In A Win for the Stacks, we hear about how Syracuse University faculty are petitioning and protesting a plan for the library to move a portion of the collection 250 miles offsite, where they would be available for next-day delivery to faculty and students.

Then there is Reviving the Academic Library, an opinion piece by Johann Neem. Neem believes that “The library is a means to an end: enabling students and faculty to access archives.” And from his essay, it seems like he thinks that is the sum total of what a library should do. He blames “the emergence of the field of library sciences” (apparently a recent event in his mind) for librarians’ desire to convert libraries from archives into “vague learning environments which, when boiled down to their essence, are nothing more than computer labs with sofas and coffee.”

I’m not going to pick these articles apart. It has been done in the comments on Inside Higher Ed (an alternate title for this post is “Supercilious faculty and
defensive librarians”) and also in the FriendFeed threads where I first heard about the Syracuse situation and the Neem piece.

Instead, I’ll do something I usually try (and fail) not to do here, and that’s give advice. Not directly to the players in these articles, as I don’t really know the background for the Syracuse story or how Neem arrived at his conclusions. This will be more general advice. First for faculty, then for librarians.

Advice for faculty

Click to enlarge.

It’s fun to get riled up and self-righteous on behalf of the preservation of Western Civilization (believe me, I know all about rile and self-righteousness, and you can check the archives of this blog if you doubt me) but it’s more productive to get to know the librarians and make your case for what role you think the library should play before things blow up in public meetings.

I understand faculty and students who value browsing the library stacks (see my advice for librarians, below), but I think it’s time to recognize browsing the local stacks as a pleasurable, useful activity, rather than a core research strategy. Even if you are at an enormous, inclusive library like Harvard’s you are still missing a great deal that is electronic-only. And you should certainly re-think passing on that strategy to your students who are likely to end up at institutions where the library has far narrower collections, or where the library has already moved to a collection that is more online than printed.

Putting aside that libraries have long been more than an archive for books, if you wonder why the library is taking on amenities that you associate with a student center, I’d like you to do two things. First, talk to students about this. Talk to a lot of students, not just the ones who know what you think and will tell you what you want to hear. Find out how students want to do research and homework, and why they still choose the library over the student center (if, indeed, they do). Second, please visit your library after 10PM during a busy time of the term. Too many faculty never see the library when it is fully in use by the student body. Perhaps you will be surprised by the variety of activity going on in the library, and how students move from quiet solo study, to group study, to social conversations and back again.

Advice for librarians

Click to enlarge.

I have misgivings about the truism “the user is not broken,” but let’s think about that for a minute, since it’s a commonplace in library blogland. I think one of the most useful readings of that phrase is that when readers tell us something, we should assume that they are speaking in good faith and that they know what they want.

So when student and faculty readers tell us that they want books they can open and handle and that stacks that are browsable are one of our core services as far as they are concerned, shouldn’t we respect that? Yes, budget and space problems are causing friction at many libraries, but I think too many of us think that people don’t browse any more, and some users are telling us that we are wrong.

We keep telling students that we have a hybrid library of printed and online sources, and that they shouldn’t privilege the online sources just because they are easier to use. Shouldn’t we take our own advice there?

Lastly, I think we all (librarians and readers) need to re-think what browsing and serendipity mean now. I think librarians have not done a great job in helping people browse that hybrid library. It used to be we could go to the reference stacks, plant our feet and look around for well-known or likely sources. Now, a big chunk of our reference books come to us from online packages that are segregated by publisher and have no call numbers so we can’t easily browse them alongside the printed works in the catalog. I’d love to see an iTunes style interface for libraries that can flip back and forth between “cover flow” and text lists, and which incorporated links to online sources and catalog records for printed books.

My mom said she’d match up to $200 in donations, and people came through with $195, which is excellent.

I realized that I hadn’t put in my money yet, so I did that.

After all is totalled up and PayPal takes their cut, I count $4,202.28 raised in just over a month by the Library Society of the World for the Louisville Free Public Library. One hundred and thirty six people donated through the LSW effort, with an average contribution of $33.40, and a median and mode of $20.

I set a goal of $5,000 and thought it was a stretch. It turns out I was right, but we didn’t fall that far short. I’m very proud of what we accomplished together, and very grateful that so many people trusted me with their money. I’m waiting for the PayPal transfer to come through, after which I’ll send a (real) check for something like $1,658.84, to go with the check for $2,543.44 that we already sent.

There is still the matter of the prizes. I didn’t do a great job of pushing the prizes as incentives, but we are certainly ready to use them as rewards. Everyone who donated before this blog post is elgibile to win. The available prizes for the dozen or so winners will be:

From photographer Jamie Powell Sheppard: one each of six different photo prints of the LFPL Main Library. That’s her work over my shoulder in the photo above. The prints are beautiful and so are the images. Please click on the thumbnails below, as the originals aren’t square.

Leo Laporte’s voice on your hope answering machine. Leo is the host of the TWiT (This Week in Tech) podcast and The Tech Guy radio show. He’s a pro, he sounds great, and apparently he’s an awesome guy since he just saw us discussing these prizes on FriendFeed and volunteered.

Eric Sizemore’s voice on your home answering machine. Sizemore is a librarian and a DJ. If you want people to think you have a deep, smooth voice or think you are involved with a guy who has a deep, smooth voice, this should be your pick.

An LSW Cod of Ethics mug (courtesy of Nichole Dettmar). Make an ethical stand! Makes everything taste like cod!

Beautiful, luxurious Black Forest Malabrigo yard from Abigail Goben

One item from the way cool libpunk store from Amy Buckland. I’m not sure, but I think my netbook runs faster and cooler since I put that libpunk sticker on it.

I still need to talk to the other people involved–Abigail and Amy had their own plans for selecting winners, which is fine–but my overall plan is to randomly select names of donors to match the number of prizes, contact the donors and let them pick first-come-first-served which prize they want. We’ll see how that goes.

Here’s the deal: we are at about $3,700 right now. There’s no way we are going to hit $5,000 and I’m mostly OK with that. But I’m still extending the fundraiser through Friday night in the hopes of reaching $4,000. And I think we will do it.

A donor that I am particularly fond of (namely my mom) has a challenge for us. She will match all donations we get between now and Friday night, up to $200 total. So every new donation is effectively doubled. If you can afford to donate $10, my mom will turn that into a $20 donation. If you can donate $50, it’s like you just donated $100.

Another reason I want to wait has to do with the incentives. I have forgotten to mention some of them here and only have half a plan on how to award them. But more about that later today. For now know that every dollar you donate from here on gets doubled up to $200 total. Here’s the button, you know what to do:

Don Quixote in his library by Gustave Doré

Whenever I hear someone–an elected offical, often–say that “libraries are for research and information and literature, and not for X” where X = video games or DVDs or comix or books that aren’t in English or Goosebumps or Madonna’s Sex or boardgames or sewing circles or popular novels; whenever I hear that, I think “this is a person who doesn’t really like libraries, who is scared of libraries and what they represent, and wants others others to be similarly scared.”

I think that research and information and literature are all wonderful things, and that almost every library must put some or all of those things at the core of their mission. But that’s not why I think libraries kick ass.

I think that libraries kick ass because libraries help people expand their imagination.

And there is more to the imagination than the serious, gray, DOA literature that people envision when they say that libraries should be for “serious” stuff. Libraries need to collect broadly to reflect the cultures in which they are embedded.

Libraries do many other things, too, many more obviously utilitarian things that even elected officials can get behind, like helping people learn to read or find a job. But in order for people to want to learn to read or get a better job or discover a cure for cancer or write a haiku, they need to have their imagination awakened. Before we can make ourselves better or make our world better, we need the imagination to envision something better in the first place.

To be able to be in the midst of thousands or even millions of volumes containing the expression of human thought and feeling in all its multitude of forms is an awsome thing. Even more so when you think that there are many more libraries like the one you are in, none of them complete. I have memories of being a child and realizing that whatever I happened to be interested in, I could go to the library and come home with an armful of inspiration. I get this feeling from every library I visit, and I hope that I can pass some of that feeling on to students where I work.

The first line of the Darien Statments says, “The purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization.” Grandiose, perhaps, but it’s something I tend to believe. The Library, and even the small-l-library, provide a way to immerse yourself in the present and past of a culture or a civilization, and come to the surface ready to create the future.

Michael Stephens says that “libraries should encourage the heart,” which I have always thought is kind of corny. But now I think that perhaps we are saying the same thing. Libraries kick ass when they allow our hearts and minds to expand and roam freer than before.

Three weeks ago today was the storm that flooded the Louisville Free Public Library. In that time we have raised over $3,200 in the name of the Library Society of the World. Over 100 of you have donated. Thank you. If you’d like to donate now, please do:

We got Boing Boinged. Louisville Public Media interviewed Greg Schwartz and me about the flood and the fundraiser and ran a radio news story with audio clips from us both (that link isn’t working right now, but I’m pretty sure it’s the right one).

Andy Woodward has started the LFPL Blogathon to stir up some more interest in the fundraiser. Please go to the lfplblogathon wiki and sign up to participate.

This is all fantastic.

But when we started all this, I kind of stuck my neck out. I said we’d raise $5,000. Which makes us still about $1,800 short.

So if you meant to donate, but haven’t yet, please do it now. If you have already donated, thanks very much. I’m planning to bug my co-workers one more time, and here I am bugging you. If there are people you can send my way this last week, please do so.

If you aren’t sure if you want to donate, consider this: you could win fabulous prizes!

Shortly after September 1, we’ll have a drawing. Or multiple drawings. We haven’t really got this figured out yet. But know that Abigail Goben is giving away three skeins of “luscious” Black Forest Malabrigo yarn, Amy Buckland is donating libpunk merch, and Nicole Dettmar has donated a lovely LSW Cod of Ethics mug.

As if those incentives weren’t enough, photographer Jamie Powell Sheppard has offered to donate six prints of photographs of the Louisville Main Library (seen above). Every donor to the LSW effort will have a chance to win one of those classic-looking prints.

So. Please donate. Please mention to other people that they can donate. And maybe you’ll win cool stuff!

If you’d rather send a check, send it to the Library Society of the World Clubhouse, PO Box 7893, Colorado Springs CO 80933. Make the check payable to Steve Lawson.

The Library Foundation
Attn: Flood
301 York St.
Louisville, KY 40203
(502) 574-1709

The short story

At this moment, 94 people have donated $3,143.19 via PayPal, check and cash. On Saturday I mailed a check for $2,543.44 to the Louisville Free Public Library Foundation, which they received today. So we have done good, but still have a ways to go. If you haven’t donated, please donate today. If you have donated, thanks, and please help spread the word.

The longer story

On August 11, we got Boing Boinged. Here you can see what your blog stats look like when all the librarians hit your blog on a Wednesday, and you get linked from Boing Boing on the following Tuesday.

As a result of the boingboinging, an anonymous donor (someone previously unknown to me) donated five hundred (500) dollars via PayPal. This is astonishing to me that someone would trust me with their money like that, and I’m very grateful. I’m almost as astonished that a faculty member at my college congratulated me today on the boingboinging.

After that $500 donation came in, I transferred all the money from my PayPal account to my bank account. PayPal takes a small cut of everyone’s donation, which is how we end up with that $2,543.44 figure (no, nobody donated $3.44). Once the transfer went through, I wrote the check, wrote a dopey letter, and sent it all with delivery confirmation. It arrived today.

(I know these are tedious details, but I am trying to be transparent as possible without, like, giving you the login for my bank account.)

I got a very nice call from Mary Hunt at the Library Foundation today, thanking us for our donation. I wish you all could have heard her say how much it means to them to get the amount of support they have had from their local community and from people like us. When I told her that we were all moved by the photos of the flood, she said “it was much worse than it looked in the photos.”

So that brings us up-to-date. Donations have slowed to a trickle (two Sunday, one Monday, none Tuesday, one Wednesday). There are plans afoot to get some more attention and perhaps motivate more people to donate, and I’ll post about that as soon as I can.

But if you have thought about donating but haven’t yet, this would be a great time to do it, and help me feel more confident that we’ll hit that $5,000 goal by September 1.

I have a new page with just the donation information, so if you want to link to a page here, I suggest this one: http://stevelawson.name/seealso/help_lfpl

And to all those who have donated so far, I can’t thank you enough. People keep complimenting me on this, and I’m proud to have gotten things started, but I haven’t donated a cent yet. It’s all of you who have donated, linked, tweeted (and retweeted), facebooked, submitted the link to Boing Boing, donated items for incentives (more on that tomorrow) and otherwise got us to where we are today.

Books float at the LFPL Main Library (By Scott Utterback, The Courier-Journal) Aug. 4, 2009

So here’s what I know that is new:

• On Thursday I received ten donations for the Louisville Free Public Library for a total of $230. Thank you, all who donated.
• Library Journal published an interview with LFPL Director, Craig Buthod. They now are estimating five million dollars in damage and the Main library will be closed through Labor Day.
• Then there was this, which amazed me. When LJ reporter, Norman Oder, asked what offers of help they have received from the library community, Craig Buthod said this:

Very strong offers. The Library Society of the World [is raising money]. I got a call from Mary Ellin Santiago. [Project Manager of Gates Foundation’s Gulf Coast Library Project]. We’ve had offers from Cedar Rapids [IA, which suffered flooding last year.] The state librarian has been on the phone daily.

It’s really neat that he mentioned us first. He knows better than I do that $5,000 is only one-tenth of one percent of five million dollars. He might or might not be aware that we are still pretty far short of five grand. But I hope it means that Buthod and the other folks at LFPL are cheered up a bit by the knowledge that a bunch of librarians from all over are scraping up $10 and $20 and $50 donations because we are thinking of them and we empathize with them and we wish we could do more.

I knew donations would fall off today. We saw the same thing with people participating in Shovers and Makers. But with this Library Journal mention, I’d really like to see us hit that $5,000 goal by September 1. Here’s the button and the addresses:

If you’d rather send a check, send it to the Library Society of the World Clubhouse, PO Box 7893, Colorado Springs CO 80933. Make the check payable to Steve Lawson.

If you’d rather donate to the LFPL Library Foundation directly instead of using me as a middle man, please do:

The Library Foundation
Attn: Flood
301 York St.
Louisville, KY 40203
(502) 574-1709

Lastly, Abigail Goben-with-a-”b” and Amy “Jambina” Buckland are encouraging contributions with prize drawings. You can win beautiful yarn from Abigail or “libpunk” merch from Amy. (See their blogs for details, must be 18 or over, odds of winning depend on number of entries, offer not valid for Elsevier executives.) I have been trying to think of a similar promo to bring donors out of the woodwork. But other than “for $50 I’ll take my clothes off; for $100 I’ll put them back on,” I haven’t thought of anything (and I think the nudity thing might be illegal in Kentucky anyway). Send good ideas my way.

• 40 people have donated a total of $1,295.
• Contributors are from all over the USA, but also from Canada, England, and New Zealand. The “World” part of Library Society of the World isn’t just a joke.
• Contributions range from $5 to $100.
• The average contribution is $33.21, but the median is $20 and the mode is $10.

I think this is wonderful. I have seen this happen on a more intimate scale where a bunch of small contributions from a group of friends adds up quickly to serious money. This is the same thing, but with strangers sending me $100 on PayPal, trusting that I’m not going to buy plane tickets to Costa Rica or something.

I think the fact that most people are giving $10 is wonderful, too. If you are moved by this story, give what you can. It will add up.

I’m also getting a little nervous. It feels very strange to be responsible for more than a thousand dollars of other people’s money. I think I’ll call the LFPL Foundation line tomorrow. Unless they would really prefer to get one check a few weeks from now, I think I’ll clear out the PayPal account a few times between now and September 1 and send several smaller checks.

I’m also nervous that the “buzz” around this will dissipate quickly, and contributions will slow to a trickle. I don’t want to turn this into Pledge Week on NPR, but I will if I have to! Despite Wednesday’s great success, $5,000 is still looking like a challenging figure to reach. But I think we can do it 5, 10, 20, 100 dollars at a time.

Speaking of which, what’s that PayPal address again? It’s LSW.LFPL@gmail.com, or use this handy button:

If you’d rather send a check, send it to the Library Society of the World Clubhouse, PO Box 7893, Colorado Springs CO 80933. Or just send your check directly to:

The Library Foundation
Attn: Flood
301 York St.
Louisville, KY 40203
(502) 574-1709

I have one more little statistic. As of the instant I’m writing this, my post from yesterday on LFPL has been viewed 2,002 times. That makes it my second-most viewed post on the site. The top post, How to Annoy Librarians has been viewed 2,003 times. Perhaps by this instant, love has already surpassed snark.

You may recall that back in May, I asked you to join me in supporting Consuming Louisville’s Libraries are Free But Books Aren’t drive. Organized by Michelle Jones, that drive was to by books for the Louisville Free Public Library (LFPL) from their Amazon wishlist. It wasn’t that LFPL was terribly needy, it was just a way to help out a library by buying a bunch of book that they really wanted.

Now LFPL is in need. On Tuesday, Louisville was hit with a really ridiculous amount of rain. The Main Library was hit especially hard. I got most of my news about the flood from Greg Schwartz’s Twitter posts and Twitpics.

Photo from LouisvilleKy.gov. Click photo for full-size.

So a lot of those books we sent them in the spring are now covered in water and sewage. And so are the bookmobiles. And the mechanical equipment for HVAC. And the data center. And $50,000 worth of new computers. The initial estimate is $1 million in damage, but they must just be guessing at this point.

So it’s time to help them out again.

I have set up the email LSW.LFPL@gmail.com and linked it to my PayPal account. I intend to collect money at that address until September 1, at which point I’ll send a check in the name of the Library Society of the World to the LFPL Foundation. You can just send money to that email address using PayPal, or use the button below:

If you’d rather send a check, send it to the Library Society of the World Clubhouse, PO Box 7893, Colorado Springs CO 80933. Make the check payable to Steve Lawson.

Don’t worry about how much you can afford to donate. My own contribution will be small-ish, between $20 and $50.

But there are about 300 members of the LSW room on FriendFeed. There are close to 1,000 members of the LSW group on Linkedin. I would like to think we can raise at least $5,000 for LFPL by September 1. That’s only $17 per FriendFeed member, or $5 per Linkedin member.

For this to work, you have to trust me. I promise that every dime that comes through PayPal or check will go to LFPL. (PayPal takes a small cut if your donation is charged to your credit card (rather than your bank account) and if you don’t choose the option to pay those fees yourself, so it’s possible that I won’t get the full amount of your donation. I’ll only be able to donate the money I actually receive after PayPal fees.)

On September 1, I’ll total up what we have raised and send it to the library. If you would rather give money yourself instead of sending it to me, here is the address and phone number given in the Louisville Courier-Journal:

The Library Foundation
Attn: Flood
301 York St.
Louisville, KY 40203
(502) 574-1709

Five thousand dollars or more for Louisville Free Public Library by September 1. Think we can do it? I’ll keep you posted.