Excerpted from District Dispatch: The Official ALA Washington Office Blog, 10/23/2013
The Digital Inclusion Survey: A new way to
define your library
You have until November 15, 2013, to complete the
survey. In addition to the survey questions, libraries are requested to
complete a broadband speed test (speed capture is automatic).
Is your library meeting the digital needs of
your community?
The easiest way to answer this burning question is to participate in the Digital Inclusion Survey, which will generate unique data to
illustrate the role your library plays in digital literacy, economic and
workforce development, health and wellness, civic engagement, e-government, and
public access to the internet.
The survey findings will highlight the unique
attributes of library services for community well-being, and what libraries
provide that few other community-based entities can provide.
Most importantly, for the first time, participating libraries will be able to
see their individual library data within a community context with an interactive
mapping feature.
The map incorporates data from the U.S. Census, American
Community Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the National Center for
Education Statistics, generating library-specific data for general demographics,
household income, unemployment rates, education attainment, English proficiency,
and more.
You will be able to view the breakout for your library not only for
your full service area, but by neighborhood. The map includes a drawing tool
that allowing for customized area selection and analysis.
This week we have a guest case, from Brian Herzog of Swiss Army Librarian.
Brian's entry:
Patron: I’ve never used a computer before, so can you help me find a job on craigslist?
Sigh. For non-reference librarians, here’s why this simple request is especially hard:
- Almost any kind of job-related request can be difficult
- Most of the job resources available in the library are online, so having no computer experience is automatically a setback
- Craigslist? It is certainly a valid job search tool, but there are other places I’d be more comfortable starting off a computer novice (she never did tell me how she got referred to craigslist)
Sigh! is right.
Brian follows with a good explanation of why this is not the "teaching moment" some might think it is. But he also advocates for public libraries to find some solutions to the challenge.
Thanks, Brian.
Mike
I'm seeing a theme emerging in my own posts throughout this Learning 2.0 process: "This is really great, and I can appreciate its value to global culture...but I'm not interested in using much of it myself."
Hmmm...I guess this is why I named the blog The Surly Librarian. I could have called it Old Dog Librarian, except that I can learn new tricks. They just have to be ones I intend to use. Convince me that I might value using a trick and I will learn it.
That grumpy intro having been written, let me step back from personal preferences and intentions, and see what I want to say about 2.0....
I began with Tom Storey's introduction to Where will the next generation Web take libraries?. He describes what he sees as the plusses of Web 2.0. I have mixed feelings.
In Web 2.0, the Web becomes the center of a new digital lifestyle that changes our culture and touches every aspect of our lives. The Web moves from simply being sites and search engines to a shared network space that drives work, research, education, entertainment and social activities—essentially everything people do.
This "shared network space" has obviously changed the political and economic realities of the whole world...for the people who have access to it.
I don't object to the positive changes; I make use of them myself. In fact, I believe the opening out of the world of communication—across space and time, across every sort of political, cultural, ethnic, religious or other barrier—may be the most importance evolutionary step the human race has made since the development of empirical science.
Just one non-trivial example: The Chinese government could not prevent global awareness of it's negligence and political manipulation following the earthquake in May, and people across the globe have been able to coordinate with each other to send aid, all because of this "shared network space."
However, as I keep saying, I am extremely concerned for the millions, perhaps billions, of people who do not have access, or, if they do, lack adequate skills, education and savvy to navigate the high-speed, consumer-oriented world to which the Web caters.
As I wrote in an earlier post, I have an ethical concern over the cavalier way in which contemporary American society neglects and abandons those who cannot "keep up" with the latest in social, economic and technological interaction.
There is a moral tradition of responsibility for the well being of those less fortunate than oneself which seems to have fallen out of the American mindset. We may pay lip service to the notion of the digital divide, yet we don't generally see a moral obligation to help digital refugees to cross the divide.
Non-trivial example: JPL cannot realistically afford the staff time it would take to help non-computer savvy customers to apply for employment, unemployment, welfare benefits, etc., all of which must be done online. It's not our mandate. We aren't funded to do it.
However, the government agencies which do have the mandate to provide such services send their customers to us.
This leads me to my second comment, responding to part of Rick Anderson's Away from the “icebergs” piece. Here's the passage which bothers me:
Reliance on user education: Libraries are poorly equipped and insufficiently staffed for teaching....
We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning.
Obviously, we’ll help and educate patrons when we can, and when they want us to, and the more we can integrate our services with local curricula, the better. But if our services can’t be used without training, then it’s the services that need to be fixed—not our patrons.
Anderson perpetuates the conventional fantasy: namely, that our only obligation is to make stuff available, the "newest, most improved" stuff, for those consumers who know about it and want it.
My professional training and ethics focus elsewhere. As a librarian, I understand my primary role to be helping customers learn how to access and use information resources for themselves.
If all of my attention and skills and time much be committed to dumbing down technology so that customers can use it without having to think about it, then I may be in the wrong profession.
I am greatly distressed that learning how to learn is no longer a core expectation of our culture. I'm not interested in cooperating with the abandonment of that expectation.
Call me old fashioned. It's a moral as well as a practical issue for me.
Thanks,
Mike
Note: See my next post for an article I had bookmarked before I read Rick Anderson.
It's called "Getting The Most Out Of Your Library," by Williams Hicks of Digital Web Magazine, and it could be read as a counterargument to Anderson's "Away from the 'icebergs'."
Note: I originally posted this essay in October of 2006, on Destination NEXT on the General Discussion board. Since you have to be at a staff workstation or logged into the City's remote link to get access to Destination NEXT, I'm reproducing the essay here.
I want to propose something far more radical than the "get with the future," market-driven message we library professionals are hearing these days. The focus of that message is almost wholly on competing for consumers who expect the latest in automated and online delivery of public library services. I did hear that warning and take it to heart in library school seven years ago. However, I joined and remain in the profession because of a more sacred set of librarianship values.
The roots of the American public library lie with Benjamin Franklin and his peers, who believed that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" depended upon free and equal access to information. They thought it important that information and the ability to search for, have access to and use it should not be solely the province of those privileged by prosperity or status.
Franklin himself began as an apprentice tradesman and built his career from scratch. He wanted to be sure that any other American had the means—underwritten at public expense, if necessary—to do the same. He knew that he had made his success through his own literacy, through his access to information, and through his freedom to use it, independent of the mediation or control of others.
We now have a culture in which only those with the advantage of computer and Internet access and the knowledge of how to use these tools can even get to much of the daily information which is most important for living successfully in American society. Even many basic government and commercial services are now almost inaccessible without the ability to connect to and use websites, online forms, email, office software, etc.
I’m sure that others of my colleagues have had the experience of trying to help someone who was told by an employee of the unemployment service, “Go to the public library, get on our website, and fill out the application.” Likely others have had to help a middle-aged or immigrant job hunter, possibly one with a lifetime of competence in his or her trade, now trying to find and complete the mandatory online application for a new job. You all have your own examples.
The new jargon refers to those who have grown up in the online world as “digital natives.” Those of us who entered the work world before PCs, but who have had the privilege of learning to use and perhaps of owning them, are “digital immigrants.” We somehow manage to keep up—sometimes holding on by our fingernails—as e-technology speeds away from us.
My concern here is for the very large population of immigrant and native residents who are “digital refugees.” Whether or not they know how to use these new technologies, our culture now expects them to join the “wired world” if they want access to the benefits and prosperity America has claimed for its successful citizens.
As our library system leaps ahead toward a 21st century refit, which will increasingly automate basic circulation and search services, I believe it is essential that the staff thus freed from mundane tasks be redirected with all deliberateness into what used to be called “library instruction.”
Every branch should have staff with the training, the resources and—especially—the dedicated time to teach people computer and Internet literacy. It should become a core service, developed and coordinated system-wide, for us to seek out and assist those who are struggling or being left behind in this digital age. It could be part of every public service staff person’s job description and performance plan to create, contribute to or participate in such instructional activities.
We library staff all have the advantage—the privilege—of having built successful careers in this new world. Yet if our library’s mandate is only to satisfy the consumer wishes of people who are already “on the cutting edge,” then we are failing the basic purpose of the public library: to make certain that everyone has free and equal access to what we provide at public expense.
