What do you know about your community?
I’m a little behind on my reading, so if you’ve already read the March/April edition of Public Libraries, go no further. In that magazine, PLA president Carolyn Anthony says the nature of public libraries is shaped by their founding as an American institution “at the community level, largely through the work of volunteer associations actively engaged in community building.”
As we at the Capitol Hill Library wait patiently for our remodel to begin, I can’t help but wonder what kind of building would be designed for us by the people who frequent our cement walls. Anthony reports that in Bayfield, Colorado (population 8,749), the community built a Dewey-less traditional indoor library while also incorporating a 17,000 square foot outdoor “living library” with a community garden (complete with a straw bale tool shed from which customers can borrow tools), fruit orchard, greenhouse, 5 outdoor learning areas, and an outdoor movie screen wall!
Small town public libraries may have an easier time keeping up with the wants and needs of their users than larger metro area libraries. There are certainly more small libraries than large; as reported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, 77.1% of America’s 8,956 public libraries can be categorized as small with 47% of those categorized as rural. Anthony gives many more stats comparing rural to urban libraries in areas such as Internet accessibility, e-books, program attendance, circulation, but your eyes are probably glassy enough as it is. Suffice it to say, these little libraries are true community hubs. How can medium or large-scale public libraries be the same for the demographically diverse areas we serve?
The Miller Branch of the Howard County Maryland Library System is an example of doing just that. Opened in December of 2011, the library focuses on “self-directed education, research assistance and instruction, and instructive and enlightening experiences”. The library’s Enchanted Garden provides outdoor teaching space for subjects such as health, nutrition, and environmental education. The staff is actively engaged on a local level, seeking to meet the needs of their 282,000 constituents by pursuing partnerships with other agencies for service development and delivery, says Anthony. This system was chosen as Library Journal’s Library of the Year in 2013.
One of the ways the Miller Branch engaged their community was by using market segmentation according to public library use patterns. According to a report from the Pew Research Center, 31% of the US population can be characterized as having low or no engagement with public libraries. Too detailed to get into in this summary, I encourage you to read the whole statistical breakdown, taking note of such terms as “young, in transition” and “rooted and roadblocked”. People in these categories can only be reached through targeted outreach – partnerships with agencies in regular contact with these groups is hugely beneficial (think Meals on Wheels, for example).
“The more diverse and complex our service areas become, the more attention staff must pay to identifying and targeting specific groups of users, with common characteristics and interests, so that we can actively relate library services to their interests and needs,” writes Anthony.
That nearly one third of the population is not engaged with our profession should be a call to action. We can no longer continue to busy ourselves with only the people who visit the library – we’ve got to make a paradigm shift, thinking about the “library in the life of the user” rather than “the user in the life of the library” says Wayne Wiegand in his book, Main Street Public Library. As Anthony asks in her conclusion, “Do we know our communities well enough to see where the library fits in to the life of the user?”
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