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LibraryCity: How you can help fight the ‘savage inequalities’ of today’s libraries
July 31, 2005 | 9:56 am
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By David Rothman
We’re especially keen on volunteers with collection development skills, reference skills, Web-related skills of all kinds (including familiarity with PHP, MySQL and Drupal), and an appreciation of interactivity. But don’t hesitate to contact us even if your talents are in other areas. Send us your resume or an equivalent, along with any relevant Web addresses. Check out librarycity.org for further details. This is a chance to work with top-notch people such as our technical director, Jeff Fobbe, the original TD of the ERIC database of the U.S. Department of Education.
To understand the need for a nonprofit like LibraryCity, read an excellent article in today’s Washington Post Magazine. “Shelf Life” briefly compares a library branch in the Southeast section of Washington and a new suburban library in the Northern Virginia suburbs:
Recent D.C. budgets have restored some cuts. Crews will soon renovate four branches. But only 30 miles from the Southeast library, you can see how far the system has fallen behind. Drive out the Dulles Toll Road past the airport, and soon the roads are wide and new sub-divisions sprout up like wildflowers.
Drive past the lake with the fountain in the middle, and you come to Loudoun County’s Ashburn Library.
Walk inside, and the air feels light. The sun streams in from a wall of windows. There’s a section for DVDs and books on CD that looks like it’s right out of a Borders bookstore. While the Southeast library has three computers that connect to the Internet in the adult section, here there are 10, with more to come. And the entire building is networked to let others wirelessly surf the Internet on their laptops. Here circulation has increased by 59 percent this fiscal year. While the Southeast library circulated just over 35,000 items in fiscal year 2004, this neighborhood library circulated more than 600,000.
Years ago, Jonathan Kozol coined the phrase “savage inequalities” to describe differences between rich and poor schools systems, and as the Post article shows, the same words apply to libraries.
Does LibraryCity intend, then, to steal resources from the well-off library in Loudon County and send them to the Southeast library? Not at all. Our wish is to get online a rich collection of resources that all libraries can share–one that will add to the value of well-off libraries along with the others. At the same time we want to use public domain works and other approaches to make as much content as possible free to cash-strapped library systems. We won’t promise instant solutions to all issues, but either directly or through partners, we’ll address such questions as, “How can families without computers access the content? And how can we help the poor and the elderly befriend the technology?”
Significantly, LibraryCity is out to strengthen, not replace, neighborhood libraries. We’ll encourage interactivity not only on the Net but also in person–such as through old-fashioned story-telling hours of the kind you see in photos in the Post article. Especially we have a fondness for free public domain classics of the kind done so well by Distributed Proofreaders, and we’ll do what we can to make them part of the story-telling hours–and reading at home. We’re out to meld high-tech with low-tech to reinforce traditional library goals and values. – David Rothman
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Meanwhile here’s the image of the LJ item on LC.
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Comments:
I have heard about Library City for a long time. But nothing ever happens. You have a slick website up and a lot of excellent people, but what is actually happening? I have heard about this for several years – and it sounds good – but you don’t have anything to show for it – no services, no collection, just a website and a bunch of people talking about it. When will we see some content or services?
Big thanks for the feedback, Sandy.
Volunteer work does not move forward like commercial equivalents. People are contributing their sweat and time, but they still need to earn a living.
We are looking at funding sources and welcome your own suggestions in this regard and others. It’s a Catch 22. Without an infrastructure, it’s harder to get funding–and yet without money, it takes more time to come up with a Web site up to our standards.
But we are seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Jeff Fobbe, our technical director, who helped set up the ERIC site for the U.S. Department of Education, is hard at work on the prototype LibraryCity site based on Drupal, and we’ve just obtained the pro bono services of a gifted Web designer working for a book publisher. Once the site is up, we’ll have something tangible to show funders. We already have serious prospects who have been following us for a long time.
Meanwhile we’ve hung on to our most valuable asset, our people. Most everyone with a serious interest in LibraryCity has remained a volunteer. When the money comes, the expertise will be there in abundance to use it wisely.
Please also note that we are working on some innovative new concepts–things that we can’t simply buy from the usual suspects. What’s the point of LibraryCity if it just replicates what’s already out there?
Email me about yourself. Maybe you’ll fit in and have ideas for speeding things up.
Believe me, we’re just as impatient as you are to see LibraryCity happen. But we want the results to justify the wait.