The Power of Narrative: ACRL NW 2012

This summer, Bookaneer Freeda Brook wrote an impassioned post about the specious stories of demise that are so popular in current discourse about libraries ("The Stories We Tell About Ourselves") after reading "The End of the Twighlight Doom" by Barbara Fister.  Brook ended her piece with a call for more of us to tell the stories of flourishing that constitute our daily experiences of the libraries in which we work, study, socialize, and grow.  It seems that ACRL NW heeded her call, and made the power of narrative the focus of this year's conference of Washington and Oregon librarians entitled: Libraries Out Loud: New Narratives of Enduring Value.  The conversations that followed both the opening and closing keynote addresses were exhilarating, as we all felt the power of our ability to collectively shape the conversation around libraries, learning and information.

We were lucky enough to have Barbara Fister herself as the opening keynote speaker (you can find the full text of her speech here, and I highly encourage you to read it).  Fister contextualized the current crisis narrative within a larger capitalism-flavored movement to monetize experience and fit research and learning into a purely  transactional model.  The overarching story under which we currently operate, goes a little something like this:

Information is something manufactured elsewhere and stored at the library.

For students, she said, that means that,

Authority exists outside of themselves and students come to the library to shop for nuggets of information.  Research is perceived as monetizeable and publications are tokens of productivity.

In this narrative, the library is the information wallet for the larger community of readers, researchers, and reluctant students on our campuses.  The bulk of our interactions with students and faculty revolve around buying resources, and then helping readers to access--through numerous convoluted pathways that have been predetermined by licensing agreements and copyright--what we’ve bought.  While we may bemoan the phenomenon of students who scan articles for useable quotes, we actively participate in this model by working within a market-oriented framework that emphasizes access and productivity over contemplation and creativity. 

But, Fister reminded us, markets, consumption, and monetizeation “are not always what people respond to.”  In fact, she estimates that it is the sense of the library as the intellectual commons of our institutions and communities that continues to bring folks to the library (be it virtual or physical).  In a sense, she suggested, it is our own inability, as librarians, to believe in the possibility of the commons—our buying into the narrative of the “tragedy of the commons”—that has allowed that commons to be enclosed around us in the form of skyrocketing prices, staff reductions, closures, and changes in our service orientation.

Fister called for a reinvigoration of the scholarship that we embody, support, collect, and make sense of by conceiving of it as a republic populated by peers.  Librarians, she said, are wonderfully positioned between professors and students.  We witness the research and discovery process on the part of students, we watch them work, and often, we are there to help them when they run into trouble.  At the same time, we attend department meetings, retreats, and trainings with faculty; we watch them develop reading lists and syllabi, and hear about the agony of the grading process.  We can act as well-informed translators between both kinds of work that we, too, wrestle with.  To that end, Fister called for a rejection of the crisis narrative of libraries, and called for, rather, a celebration of all the work that we excel at, a celebration of the collective, collaborative knowledge work that is done in and through the library.

Char Booth, in her closing keynote (slides here), responded beautifully to Fister’s themes by asking us to embrace the crisis narrative—not as something new and terrifying, but as an old story that signals the centrality of the library to major societal shifts in communication.  “Libraries” she said, have a very real history of decline, destruction, and displacement: they “have a history of being burned to the ground because it is a swift way to destroy a culture.”

Because libraries are, at their core, about the communication of knowledge, our seams will be strained every time there is a major shift in the modes of information distribution and communication.  “Libraries should not be an easy thing to advocate for,” according to Booth, because we have to respond, reshape, and revalue ourselves to stay useful to our communities with “every great format change” that the world undergoes.  This constant crisis state, she said, keeps us sharp.

Keeping that in mind, Booth urged us not to focus on the "container" and "content" metaphors that are so prevalent in narratives about the library as a place that holds books, because, when the boundaries of the physical library start to blur into virtual space, and the boundaries of books begin to dissolve into the ether of e-resources, we risk disappearing from the cultural narrative.  Rather, she suggests, we should focus on "concept" metaphors that speak to the lived experiences that most of us have about the library, or librarians--those positive, powerful, life-affirming narratives that communicate what we see people doing with and in the library: the sleeping, the growing, the making out, the writing, the sharing that has made the library a center of vibrant life on our campuses.

Though Fister and Booth fundamentally differed in their approach to the crisis narrative, each was saying essentially the same thing: we must put the emphasis back on our core values when we shape the narrative of the library in today's society, because those values speak to the role that we play in people's lives--not just the space we take up on our campuses.  The walls may tumble, and the books may crumble, but libraries are here to stay.