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The Thrill of Exploring the Unknown

My daughter recently shared with me a meme that said this:

Some dream of fame.
Some dream of traveling to space.
I dream of having a secret door in one library that leads to another, hidden library.
– Elliott Blackwell

I immediately had two reactions. One was, “Yes. I get this.” The other was, “Why such a dream?”

The why question, predictably, turned into a bit of a rabbit hole. Why do some of us thrill at the very idea of a library in the first place? And then, why would the idea of a secret door in a library be exciting? And even more, why would a secret library behind that hidden door inside a library be even more exciting?

I imagine psychologists would have fun with this series of questions, but I think the answer is fairly simple: Humans are curious. Around the world, in any culture I’ve ever been exposed to, people want to add to their knowledge and understanding. Not for everyone, but for many people this is fundamentally true.

That curiosity explains the James Webb Telescope.

It also explains Q-Anon.

Knowledge, especially forbidden or hard-to-find knowledge, is thrilling.

Libraries are full of information – knowledge waiting to be explored. Much of what we find in libraries is ordinary knowledge – facts and theories that have already been vetted and tested, if not perfectly proven. Another big chunk of it, especially in public libraries, consists of the imaginings of people who want to explore humanity and the possibilities of the universe (we call this “fiction”).

When we visit a library, whether we read fiction or non-fiction, we expand our awareness and our ability to process what we know.  (We do the same thing when we travel and immerse ourselves in other cultures, but that’s another essay.) Over time we learn how to distinguish between amazing facts (eg: images from the James Webb) and absurd beliefs (eg: Q-Anon), and both contribute to intellectual growth.

The idea of a secret library suggests knowledge and growth beyond the ordinary. The appeal of rare or hidden knowledge is manifest as a recurring theme in the Harry Potter books, the recent Netflix series “Wednesday,” and other teen / young adult literature. Young people appreciate this appeal instinctively.

The appeal of hidden knowledge is also the driving force behind scientists searching for gravitational waves, elementary particles, and the inner workings of biochemistry.

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Change – And Communication Required by Change

We’ve all seen it or experienced it: A substantial new change is introduced by a colleague, a boss, or some outside consultants and the people who are expected to actually implement the change stumble and make mistakes. Why does this keep happening? Here are four explanations (which are not necessarily mutually exclusive).

    1. The people making mistakes are dumb. This is a surprisingly common explanation from the people who design and roll out a change. However, because change associated errors are so common, it could only be true if most people are dumb, and that simply is not the case. People only appear dumb because that which is obvious to the designer is not always obvious to the people who have to learn the change, regardless of how bright or dumb they are. In the vast majority of cases, blaming the people who have to carry out the change simply makes no sense. Blame is neither accurate nor productive.
    2. The change is poorly explained. Despite thorough instructions, in many cases people simply may not have understood or remembered their instructions. Here’s why:
      • Not everyone learns the same way. Some people learn well through written instructions. Other people learn well through verbal instructions.   Still others are highly visual and need to see a demonstration of what they are learning before they can remember anything. If instructions are provided in only one form, learning preferences for some portion of the people who need to execution on a change are likely to be missed. When a change is complex, it’s a good idea to provide instruction both in writing and verbally. Also, keep in mind that some people, no matter how well they understand instructions, can’t really master something new until they do it. Surprisingly, this is particularly true of bright people who think in abstractions – like Einstein, Thomas Edison, and Steven Spielberg. It is usually best to allow someone who is learning a change to practice it; showing them is fine, but having them do it is better. Of course, having them do it is slower and requires vastly more patience on the part of the instructor, but the reduced error rate in later actions is well worth the time and tolerance.
      • Sometimes the instructions are not clear or complete. This goes back to the earlier point that what’s obvious to the creator is not always obvious to the users. In the early days of computer programming, first iterations of products were designed by engineers who could not understand why users didn’t automatically understand how to use their products. This phenomenon also appeared in the early days of PC software, again in the early days of the internet, and then again in the early days of mobile devices. The industry’s quite brilliant and imaginative engineers understood how to use their products because they had designed them; the users, however, were flummoxed. The same thing can happen with process changes in any work environment.
    3. People aren’t accustomed to change and habits are hard to break. In some work environments, especially environments in which people are expected to work robotically and follow the same patterns all the time, workers sometimes fall back on old habits and patterns. When tasks are reduced to mindless repetition, people who have been mindlessly following those patterns cannot be expected to quickly and easily abandon them. One way to avoid this problem is to reduce the expectation for robotic function in the workplace. People who routinely experience change and are routinely expected to be flexible find it easier to adopt change. In other words, the more change people experience, the easier it is for them to adapt to it when it happens.
    4. The people who are affected by the change weren’t involved in developing or rolling out the change.  People always find it easier to implement a change that they have had a hand in developing. For one thing, they understand why the change is designed the way it is. For another, they have probably been able to affect the design of the change so it suits them. Perhaps most importantly, however, they have had the opportunity to learn the change over time so, when it comes time to implement the change, the change feels familiar. In the end, if the people who are affected by a change have been involved in the development of the change, even if the change is not exactly as they would have designed it themselves, at least they are prepared to accept it and implement it as it is.

A final point about change and mistakes: sometimes mistakes reveal problems in the change itself, not in the people who are implementing the change. When a change is introduced, if people have trouble implementing it, perhaps the change itself needs further modification. People designing change should be prepared to change their changes as appropriate. Think of change as evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Here a few suggestions for avoiding problems when rolling out a change:

    • Early in the process of planning a change, involve the people who are affected by the change. Help people become familiar with the changes so the changes are already familiar when they are rolled out. Listen to what the people have to say so you can adapt the changes to accommodate their needs.
    • Provide both written and verbal instructions.
    • Ideally, let people practice. At a minimum, provide them with supervision the first time they have to work with the change.
    • Make change routine. A series of small changes may be easier to accommodate than a single big change.
    • Allow for mistakes. As Alexander Pope said, “To err is human.”
    • Learn from the mistakes people make. How can the changes be improved to avoid further mistakes? How can future changes be designed and rolled out such that they result in fewer mistakes?
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In a Team, Two Kinds of Communication are Essential

Do a Google search on “essential components of teamwork” and you’ll get a long list of articles on the subject. Teamwork is complicated and takes effort, but it can be much less complicated and take much less effort if the team communicates well.

There are two kinds of essential communication in teams. The first is vertical communication (top down and bottom up) and the other is horizontal communication (between teammates).

As obvious and intuitive as the above statement may be, poor communication probably causes more team failure than any other factor. Well-led teams are successful communicators in all directions on an ongoing basis.

Top down communication has to do with setting direction. Defining the goal. Everyone on the team must be working towards the same objective and each member of the team must prioritize that goal above self-interest. Top down communication is also how task assignments are determined, although this can, in good teams, be delegated to the team members to work out for themselves.

Bottom up communication is how team leaders get all kinds of information.

      • How well do team members understand the objectives and how committed is the team to achieving them? How efficiently is the team working? Are problems brewing?
      • How could the team work better? What improvements can be made so the team has a greater likelihood of success? What changes would result in less effort or lower costs?
      • What are customers saying about the product or service? What ideas do they have? How are their needs or interests evolving?
      • What could the team leader do better to ensure success of the team?

Horizontal communication may be the most important form of communication. This is the communication that allows team members to coordinate their actions in furtherance of their shared objectives.

When I was setting up a small US startup/subsidiary for a large Japanese company, we had a very aggressive time frame for achieving a set of goals. My VPs (software development, creative, operations, finance, and sales/marketing) and I would meet regularly to go over priorities and near term action items. Budget, labor resources, and skill sets in their respective departments had to be juggled to meet a series of milestones required to obtain further funding. Every time we encountered a problem or a change, we worked through those changes and the ways a change in one group’s output or activities would affect the other groups and their contributions.

Of course, each of the department heads had needs. Everyone was working against a tight schedule with limited resources, but by the time we ended each meeting, each team leader (and management team member) understood why resources were being allocated they way they were. Each VP understood what tradeoffs had been made and why. My role was not to make all the decisions, although imposing a decision was necessary from time to time. I talked as little as I could. My role was principally to guide the process, keep things moving (push for decisions), periodically remind everyone of the larger objective, and trust them to listen to and work with each other. We rarely achieved universal happiness over decisions, but everyone came away understanding why each decision was made and committed to executing with it. Working with that team was among the more enjoyable and rewarding experiences of my life.

Libraries rarely operate under the time crunches that early stage companies face, but, like early stage companies, libraries have to achieve objectives with limited resources. Building teams that communicate well so everyone understands what is being done by whom and how their work affects everyone else is essential in any organization that aspires to efficiency and effectiveness in achieving goals. Including libraries. Building a culture of open, complete, and ongoing communication at all levels of the organization is essential to building a winning team.

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In a Team, Everything You Do Affects Someone Else

One of the first things I tell any new staff member at the library is, “Remember, each task you perform is affected by the way someone else did their tasks and will, in turn, affect someone else. You may perform your task alone but the task sits in a long chain of cause and affect. So perform your task knowing that how you do it affects a colleague or a patron.”

Henry Ford famously introduced the assembly line to automobile manufacturing. Each worker had a specific task that he (usually it was a “he,” until World War II came along) repeated again and again as part of a long chain of assembly. Economists and sociologists associated this atomization of tasks with a disconnect between workers and the products they produced, resulting in a steady erosion of quality because workers didn’t notice or care about the end product. Craftsmanship gave way to mechanical production and efficiency, and workers no longer knew or cared how the work they did affected either the work done by their fellow workers or the finished product that landed in the hands of customers.

Work in contemporary libraries can often result in the same disconnect. Staff hum along at their jobs simply going through the motions and passing along the results to the next person in the chain without thinking much about what the next person does or how their own work affects that person’s job. My admonition to new staff often seems to come as a surprise because we don’t think about our work as impacting others. Here are a couple of examples I have run across.

    • Inter-library loans (ILLs) coming in from other libraries sometimes have little slips taped to the cover of the books with the name of our library on them. Undoubtedly, the slips helped the staff or volunteers at the sending library know in which bag or box to put the item so it would come to us. Very useful for them. However, the tags serve no purpose to us or our patrons who are borrowing the item. By leaving the slip taped to the item, the sending library is offloading the task of removing the slip (and perhaps damaging the cover of the item) from themselves onto us. Yes, it’s petty. I agree. But I hope you see the point.
    • When putting returned non-fiction items onto shelving carts, some staff are careful to put the items in order as they load them onto the cart. Others are imprecise and just toss returned items onto the shelving cart in approximately the right order. By taking an extra second or two to be sure the items are in the correct sequence, one staff member would save other staff the time and trouble of  first noticing and then fixing the error. In addition, such carelessness can compound the added work created because subsequent items added to the shelving cart may be placed incorrectly even if this staff member is making a concerted effort to be careful. When the cart goes out for shelving, the staff member or volunteer has to take the time and trouble to fix the errors. Another petty example, but the lack of consideration shows poor teamwork and reflects a culture of indifference to teammates.
    • Back to the subject of ILLs…. Processing ILLs (packing outgoing and unpacking incoming ILLs) used to be a task assigned to adult volunteers who would come mid-day to do the job. The decision was made to switch to high school volunteers. High school students are only available after school, so ILLs get packed in the late afternoon. This has a couple of consequences.
      1. Outgoing ILLs are pulled from the shelves in the morning and the ILL driver picks up outgoing ILLs in the early afternoon. However, since ILLs don’t get packed until late afternoon, outgoing ILLs don’t get packed until the driver has left, so they sit in our library waiting to be picked up for more than 24 hours after they have been pulled from shelf. As a result, patrons in other libraries have to wait an extra day for the items they requested.
      2. Similarly, incoming ILLs are not unpacked until well after they have arrived and the staff who need to check them in can’t do their part of the work until the students are finished unpacking. Sometimes this puts the staff in an awkward time crunch to get their work done before the end of a shift. Also, notifications to patrons could be delayed since the notifications go out in batches and late processing means that notifications don’t go out until close to closing time or the next day. Late unpacking, therefore, is also an inconvenience to our patrons. Managing volunteers is a tricky business since they are doing us a favor and we need to accommodate their schedules, but for time-sensitive tasks the volunteer manager needs to put in a little extra thought and consideration in choosing volunteers and making arrangements. Or the staff has to do the job. The timing of these tasks affects patrons as well as other staff and that’s important.

These examples have relatively trivial consequences, but collectively they can have a substantive impact on the library’s work culture and the quality of patron services. Two relatively straightforward changes will facilitate repair of these broken systems and prevent similar issues from arising in the future.

    1. Create an environment in which staff are aware of and care about the impact their work has on other people, including staff and patrons.
    2. Cultivate an openness to change and communication about ways to improve. Avoid blame or finger pointing. Focus on process and consequences.

You’ll notice that both of these are driven by organizational culture. If staff feel that change and improvement are normal and healthy, then they will be less resistant to it. If they feel that other people are being considerate of them, they will be more welcoming of suggestions on how to better accommodate the needs of their colleagues and the patrons.

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Use Library “After Action Reviews” for Successes as Well as for Challenges

I grew up calling them “post-mortems.” You know, those horrible one-off meetings that are often held after something goes badly (eg: a grant application is denied or turnout for an event is abysmal). The objective is to figure out what went wrong and fix the mistakes. No one likes post-mortems because they mean facing failure and everyone comes away discouraged. The very name (“after-death”) is a turn-off. And libraries rarely have them.

And yet, I have always believed that constantly reviewing actions is essential to a healthy, productive organization. Such reviews are important both when something goes badly and when something goes very well indeed, thank you. I also believe they should be held for all sorts of events, large and small.

So let’s start with a name change. After Action Review (AAR) sounds more neutral and is a widely used term.

And let’s stop thinking of them as long, boring, discouraging meetings. Quick surveys and short, two paragraph reports posted on groupware for discussion are usually more useful forms of AAR than sit-down meetings.

I was pleased to hear a discussion of AARs as a core element of strategy on a recent episode of The Library Leadership Podcast. When learning becomes a core element of ongoing strategy, After Action Reviews can be seen as positive rather than negative exercises. Through them, the organization can learn from the community and from each other. Instead of resisting, staff and management embrace the practice and incorporate assessments into the organization’s culture. In addition to encouraging an outward looking orientation, AARs stimulate communication and idea sharing that is not merely reactive to negative circumstances but rather positive and forward looking.

Perhaps most importantly, AARs encourage constant change. Instead of doing things the same way every time year after year even as technology, community needs / interests, and staff skills change, AARs facilitate steady evolution from mediocre to good to excellent. They also make it possible to face failure when that happens (and it will) because staff will have the sense that positive outcomes outnumber the failures and failures are merely additional opportunities to learn, change and improve.

After an event, ask participants to quickly fill out a short survey. What did they like; what didn’t they like; what could be better? Get specific where you need to (speaker quality, etc), but make it easy for people to reply. After an event, ask staff to submit a short report on what went well and what could have gone better. Ask everyone for suggested improvements. Staff reports and summaries of surveys should be posted publicly on groupware so others can see, learn, and discuss as well.

For example, an AAR for response to a power outage might look something like this:

Management should make a point of reading AARs (another reason for keeping them concise) and responding. This way staff realize that the reports matter and can make a difference. We have all worked in environments in which suggestions and reports are requested or even required but no action is taken. Management sets the tone, so step up and interact.

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The Everywhere Library

Back when the 19th Century was becoming the 20th Century and Andrew Carnegie was funding the construction of libraries in communities across the United States, information came in the form of books and the best way to store and access books was in buildings.

That was over 100 years ago and the world of information has changed. Don’t get me wrong, we absolutely still need libraries and libraries still need buildings, and one of things found in those buildings should be books (lots of books).

However, printed pages are no longer the most widely used means for storing and presenting information. Therefore, libraries need to be more than buildings with books in them. There is no reason libraries should be confined to one place. There is every reason for libraries to be ubiquitous.

Libraries should be part of the local diner, local philanthropic organizations, the kitchen table, and the local park bench as much as they are part of that wonderful building many of us turn to for a good book. Digital access to library books and magazines, digital access to library programs and services, and library programs and services themselves can and should be found everywhere. We have the technology; we just need the imagination and the willpower.

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When do we stop educating ourselves?

From the time my son was about three years old, he looked forward to going to school. We had neighbors down the hall who had two bright and curious daughters in elementary school,  and my son really wanted to go to school, too. He was excited to learn new things, meet new people, and, like his friends down the hall, figure things out.

My wife and I remember the day he was brushing his teeth and his gaze wandered – as one’s gaze does when brushing your teeth – and he saw a 3×3 square of dots in the lower corner of the bathroom mirror. After staring at it briefly, he turned to my wife and said through toothpaste frothy lips, “You know, mom, three threes is nine.” At the age of four he had figured out multiplication, which became a subject of happy parent-child conversation for days.

Unfortunately, my wife and I also remember the numerous times – after my son finally started kindergarten and even after he advanced into first grade – when an adult heard that this charming small child before them was in school and loving it, the adult would laugh and say incredulously, “Really?” And then follow up with, “Wait until you have homework! You won’t like it so much then.”

These comments always infuriated us. People – often smart, well-educated people – were teaching our child that school is something to dislike. They were telling our child that learning is something unpleasant. It seems that in America, all children are taught this lesson by the adults around them. And they continue to believe it when they become adults, too.

A meme that periodically appears in one or another of my social media streams attributes the following pithy quote to Isaac Asimov: “Education isn’t something you can finish.”

What he really said, in a 1988 conversation with Bill Moyers, was something a good deal more thoughtful.

[P]eople think of education as something that they can finish. And what’s more, when they finish, [graduation is] a rite of passage…. And, therefore, anything that reminds you of school — reading books, having ideas, asking questions — that’s kids’ stuff. Now you’re an adult, you don’t do that sort of thing anymore. [Y]ou have everybody looking forward to no longer learning, and you make them ashamed afterward of going back to learning…. 

As a result of this mindset, conversations become exchanges of pronouncements of what we think we know rather than questions to increase what we can know. People seek out information only to confirm what they already believe to be true.

We need to instill in our communities the notion that asking questions, digging up information, learning new things, forming and reforming ideas is fun and valuable. We need to remember that increasing our understanding of each other and the world around us is essential to our own happiness and to the survival of the societies in which we live.

Until very recently, the best (and only) place to find information and new ideas was in books, so we collected books and built buildings to store them. We called these buildings filled with books “public libraries.” Today, libraries are becoming more than warehouses of books, and they are less dependent than they used to be on their physical buildings. Libraries are still information resources – powerful resources for continuing to learn – but the nature of the information they store and the ways libraries deliver that information to their communities is becoming more connected, more discerning, and more complete.

Education in a school is something that can end, but ending is not the same as being finished.

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“Be Curious, Not Judgmental” about This Quote?

Be curious, not judgmental.

Every once in a while, we run across something that immediately strikes a chord. On the surface, we get it and it appeals to us. What’s rarer is finding something that immediately strikes a chord and then continues to surprise us with layers of lessons.

“Be curious, not judgmental.”

This simple quote is attributed to Walt Whitman. No less a celebrity than Ted Lasso (the eponymous character in the Disney+ series) gave ol’ Walt credit in a much loved scene that has spurred sales of “Be curious, not judgmental” paraphernalia. Lovely quote. Lovely scene. Certainly, as Ted suggests (and demonstrates, we should all ask lots of questions before forming our opinions. After all, an uninformed opinion is not going to be a useful opinion and may get us in trouble.

And yet this quote has more significance than simply providing a clear and simple assertion of wise advice.

You would think that some “curious” people would ask a few appropriate questions:

      • Did Walt Whitman really say this?
      • If so, when, where, in what poem or letter or speech?
      • If not, who said it?

Sadly, not many people took ol’ Ted’s lesson to heart and asked these questions. It takes a bit of digging, but among publicly available resources, only Snopes seems to have taken up the challenge, and the answers seem to be.

      • Probably not.
      • Nowhere that anyone can find.
      • We don’t really know.

Normally, this would frustrate me. I want a quote properly attributed and it bugs me when memes appear on FB, Twitter, or other social media platforms that either misattribute famous quotes or completely make up quotes for famous people. For example, the internet is filled with memes that attribute the following quote to Thomas Jefferson: “The end of democracy and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.” However, according to the Thomas Jefferson Library at Monticello, Mr. Jefferson never said or wrote these words. 

Generally, I succumb to suspicions of disinformation and deliberate manipulation of public opinion when I encounter such memes. If anyone objects, privately or publicly, to such memes, the person who posted the meme will likely dismiss the objections as pedantic – and the meme will stay posted to be shared and further spread the mis/disinformation. 

Whether or not misquotes such as the Jefferson misquote “matter” is a subject for debate and I may come back to it in another post. (I think they do because people are more likely to base opinions on how they feel about a subject than what they know about it – in fact what they know is more likely to be determined by how they feel than they other way around – and attributing a fake political message to a hero figure will increase its appeal to a target audience.) 

In the specific case of “Be curious, not judgmental,” however, I would conclude that the political and social consequences of misattribution are minor. No one is picking sides or challenging someone else based on this quote. No one will take the quote more or less seriously whether it is attributed to Walt Whitman, or for that matter Ben Franklin, Newt Gingrich, or Homer. 

In which case, why not simply attribute it to Ted Lasso? He may not have been the first to say it, but he made it famous. And in so doing, he accidentally showed us how we may all become entranced by an idea without actually living it.

So if someone makes a t-shirt that says, 

Be curious, not judgmental.
(not Walt Whitman) via Ted Lasso 

I’ll buy it.

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Podcasts on Library Leadership and Community Engagement

What are your favorite podcasts for staying current on library news and trends? I look for podcasts that focus on Community Engagement or Transformative Leadership in libraries. Here are a few that consistently include material relevant to one or the other (or both) of those subjects. If you know of another great podcast that addresses these issues, let me know using the “Contact me” link on the right.

Call Number with American Libraries presents “conversations with librarians, authors, thinkers, and scholars about topics from the library world and beyond.” Host Phil Morehart, communications manager for the American Library Association, is professional and focused on the topics, which he and his guests explore systematically and in depth. The length of each episode varies dramatically from 15 minutes to 45 minutes, though you should expect just over 30 minutes. The range in length seems to be a function of subject matter, the number of guests, and whether or not it’s a sponsored podcast. Many podcasts are not only purposeful but also fun, such as the late 2021 podcasts on Zombies (in October) and food (in November). Call Number is a great general-subject podcast for librarians and occasionally touches on topics related to community engagement, management, and transformational leadership.

Libraries Lead in the New Normal addresses strategic library leadership issues. It’s a little irregular, disorganized, and long-winded, but it is also highly relevant and insightful for library leaders. Many discussions look at how libraries fit in their communities and the role libraries play in society. Each podcast is 45 minutes to an hour long and includes one or more practicing librarians as guests. The hosts (R. David Lankes and Mike Eisenberg) ramble a bit, but the casualness also makes the podcasts entertaining and, again, the topics are fundamental to librarianship and the guests are interesting.

Library Leadership Podcast tends to adhere to important, day-to-day concerns about library management such as “Beating Burnout” and “Talking So Your Boss Will Listen”. It is tightly organized and professionally presented – it comes out regularly, the topics and the questions are  prepared in advance, and the host (Adriane Herrick Juarez) does a good job of staying focused. Each podcast is about 15 minutes long and consists of an interview with one librarian.

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Libraries: Community Information Centers during an Emergency

In an emergency, whether the emergency is a tornado or a pandemic, in most communities everyone knows who takes care of what:

      • Order and traffic, rule enforcement: The local police department.
      • Safety and rescue: The local fire department.
      • First aid and medical attention: The local first aid squad, clinics and hospitals.
      • Shelter: Schools and community centers.
      • Coordinating it all: Town Hall.
      • Keeping the public informed: ????? (Hint: Why not the local library?)

With the demise of local newspapers, most communities, whether the population is 3,000 or 300,000, have no place to turn for reliable information accumulation and dissemination. During the COVID pandemic, initially Americans experienced an information vacuum at the state and national level. National leaders declined to provide direction and released confusing, contradictory, and sometimes downright false information. A few state leaders, such as Governor Cuomo, became particularly famous for filling the information vacuum. However, who fills the information vacuum at the local level, especially for emergencies, such as flooding, fires, earthquakes, or tornados? Why not the local library?

Emergency action is usually well planned and coordinated. The police and fire departments as well as other first responders  work with local government to prepare for emergencies. They know what to do, they practice doing it, and they’re good at it. Thanks to that preparation, people get rescued, order is maintained, and emergency facilities are set up where and when they are needed. In addition, volunteers step forward to clear debris, fill sand bags, and help distribute food, water, and blankets.

But who informs the public? How do local residents know which roads are closed or where to go for those emergency supplies of food, water, and blankets? Who tells volunteers where they are most needed? As rules and policies change, who makes sure that average citizen knows what’s going on? Police and fire crews are all busy being first responders and there is nothing in their training or experience that familiarizes them with platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Nixle/NextDoor, or even email to effectively communicate with the entire community on an ongoing basis. Someone needs to fill the information gap, regardless of information platform. Why not libraries?

The little town of Cranbury, NJ where I live was hit by tropical storm Henri on August 22, 2021. We didn’t suffer any wind damage, but we got pounded by 9 inches of rain in an hour. The rain was so intense little Cranbury (population about 3,000) was mentioned on the PBS NewsHour and CNN coverage of Henri the following day. In addition, many towns upstream from Cranbury’s beautiful lake got almost as much rain as we did, which of course, meant we not only suffered from flooding due to the rain that fell in our own town but also from the rain that fell in other towns when it flowed down to us through the watershed. The mayor, local volunteers, and Cranbury’s Office of Emergency Management did a great job of handling the flooding, rescuing stranded motorists, and helping our neighbors and businesses near the lake. But communication was a problem. And still is.

No one knew which roads were closed and, once we found out which ones were closed, we didn’t know when they were reopened. For those of us who had to go to work, there was no way to find alternate routes with any certainty. No one really knew where to go for help, and since it was Sunday the town hall was closed. If you were personal friends with the mayor or someone on the township committee or if you knew a volunteer in the fire department, you could call them, but few of them knew the whole picture – or even many details beyond what they personally were working on. Unfortunately, if you didn’t know someone, other than for a 911 life-threatening emergency, you were out of luck. We have great first responders and an excellent library. We should put them together.

Just as the police department, the fire department, the mayor, and others spring into action in an emergency, why can’t the local library staff spring into action to provide information services? Information is what libraries are for, isn’t it, the accumulation and dissemination of information? And librarians can do most of this kind of work from home – no need to go out into the pandemic, the rain, or the wind like other first responders.

Most towns have an Office of Emergency Management (OEM) that prepares for emergencies and lays out which township organization will take responsibility for which services. Libraries should join in the planning and, whether the emergency is a storm hitting at 4:00am on a Sunday morning (like Henri) or a pandemic rolling out over many months, the library staff can quickly set up information accumulation and dissemination services, both for the first responders and the public. If library staff are part of the OEM, it would be expected of them, and first responders would coordinate with them. It would be the library’s job to figure out how to collect the information and disseminate it effectively to the entire community.

Turning the library into the community’s emergency information center benefits the police, the fire department, the medical workers, and the town hall staff as well as the community members because the first responders can focus on their jobs and the community has a place to turn for reliable, curated information.

I have no data on this but I am willing to guess that if you ask most Americans where they turn for information in an emergency, they do not think of the library. They should. Information is the heart and soul of what libraries offer their communities. Libraries should be so plugged into their communities that whenever the community needs information, especially in an emergency, the first place everyone in the community thinks of is the library.