Here’s an international linterview….. an interlinterview?

Walt Crawford currently works at OCLC and has written many, many carefully crafted books and articles on librarianship, including the monthly e-journal Cites and Insights . He will be looking for a new job in September and his list of places he’d consider include the warmer parts of the US plus Australia or New Zealand. Right, I thought - that makes him an excellent candidate for a Linterview (especially when he comes out with things like “A good public library has something to offend (nearly) everyone in the community” ).

Here’s a more detailed biography:

Walt Crawford was for many years Senior Analyst at RLG, focusing on user interface design and actual usage patterns for end-user bibliographic search systems. He’s also been writing and speaking actively for a couple of decades and has been active in the American Library Association, including a term as president of the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA). Crawford is the creator, writer and publisher of Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large, an ejournal on the intersections of libraries, policy, technology and media published monthly since 2001. He also maintains a blog on these and other issues, Walt at Random. Crawford’s books include Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change (2007), First Have Something to Say: Writing for the Library Profession (2003), Being Analog: Creating Tomorrow’s Libraries (1999), Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness & Reality (with Michael Gorman, 1995), and eleven others going back to MARC for Library Use: Understanding the USMARC Formats (1984). His columns appear or have appeared in several magazines. Crawford has spoken at and participated in two Australian library conferences–the 1996 VALA Conference in Melbourne and the 1997 ALIA “PUB-RAISS” (Public Libraries and Reference and Information Service sections) conference in Brisbane.

What was your first library job?

I started working part-time as a page and shelver in the Doe Library of the University of California, Berkeley halfway through the summer before my sophomore year. At the time–1963, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and before the Free Speech Movement, People’s Park and various other Berkeley affairs–the Doe library (Berkeley’s main library and primary humanities collection, with three million volumes) had a nine-tier stack (closed except for grads and faculty), with pages on each floor and a combination of pneumatic tubes (for requests) and book-tub delivery system. You were either paging or returning books to the shelves.

While I moved on to other jobs within the UC Berkeley library, that was the only library I worked in. I should note one particularly interesting and enlightening task I relished once I’d been there a couple of years: ILL paging, which involved finding needed items in half of Berkeley’s 30-odd branches (or, on some days, doing all of them). Great exercise, and it gave me an appreciation for the diversity of interests and collections even with one library–albeit one of the world’s largest and most complicated libraries.

What is your earliest memory of a library?

My hometown–Modesto, California–had a Carnegie library downtown, with the children’s department just below ground level and the main stacks up that grand staircase. I must have started going to the library as soon as I could ask my parents to take me, and probably went every week or two until I left for college. I remember helpful librarians. I remember the thrill of graduating to Upstairs. Mostly, I remember reading lots of books on lots of topics–including loads of fiction, of course.

The building’s still there, but now it’s a museum. The new library’s a couple of blocks away.

What 3 skills/characteristics do you think are important for librarians to have in the 21st century?

A commitment to lifelong learning, which should go without saying–both for yourselves and for your communities. When you stop paying attention to new possibilities and spending at least some time learning about them, it’s time to retire.

Pride in yourself and in the profession so you approach your work with a positive attitude–and enough humility to recognize that you’ll never know everything and are quite likely to be wrong at times.

An appreciation for complexity, history, and diversity, within the profession and with those you serve. While I’ve always (since graduation) made my living from library technology, it’s important to recognize that technology just provides tools. The tools keep changing but the complexity and diversity of your collections, community and services continue in ways frequently independent of the tools. Libraries have a long history of technological innovation (sometimes dismissed by those who press for faster adoption of new ideas), and of using technology to serve slower-changing needs.

Which of these is new for the 21st century? None.

What do you see as the core business of libraries?

For public libraries, I’d say stories and community-building. Libraries are in the business of collecting, organizing, describing, preserving, distributing and even creating the stories that record civilization’s advances, the stories of the community and its members (with a strong emphasis on local history), and the fictional stories that we also need for balance.

Community-building is about the “third place” but also about locality–the extent to which good public libraries reflect where they are as well as what they are–and the simple fact that the library’s resources are less important than the impact those resources have on the community and its members.

There’s more to it than that, of course. People smarter than I have been setting forth the vital roles of libraries for decades, and I’m sure that will continue. I take the slightly maverick view that libraries are *not* primarily about “information” and that librarians should not spend too much time fretting about competition from Google, Yahoo!, Ask and Windows Live Search.

I guess that goes for academic and school libraries as well, and maybe even special libraries–although the definition of community changes in each case.

Incidentally, saying that libraries need to be local and reflect their communities doesn’t mean libraries should reflect the lowest common denominator or simply “give ‘em what they want.” A good public library has something to offend (nearly) everyone in the community–and something to delight, inform and encourage everyone in the community as well. (I had to add that parenthetical: Some of us find it hard to be really offended by material in the collection even if we’d never, ever read it ourselves.)
What do you wish you could change about the library world?

Two things: First, the obsession with stereotyping–an obsession that lawyers (who get slammed a lot more than librarians do!) seem to lack. Second, and far more important, especially for public libraries: Work from a position of strength instead of worrying so much about weaknesses and “competitors.” At least in the U.S., public libraries are well-used and generally well-loved; if “books” are at the core of people’s understanding of libraries, that’s not so terrible. We–you–can build on that, adding new audiences and methods to serve your communities better. Not only is that likely to be more effective than worrying about various ways that libraries could become irrelevant, it’s a lot easier on the spirit and system–you get very few ulcers by finding ways to do an even better job.