What I am after is not flexible bodies, but flexible minds. What I am after is restoring people to their human dignity.

Movement is life. Life is a process. Improve the quality of the movement and you improve the quality of life itself.*



Louis Choquette was seeking flexible minds at his 2012 OLA Super Conference session, Better Teamwork for Greater Efficiency in Public Libraries. His formula was simple:

Re-imagine library work not simply as a matter of heralding/advancing your position [title], but actually focusing all of our game on the foremost reason for our existence as public institutions: serving our communities and the public good. Civics 101.

Now imagine that every member of your staff/team are equal in value to achieving this goal (optimal service). Each one’s unique talents/ideas are sought and recognized and each are entrusted with the charge/authourity to do so, encouraging all to bring their best thinking to work as they would approach a favourite hobby.

Equal value and recognition as a team member in advancing the vital services of Public Libraries. All actively contributing to a common goal greater than ourselves, work we can believe in. Libraries as sanctuaries from chaos, a refuge. Public spaces devoted to making societies better. Actually shaping/modeling the world we want to live in.

Shocking.

The major obstacle to all of the above: systemic entropy. No team. No vision. No shared responsibility. No new thinking. No movement. No joy. Why try? Same old. They don’t listen. Don’t rock the boat Don’t say anything Stop/Dontcare/alltoofamiliarbusinessasusualsucks

Abundance mentality + teamwork = innovation, expansion and renewal [vs. entropy/extreme rigidity]

Workers (v. team players) automatically tend to resist change based solely upon their personal fabrications of what change looks like to them (usually, in the negative, or “more work”). Therefore—”We don’t want that. I’m happy staying put.”—completely eradicating any ideas, thought, imagining, investigating, or naming what that change might actually look like/entail and manifest for the advancement of the goal/good. “If it ain’t broke…”

Well, if it doesn’t allow/value (better still, actively encourage and suss out) fresh input and show any signs of new movement, it isn’t just broke, it’s dead.

And then change happens to us.

A solid example Louis presented was, at his branch, there’s a large population of Mandarin-speaking older adults who seek assistance. Who, on their team, were best suited to meet this public need/demand. Turns out, a page and a janitor spoke Mandarin. And, as team members of equal value on the floor in service to the public, they were able to step up and meet the need. This also means other team members will have to pitch in to see that the public restrooms are serviced/maintained.

This was all met with a fair amount of push-back in a room chock-full of MLIS’s. A few attendee’s came up afterwords, calling him “brave.”

Imagine. Librarians. Stewardship. Flexible. Brave.

LOUIS CHOQUETTE Better Teamwork for Greater Efficiency in Public Libraries (Session 1221) can be viewed in it’s entirety at OLA Scholarlab

Graphic: source unknown
*Moshe Feldenkrais

C. D. WRIGHT, from One With Others Copper Canyon Press, 2010. p 87.

Photo: KIRBY

Photo: KIRBY

The 34-foot tower of Lincoln books within the lobby of the new Center for Education and Leadership at Ford’s Theatre. Washington Post

Photo: Maxwell Mackenzie/Ford’s Theatre

Artist: ROBERT MONTGOMERY

Celebrating 100 Years | Find the Future | NYPL at 100
extended through March 4, 2012

see also: Book Fund Campaign

Photos: KIRBY

One afternoon this week, walking through the white, light-filled Bloor-Gladstone Library in Toronto’s west end, reimagined in 2009 so that a contemporary glass jewel dialogues with a historic Beaux-Arts library, I was struck by the young, fit-looking urban dwellers focused intensely on a book, or working through some chemistry problems while others studied computer screens. Every lounge chair was taken. Every wooden work counter set below each of the gracefully arched windows had been claimed by pairs of people.

More and more, true, unfettered public space is increasingly hard to come by. And no, Coffee Time and Starbucks do not count. In a world obsessed by connection, via Twitter, e-mail and endlessly multiplying Facebook friends, the library gives us permission to hunker down by a window or a fireplace, disconnect from the hammering distractions of everyday life, and get on with what has to be learned, and contemplated.

LISA ROCHON The business case for beautiful libraries from Saturday’s Globe & Mail, published Friday February 10, 2012

Pictured: from Celebrating 100 Years | Find the Future | NYPL at 100
extended through March 4

Photo: KIRBY

If I can only be horrified by my species, then I will have to kill myself. If I find others recognizable, I guess I will continue. It’s as simple as that.

FANNY HOWE

I was first introduced to Ben McNally’s, reading at a book launch for My Diva. Every visit since, I’m still agog. “Does this place really exist?” followed by, “I have entered the home of books.” A recent purchase was a Faber and Faber hardcover edition of Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain. Yes, I paid full price—knowing the sheer pleasure of browsing in a bookseller so clearly devoted in service to their readers—it’s a volume I’ll treasure all the more.

BEN McNALLY BOOKS
366 Bay Street (just south of Richmond)
Photos: KIRBY

From the time when the sun and the moon didn’t have a name, hidden in a garden with statues talking in silence, telling a secret path that leads to the bravest love…

see also: Shelter Press