[This is one example of librarian Barbara Fister’s writing… its a conference tutorial. I hope it will convince others to check her out more thoroughly. Here interests range across various maps, and she writes very well about them all. And I believe that teachers and librarians are in sanctified professions. -SG]

Though reading is often considered a solitary pursuit, it is a profoundly social experience. This session will explore the social nature of reading, what librarians can learn about the reading experience from book groups both online and face-to-face, and will explore the role that popular fiction plays in the everyday lives of readers.

I’m going to ask you to do some work throughout this session. From time to time I’m going to ask you to do some free-writing in response to a prompt. To start, I’d like to ask you to take a moment to think back to your very first memory of a library. Where was it? What did it look like? How did you feel when you were there? Who was there with you? Take a few minutes to jot down any impressions you can remember about that library.

I’m sure many of you are familiar with an OCLC market research report published a couple of months ago, Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources, a large-scale survey conduced for OCLC by Harris Interactive. A major concern of the study was how the public perceives the library as a “brand.” The finding? Overwhelmingly, libraries are identified with books. As the cover of this report indicates, this response is very puzzling indeed. Why books, when libraries offer so much more?

According to the authors of the report

It would be delightful to assume that when respondents say “books,” what they really mean to say is that books, in essence, stand for those intangible qualities of information familiarity, information trust and information quality. The data did not reveal it. We looked hard. We reviewed thousands of responses to the open-ended questions that inquired about positive library associations and library purpose. We searched for words and phrases that included mentions of “quality,” “trust,” “knowledge,” “learning,” “education,” etc. We found mentions of each, but they were relatively few in number.
“Books” dominated - across all regions surveyed and across all age groups.

But never fear, all is not lost: the report goes on to say “This global, nostalgic perception should give the library community reason to be concerned, but it also provides a solid base from which to leverage value, and create change, on a large scale. . . Libraries must take this advantage and work collectively to ‘rejuvenate’ the brand.”

It’s a little perplexing to me that it’s so crucial to rejuvenate a brand that is apparently successful - library visits have doubled in the past ten years and circulation is up in all types of libraries - but evidently the brand needs work because people now can get information elsewhere. It’s not that they don’t think of libraries as places to find high quality information; the majority of respondents named “providing information” as the main purpose of the library, and they believed the information to be of good quality. It’s just that libraries have to share the market for quality information with the Internet. And though sharing is something libraries do rather well, sharing the market is evidently a sign of failure. If people turn to Google instead of to our databases, we must be doing something wrong. If people think of books instead of databases when picturing a library, we need must need better marketing.

Wayne Wiegand has pointed out that while Americans like libraries, and always have, librarians struggle to define what they’re for. Libraries, he says, have done three things exceptionally well for the past century: they make information widely available, they provide places where people can meet for cultural and civic purposes, and they have furnished billions of reading materials to millions of people. (It’s not outrageous to borrow McDonald’s slogan of “billions served” given there are more libraries in the US than there are McDonald’s outlets.)

Librarians have focused their claim for significance almost exclusively on the first of those three functions: they provide information, or as it was called in an earlier era, “useful knowledge.” The other two functions - providing a civic space FULL ARTICLE