing to grasp the nature of the changes taking place makes me think what we really need are fewer "library leaders" with no faith in the profession's front line. I have a lot of faith in public librarians and the job we do; it is a great profession and we should be proud of it.

Let me address some of the problems and changes that I think we are facing today, problems that bear directly on our ability to succeed or fail in the coming years, changes that are more important to me than when the library gets digitized.

Telecommunication

Historically, telecommunication has been an area of public policy. The airwaves for radio and television are strictly controlled by federal laws, construed in the public interest. Certainly when you turn your television set to channel 5, that's what you have every right to expect to see. When listening to Chopin on WFMT, you have a right not to be interrupted with a home-brewed rock station. The FCC has limits on ranges, frequencies, power, public interest, and safety and it has a prohibition against conflict of interest. All these agendas were set by public debate, in a public forum with an opportunity for all parties to be heard. Today crucial telecommunication and computer decisions are being made not in public debate of public issues, but in private, closed sessions by industry insiders.

Open public debate has not happened with computers and will not happen with telecommunication unless members of the public become much more concerned with these issues than they have been. Up to now, computer consumers have been very passive customers, all too willing to be product-driven. The financial consideration alone make public involvement essential, but even more important are the changes that these new technologies are bringing into our homes and lives. The idea of media conglomerates deciding what will and will not be available, how it will be delivered, how it will be telecommunicated, how we will pay, and what the intellectual level will be is one set of concerns; the other is the isolating effect this will all have on us as a society. How we will be monitored and profiled, how our personal tastes and habits will be tracked and quantified is not something we will be able to avoid. But, it is the psychic isolation coupled with the lack of public debate or input into essential policy that I am the most concerned about.

Public policy of this magnitude should be developed as a result of public debate and discussion, not simply by the profit motive. We should not blunder into some futuristic dysfunctional society merely because someone somewhere decided it would be a great way to make a buck. These technologies are bringing with them a social change not remotely connected to education, recreation, information or access. The social implications will not be known or understood until long past any point of remediation.

Library Buildings

Unlike the digital futurists, whose subtext is really "libraries without walls," I believe that the library building will be of more, not less, importance in the future. There has not been enough thought and study given to the organic nature of the requirements we now put on our buildings. Currently we are supporting three or four formats not envisioned when most of our buildings were constructed and we are using several technologies that are new to the field. We are having trouble coping with the demands made on the building to support our activities. We have had to make major changes and concessions to deal with loaning and shelving videos, now the DVD format will change how we shelve, display, and store this new format. These issues deserve to be a high priority item for the profession, but seems to be on the back burner until the future is less obscured and the problems sort themselves out.

At the very least it is an easy call to predict we will need a more organically built and organized structure that will be significantly larger than current guidelines. Why do I say that? Because what we have doesn't work and no one seems to have the slightest idea what space for technology in a public library should look like. Current libraries being built around me seem to stress the coffee shop and consumer mall but fail to address the necessity for large and small spaces, public and private, noisy and quiet, browsing and display, sight lines, data lines, and access. All libraries have shelving that is too high or too low, illegally narrow aisles, arcane and confusing floor plans, and no one seems to know just what a tech area is and what it should look like. Buildings are now too small and too rigid to perform well in the post-modern environment. This list doesn't even address the failure of most of our buildings to provide good lighting, an aura of user friendliness, provocative display areas, or user comfort. If the futurists were right at all new libraries being built would be smaller than the buildings they replace. Is that true in your neighborhood?

Vendors

I am bone weary of dealing with the hardships of getting electronics to work as advertised or as they did the day they were installed. We must break the cycle of dependency we have with the vendors or we will forever be held hostage, at their mercy. Past experience is not really a guide; all it has taught me is that you should always buy the big one, be sure to get the fast one, and be prepared to throw it all away and start over when you finally learn how to make it all work. I am tired of hearing things like, "Oh, we forgot to tell you, that release won't run on your platform," "You're going to have to upgrade those PCs," or, "The new release will cover that issue." I don't know how we can really plan where we are going if we as a profession have no input into the computer and telecommunication decision making process, and currently we do not.

Library Schools

The closing of Library Schools should have been seen as a cautionary tale. It has been ignored by our profession and our press. Seeing all the schools close and many of the remaining schools strike the word library from their names is not a healthy or a normal growth path. Information scientists and technicians are not public librarians anymore than bookstore clerks are librarians. The current trend of having library school staff without MLS degrees is a trend that should be stopped before it takes root.

Public Relations

Everything we do is public relations, from a well-processed book, a helpful reference librarian, neatly organized shelves, orderly and attractive displays, good lighting, a trained staff, regular news releases, a clean building, professional and personal response to patron complaints. The recent negative publicity libraries have received in American Scholar, Harpers, New Yorker and Newsweek should make us aware that there is a big difference between our vision of ourselves and the public's expectations. The reason those articles worry me is that they successfully made us look like a bunch of bumblers, not technological leaders. We must have an ability to use the press to tell our message at every opportunity we have, who we are, what we do, why we do it, whom we serve, why we exist. We must promote ourselves better in the future than we have in the past. Doing newsletters, news releases, and annual reports is fine, but knowing your reporter or editor on a first-name basis is just as important if you are to have ongoing access to local media. As a general observation I think libraries fail at public relations. The general public does not know who we are, or what we do and what they can or cannot find when they come in the library. The message should always be simple and direct and never vary: the library is intelligent, professional, and literate. If you try to promote a single issue or single product you will fail. The patrons remember or forget on a need-to-know basis, but the broader themes of intelligent, professional and literate will endure in their memories. We must project a significant presence of ourselves and educate the public to the uses and mission of the public library, we must make our residents as aware of the library as they are of the schools, or fire and police departments.

Impact

It is right and proper that we keep and monitor our output statistics, they are good indicators of how we are performing. However, those numbers tell us how we are doing only compared to last month, or last year, within the library. How do we measure our impact outside of the library, and what do I mean by impact?

Oprah has impact. She holds up a rather ordinary book for review and the next day 50,000 reserves have been placed in libraries all over the country. That's impact. Libraries have wanted to have that kind of effect outside their libraries forever, but we seldom achieve it. Well, you say, that's all well and good for Oprah, television star, watched by millions, unimpeachable credibility and so on. But that sort of impact on a local scale is possible for all of us. I have a friend, Lois Larson, who is the Librarian of Cook, Minnesota, population 800, circulation 5000. Not impressive numbers, but what Lois has been able to achieve is impressive. With an almost non-existent budget, but with creativity and perserverance, Lois has managed to make the Cook Public Library the place in town to go, to volunteer, to donate, to support, to be seen. She has regular press coverage and is nothing short of an overwhelming success. Through grants and Arrowhead Library System support, Lois also has Internet and circulation services. Lois has been wonderfully successful at making an impact on her community and moving her library far beyond what should have been possible because she looked beyond the doors of her library and into the heart of her community.

People Skills

We talk a lot about service, but how much money do we spend to train staff in people skills? I am not talking about once-a-year staff days, I'm talking about nitty-gritty workshops to develop the social skills that are integral to our success. The hardest thing I ever had to learn to do was not working with a computer network, it is working with the public effectively, interacting with living, breathing clients. This is probably the one aspect of the job that we as a profession neglect the most, and cramming our buildings with computers will not alter that. Working with the public is not an attitude, it is not a product; it is an ongoing process. We take for granted that these skills will be learned on the job. Well, take my word for it, they are not. The ability to work with clients is not often taught in library schools either. Since all service begins and ends with the patron, we must all be fluent in handling their needs. We must avoid turning these functions over to machines and assuming that will suffice. How many of us have a personnel training budget equal to our technology training budget? How many of us do formal training in people skills more than once a year at our staff workshops?

Vision and Ambition

The post-modern library will make a statement, this is who we are, this is what we do, and this is what we believe, this is what we'll defend. If we don't have a vision for the profession, nobody else will. We must not stray from ideals, values, access and choice. We must

not ever stray into debate that confuses the medium for the message. Whoever said the medium is the message missed the essence of life itself. The message is always the important issue. Certainly we will see more, not less, technology, and we can't succeed without it. We will probably have offline notebook computers capable of downloading twenty full-text novels to be used offsite, analyzed, or read at your leisure at the beach or under the bed covers. Those are only issues of medium confused for message. No one will be at the beach reading technical specs, or under the covers reading operational manuals. They will be reading for the message, remembering the message, repeating the message because all the technology in the world is pointless unless the user can read and comprehend, read and grow, read and visualize, and learn to make ethical and moral choices. Balance will be a post-modem watchword, leading to a better definition of balancing human reference skills and machines. One does not substitute for the other, neither can succeed alone; we must not abrogate to the machines those activities that are best left to people and human skills. To thrive in the future all libraries will have to have a vision and articulate it to the whole community, not just on regular users, and that will take ambition.

Two Final Concerns

I have two final concerns that I have absolutely no answers for, but I would like to air them: First, the disparity between have and have not libraries is a very serious worry. Society will not close this gap, so we in the profession must seek the answers. The second, is the threat of censorship from both the right and left. To practice and condone politically correct speech should be as abhorrent to any of us as right-wing censorship. How can we pretend to support freedom of speech and the First Amendment if we practice any form of censorship? Censorship has the potential to do great damage to the public library, especially with the implications ahead with Internet. Censorship from the right or left could take us back to a new Dark Age, just like the Scopes Monkey Trial era; politically correct speech is only the dark mirror image of right-wing extremism.

A Patron Story

In closing I would like to tell one of my favorite library stories, a real life story. Once a month, on a scheduled basis, one of my board members and I sit in the lobby under a large sign that asks for ideas and suggestions. What we hear is a wide, wide spectrum of comments from our users, some good, some bad, many helpful. One evening a man I had often seen in my library but never spoken to came in the front door trying as hard as he could to avoid our table. But my board member snared him with the question, "What can we do to change the library?" The patron stopped and thought for more than a few moments and said something like this: I'm Doctor So and So. I'm in nuclear medicine at Loyola University. I'm currently on leave of absence to work a year for Siemens Electronics in medical research. I was raised in a household of scientists with a thorough disdain for the soft sciences. Out of necessity, I started to use this library in my off hours and was always disappointed by the scientific resources, but then I started to use and read in your fiction collection. You have a wonderful collection, with a fine staff who led me along. This library has taught me a love of literature; you hold all the classics and all the current favorites, both popular and serious writers. This library has taught me to hold the soft sciences in very high esteem, the library has taught me a lot about life and the world. This library widened my horizons and perspective of life. Change the library? Take my advice and don't change anything.

That is the broad middle ground the public library has to serve, a middle ground apparently not valued or understood by the digital futurists, but that broad middle ground is the reason we exist and will continue to exist regardless of the tools or formats. Thank you.

*Jack Alan Hicks, Director, Deerfield Public Library. Keynote address given at the Wisconsin Association of Public Librarians Conference, Eau Claire, Wisconsin on May 1,1997.