Matt Finch The book of the world: crossing boundaries in culture and outreach
(One of those talks where it all tells a coherent story but is impossible to blog coherently. Semi-random highlights below.)
“Hub is just what you call something when you know it’s really important but you don’t know what it does.” Can lead to mission creep. The hub sits in the middle but never kisses the ground, it’s the wheel that actually contacts things.
How much can you create a space that levels out imbalance of power between storyteller and audience? Make it a game so you don’t know what the outcome will be. Does zombie activities – includes police and fire department as allies of participants. “Yay library as hub, lots of networking and community engagement, tick tick tick” – but actually this was about stepping into the world of the story. Performance as well as static things on shelves.
Cites Dr Who script The Book of the World (PDF) in which the TARDIS is described like a book: can show you anything anywhere anytime – it just takes your body as well as your mind.
“If you have one or two central spaces for books and ideas in a city, all the energy flows through those spaces, and it has a catalysing effect.”
Tension between outreach and control. Bentham’s panopticon to monitor whole library… or whole prison…
Troubled by “Zombies vs Unicorns” book debate where students had to pay to be audience. And Cory Doctorow coming to events – but had to pay to enter. Can still not see videos, just Facebook images. What if you took him to suburb and used contacts to get a big event and beamed it back to privileged city centre to get your visitor numbers needed there? Hitchcock festival in London did just this, set in Waltham Forest which has no cinema so put Vertigo on in the church, arranged walking tour of neighbourhood.
Tensions when reading ambassador cut literacy programme….
Cataloguing comics to add 650 fields for characters who don’t appear in titles but kids will still want to find the comic. Weird that this is happening ‘at periphery’ urban library, but all about access.
Librarianship not just about being rockstars and ninjas and movers and shakers; it’s about being on the coalface dealing with ordinary people in your actual community.
Budget cuts are going to come, and they come in sly ways and they come fast. It’s marginal branches that are most at risk. Executive director of ALIA selling books from collection at county fair to raise awareness and get a stay of execution.
Solve the small issues, look to the unglamorous problems, go to communities most in need. We’re all out there on the edges.