Image by cwalker71

I’m still buzzing from a conversation I had with Glen Lowry where we brainstormed how the library could be “activated as a space for artistic and research inquiry”.

Right now I work at a small university library at an art and design school. Currently there is no programming happening, which doesn’t seem to be that uncommon for a university library. We have an exhibition space that we let students and classes to show use to show their work. There’s also a small display case upstairs.

The library is used heavily as a place to study, sit and ponder, do group work, and occasionally nap.  Some weekday afternoons there are students sitting in the stacks because there isn’t enough space. On the weekend the library is used primarily as a safe and comfortable space to work. There is a regular patron, who is professor somewhere else, who is writing his fourth book in our library, and a few other authors have told me that they wrote large chunks of their novels in the study carrels.

I think the library has a huge potential to be utilized as a space for events or programming. We could host readings, like the University of British Columbia’s Robson Square branch has done for the past 7 years. We could bring out some of our artist book collection, that is usually in locked filing cabinets, for people to browse. We could also invite book artists or book arts groups to collaborate with us. We could invite students studying curation to set up exhibitions on our walls. We could set up chairs outside on the street and screen local experimental film, mainstream animation, or carrels of slides on our windows at night time. We could set up a living library. There’s a whole lot of things we could do.

We could invite and encourage students and faculty to make site specific installations, or do site specific performances. One of my coworkers talked about the library as a type of laboratory. I like this word as it implies exploration, investigation, looking for new ways to do things, and learning from failures. I love the idea of experimenting to find new ways of arranging and providing access to our physical and electronic collections.

I love how the Vancouver Public Library has a public art program.  I especially loved the recent aerial dance performance that utilized the inside concourse and outside walls as a stage.

I’m keen to experiment and activate the library space. Does your university library do any programming? How could your library’s space be utilized in new ways?

Friday night I went to see a free Aeriosa Dance performance at the Vancouver Public Library. Aeriosa is an aerial dance company that performs in non-traditional spaces. The performers wore climbing harnesses and danced on the walls. Five minutes into the performance my brain had shifted, so that it became normal to see people dancing on vertical walls. They created a sense of awe and magic by using a space I’ve been in hundreds of times in an unexpected way.

The first part of the performance was inside the concourse of the library. It was exciting and a bit nerve wracking to watch one of the dancers climb up 5 storeys on the inside glass walls. They used books, and traditional library stereotypes like glasses, and the sound of shushing, and typewriters to link the piece to the place. While many people recognize those as library stereotypes, I thought they were too obvious and outdated.A graphic designer friend remarked that the shapes their bodies made in the cubes looked like the VPL logo.

The music was interesting, but unsettling and I didn’t like it. Various musicians were located in different parts of the concourse, and at different levels. The music played with the echo of the space. I like that I didn’t like it and spent quite a bit of time pondering why.

The percussionists lead the procession outside to the South Plaza for the next part. Three people dressed in red danced on the government tower. There was a lovely energy — people were excited, curious and I felt a connection with all the people watching the dancers slowly run along the walls, perform elegant slow motion acrobatics, and push off the walls as a group to make formations with their bodies, like skydivers. I enjoyed watching the crowd. Many people were standing with their heads flipped back looking up. Some people were lying on the ground looking up. It was delightful.

The percussionists lead us around the outside of the building to the North Plaza to watch the last piece. Dancers moved like lizards along the moulding of the building. They bounced and moved in slow arcs through the air. The shadow of their bodies looked like a kaleidoscope on the buildings across the street. By the end of the performance there were about 1000 people in the library plaza but it didn’t feel crowded in an ugly way. It felt like we were in the living room of the city sharing a wonderful moment with the dancers and each other. I bumped into people I haven’t seen since the Fall. I met up with my friends who I got separated from and we lingered on the South Plaza, wishing that it was a few degrees warmer.

VPL does a great job of programming. There are kids’ storytimes at branches across the city. Almost every night there are talks, readings, and film screenings at the Central branch downtown. As part of the Cultural Olympiad, there is Ron Terada’s The Words Don’t Fit The Picture and Christian Kliegel and Cate Rimmer’s Walk In/Here You Are. Vanessa Kwan’s Vancouver Vancouver Vancouver was also on the North Plaza. In the concourse, Jeremy Turner and Geoffrey Farmer’s Broadsiding hang in the spaces between the pillars inside. From July 2006 to December 2009 VPL organized numerous Library-specific art projects. There’s also the Writer-in-Residence program, Poet Laureate program, and One Book One Vancouver, a city wide book club.

I’m proud to live in a city where so much is going on at the library. I think that it’s important that it’s free and financially accessible to all.

A couple of weeks ago I had an awesome conversation with a faculty member about “activating the library as a place of artistic and research inquiry”. I’m still formulating my thoughts on this, hopefully I’ll be able to articulate some of them soon.

Avi and Leah with the blindfolded mannequin

Avi Silberstein, the Outreach Librarian for Greater Victoria Regional Library describes their provocative and engaging Freedom to Read Week display.

We thought it would be fun to have a mannequin – blindfolded – at the entrance to the library.  So we made a few phone calls and visited a few stores, and after some persistence were able to convince the owner of a local consignment shop to loan us a mannequin.

We picked out a mannequin that was lying on her stomach with her hands near her face, dressed her up in clothes from the consignment store, and propped a book up in her hands.  Then we tied on a blindfold.  We put her up on a table, and filled an adjacent table with banned/challenged books.  We also made sure to put up some signage explaining the display and that the books were there to be borrowed.

The response we received was overwhelmingly positive.  Patrons loved it, staff loved it, and more than anything it got people to stop in their tracks and walk up to the display for a closer look.

A couple of years ago I heard about Scandinavian libraries where you could “check out” a person and talk to them about their life. It seemed like an interesting way for people to develop empathy for people who are not like themselves.

The living library concept has been adopted by libraries all over the world. The hope is that the information passed on by a human book will help counter ignorance, prejudice and discrimination.

The living library concept has been incorporated into the Olympic homeless pavilion. This pavillion has been set up to explain the poverty in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to journalists, spectators and tourists from around the world. Visitors can listen to a Real Homeless Person from the Downtown Eastside talk about their experiences. I agree with the Vancouver Sun article that argues that this idea is contrived.

Nobody needs publicity shots of smiling politicians, pre-canned 200-word testimonials or human books to find out about life in the city’s poorest neighbourhood.

You just need to go outside.

The homeless and destitute still fill our streets. And they will be there in their unnatural habitat, whether you like it or not, for the world to see, during the Games.

I am angry and frustrated that so much money has been spent on a spectacle, while there have been cuts to social services like education, libraries, and legal aid. The homeless need homes, not to be books in a living library.

I haven’t written anything here since the fall. This was partly because I was frantically learning a bunch of new things at work, but mostly because now that I have a normal library job I’m not sure how to talk publicly about what I’m learning at work and some of the challenges that have come up.

I think there’s a broader culture in libraries of only talking about the good things outside one’s library or institution. Conference sessions are rife with “how we done it good here” sessions that present positive success stories. I learn more from stories about how things went horribly wrong, or the hiccups and mess ups that happened along the way.

Starting a new job, I knew it was going to be full-on for the first 6 months. There’s new policies and procedures, formal and informal things about the organizational culture, new people to work with, and in this case for me, completely new subject matter.

I’ve had a casual but uninformed appreciation for art. On the reference desk I often have to ask users what medium a specific artist works in, what country they are from, and if they are alive or dead. Thankfully most of the users are generous, inquisitive and kind. Provinding reference services is collaborative affair—I’ve got some skills on how to find stuff and an ability to teach, and the user has useful information and is often keen to learn. This semester I’d like to learn more about art reference.

I’ve been thinking about and reading quite a bit of management literature. This has surprised me. Some of the other unlikely things that I’ve been thinking about include: organizational culture, community development in an academic setting, supervision and management styles, the library as place, and time management.

In the fall, I started writing about different issues. I either wrote things that I knew would get me into trouble, or posts that were extremely vague, over generalized and uninteresting . This semester I hope I can find an appropriate balance and find my voice again. For me blogging is a way to reflect on the things that I’m doing and learning. I hope to find the words to talk about the things that that are broken at MPOW, or things that have gone wrong during various implementations.