On Letting go of Libraries/Libraries Letting go
I write this as almost a decade of working primarily for and with Libraries comes to an end. Honestly, right now, it’s with a mixture of wistfulness and relief. For many years, I have had a love-hate relationship with libraries; there is so much potential, but so much stuckness as well. I have worked on various initiatives to innovate and make libraries more engaging, including makerspaces, developing co-design skills in staff, and most recently coaching teams to make libraries platforms for participation, where community members can cocreate activities and projects which activate their skills, passion, and energy. But at the end of the day, there’s something that librarians just won’t let go of that dominates their energy, making everything I’ve described above feel like an “add-on”: books and reading.
Why would you want to let go of books and reading you ask? It’s not that those things are bad, they are just a very limited subset of the learning and development space that communities now occupy. It’s also a very eurocentric way to support community learning and development. And libraries are experimenting with various other ways to create value. But, broadly speaking, so much of the time of librarians is still consumed by physical books and reading. Shelving them. Talking about them. Tidying and making them orderly. Displaying them. All of this takes a massive amount of public human resource. All of this effort for a service whose usage is gradually declining; I’ve never in my nine years at libraries seen a significant change in the overall gradual downward trend of usage (this doesn’t count for e-book collections whose use is skyrocketing, but e-books only take a small team to collect and maintain).
Consider a parallel community service: community centres. In Auckland these have a fraction of the staff that libraries do. But their staff have a different way of working. They engage communities, understand needs, and facilitate the development of programmes, which are often led and/or co-built by community members, creating “many to many” interactions. And usage has increased considerably over the last few years as they get better at this and their practice evolves. This way of working is participatory; it engages community members to develop a wide range of activities which are the most relevant to them. Libraries and librarians do this too, but there’s always an attachment to books and reading that limits the scope of possibility, and the energy available to them to engage in the process. Their energy is divided between the old and the new.
So all of that energy is tied up into a very specific subset of community learning and development, when there is a burgeoning but under-recognised need for new types of community services.
Participatory City in England developed a platform to grow participation culture: a set of “shopfronts” where participatory designers support community members to cocreate community activities which build social capital and connectedness, and grow individual and collective confidence and capability, and an ecosystem of activities and projects which make the community a livelier, more sustainable, more equitably prosperous, and more “belongingful” place. The pilot project “every one every day” contains the aspiration in the name: to draw everyone in the community into participatory activity on a regular basis.
Libraries and librarians could evolve into platforms for participation, if they were open to letting go of control, broadening the scope of possible learning, and taking a more facilitative role. And as we see more community hubs emerge, with a mixture of library and more “community centre-esque” services, we may well see platforms for participation emerge.
The leading edge of participatory design is at the scale of the street: Dan Hill is talking about one minute cities, the city that we encounter right outside our doorstep that we can cocreate with our neighbours, and Tomorrow Today Streets gives groups of neighbours extremely practical support to do this. Again, we could support this street scale participation to grow and spread across the city, simultaneously contributing to solutions for burning platform problems like climate change, social isolation, and inequality, but only if we invest. This requires taking a good hard look at our existing community services, to figure out what we can let go of, what we can hand over to the community, and what we can simply stop doing. What does local government need to let go of, in order to create the space and support for communities to grow participation culture and cocreate the future that we all need?
