Monthly Archives: February 2010

Community led work with communities: The Impact of professional library identities

Over the course of the next few months Ken Williment, a member of the Working Together Project at the Halifax site, and the current Community Development Manager for Halifax Public Libraries will explore the integration of Community Led Program and Service development on librarianship on the Social Justice Librarian Blog .  This will include discussions on possible systemic barriers that currently exist within library culture, which we need to be aware of when trying to work from a Community Led approach.

The four-year and four-city Working Together Project sent Community Development Librarians into diverse neighbourhoods across the country. Vancouver, Regina, Toronto, and Halifax public libraries, supported through funding agreements with Human Resources and Social Development Canada, worked in diverse urban neighbours and with diverse communities that we would traditionally consider marginalised or socially excluded.  Two of the lasting legacies of the project was the development of a library toolkit, which provides library staff with multiple tools to work with communities in different ways, and the development of a Community Led Service Planning Model pg. 24-33 of Working Together Toolkit (www.librariesincommunities.ca and http://www.criticalimprov.com/index.php/perj/article/view/545/1477).

Community led work with communities:

The Impact of professional library identities

Brief Community Led Definition: Collaboratively working with community in the identification, planning, delivery and evaluation of library services.

When shifting library work to reflect the needs of local community, the potential exists for library staff to feel their professional identity is being challenged.  Instead of viewing community led library work as a challenge to our professional work, it should be viewed as a set of new skills which allows us to build upon our other professional activities.  This approach to working with community will help to ensure library relevance within the local communities we serve.

What does this mean?

Library Staff as Expert

When entering library school, or the workplace, we are trained to become experts within our roles and assigned duties (e.g.  Using databases, sorting information – cataloguing, selecting book or materials, making lists, using technology, answering information questions etc.).  These are the professional skills which we offer to the community.

Community as Experts

As we discovered through Working Together, community members are the experts of their own needs.  While library staff may enter a community with preconceived notions of community need, only after directly engaging with community do we discover from them, what their needs are.

Disconnect

This is potentially where the disconnect lies.  While librarians and library staff do bring professional skills to the community, these skills differ from the skills and knowledge community bring to the interaction.  These concepts and their impact on our identities as information specialists cannot be confused.  When using a community-led approach, we need to begin the process by understanding that we are not the experts of local community need, or how to best address community need.

Why is this important?

Traditional library service planning provides limited opportunities for the community to play a significant role to actively identify their own needs, and participating in the development of service or programs to meet their needs.  Our engagement techniques need to move beyond consultation.

Since many of the services are internally identified by library staffs perception of community need – the Field of Dreams/Outreach model: if we build it they will come – we are missing numerous opportunities to:

  • get to know our communities better,
  • discover needs and develop new innovative services to address them, and
  • help increase our local community’s capacity to gain skills to address these needs.

As public library staff, our role is to meet the information needs of all community members.

What does this mean for me?  The potential for changing roles and soft skills as a professional librarian!

Adopting a community led approach does not mean that we abandon our professional skills, nor does it mean that we shift our key service areas.  It does mean that we need to build upon our professional skills and be cognisant of how we present our professional skills to the community.

The old Field of Dreams/Outreach model provided library staff with a tool to create services to take out and deliver in the community (please refer to the Working Together Toolkit).  In addition, we are comfortable with library staff or community experts providing information to the community – either in the branch or in the community.  This information out process, automatically sets up an us/them power dynamic.  This needs to change.

Library staff need to have support (e.g. training opportunities, support from supervisors and senior management) to begin working with communities in different ways.  One of the first key steps is to learn how to actively listen to our communities.  It sounds like a very simplistic concept; however, putting this into practice can actually be very difficult – since one of our key skills as information professionals is to continuously provide information to community.

Being inquisitive and acting on our curiosity of the unknown within our community is a new skill which must be developed and added to our current skill sets.  This is one of the beauties of using a community led approach.  The power of listening, exploring the unknown, and documenting need is that library staff become connected to the needs of local people.

It is a humbling experience to step back and listen to important issues being discussed within a community. Often we may find just how disconnected we are from the pressing issues relevant to the people we are meant to serve, and discover the opportunities and roles the community may view the library may play in addressing these issues

In order to implement this approach we need to be confident.  We need to be confident because it takes time, patience, and a new skill set to explore, document, and contextualize need and trial and error when trying new and different approaches when implementing a service or program response with community.  We also need to be confident that we can learn as much from our failures as well as from our successes – and to know that learning to listen does not dismantle our professional identity.

~ Ken

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Introducing Guest Blogger Ken Williment

It is my great pleasure to introduce  Ken Williment, a former member of the Working Together Project at the Halifax site, previous Community Development Manager for Halifax Public Libraries (2006-2012) and currently a branch manager.  He has published a number of articles including “It takes a community to create a library“, another on asset mapping, etc…  In 2013 Ken and John Pateman published a book titled “Developing Community-Led Public Libraries: Evidence from the UK and Canada“.

In Ken’s previous life, he has been a Sociologist, Social Worker, farm hand, and of course an avid mountain biker, skier and kayaker!

The Working Together project has interested me since I first found out about it back when was a student and thought I was strictly public library-bound. As someone transitioning from the community-based nonprofit world to the library world, I was excited to see librarians acting according to a community development librarianship model (<– link is a PDF).

Now that the Working Together Project has officially wrapped up, I have been curious as to what the impacts have been. Are Canadian libraries integrating a new, community needs-based model? What are the next steps? (How) can the successes of the project become institutionalised in libraries?

On the Social Justice Librarian Blog, Ken will be discussing Community Led Program and Service development in libraries. Among other things, he’s planning to discuss “systemic barriers that currently exist within library culture, which we need to be aware of when trying to work from a Community Led approach.”

Please pull up a seat, join the conversation, and enjoy Ken’s contributions here at SJL. I’m sure I will.

-Greyson

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Big ISP + Big Content Provider = test of new neutrality rules?

This morning, the CBC is reporting that:

The company that owns Shaw Cable and the StarChoice satellite TV service has arranged to buy a controlling stake in Canwest Global Communications Corp.

According to the article, if this deal goes through,

Calgary-based Shaw Communications Corp. would own at least 20 per cent of Canwest’s equity and 80 per cent of its voting stock

Shaw has already been called out for violating net neutrality principles, most notably back in ’06 when Vonage called foul on Shaw’s $10 fee for using non-Shaw VOIP on Shaw Internet lines.
CanWest has shown itself to be a very bold company, even to the point of instigating a chafter challenge court case against the government pushing the legal limits of direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription medications.
One of the reasons a non-neutral net is anti-competitive is illustrated with exactly this scenario: Shaw, with a past willingness to discriminate among content on it’s network, may now have a vested interest in prioritizing the content of one of the largest media content providers in the country.
Both Shaw and CanWest are giant players in the Canadian media scene. However, last fall, the CRTC implemented some guidelines for net neutrality. If this Shaw-Canwest deal goes through, the company will certainly be one to watch for compliance with these new guidelines.
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