Outreach and Programming: A Three-Pronged Model to Community Engagement

There's much in the research literature about community engagement and outreach for libraries, some of it interesting case studies of partnerships, others are interesting programming stories with some tips and tricks for best practices.   But one of the more interesting pieces that I came across recently is from the Oakland University Beaumont School of Medicine which reviewed the last seven years documents its outreach program's initiatives targeting both members of the university as well as the local community.  What's interesting is the thoughtful approach by its library in the form of a three-pronged outreach model that it suggests could be adopted by other libraries.   The authors of Community Engagement at an Emerging AcademicMedical Library: A Three-Pronged Outreach Model share a very useful and practical three model:

Integrate - Library services and information resources are shared between existing institutional activities.  

Partner - Between relevant stakeholders and groups to co-develop and host outreach activities.  

Create - These are library-driven initiatives, where the library is the primary driver of an outreach project or activity.  This puts the greatest strains on library time, staff, and resources but provides the library with the greatest degree of control and the least difficulty with issues such as coordinating schedules.  

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But as good as models can be, the authors suggest two areas of best practice that should be considered when developing a community engagement plan, which I find to be truly appreciate and can find useful for my own work in this area:

Assessment - The methods and quality of assessment used by libraries in outreach activities vary drastically.   While metrics could include things such as participant attendance, money raised, student application of information literacy skills, how does one measure success in engagement?  

Long-term planning - Succession planning is difficult with staffing and leadership changes.  While the literature points to long-term goals early, initiatives do sometimes just naturally fade away.  

Making Non-Western Knowledge Digitally Accessible through Community Engagement

Karim Tharani's Shifting Established Mindsets and Praxis in Libraries: Five Insights for Making Non-Western Knowledge Digitally Accessible through Community Engagement in the Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship is an interesting piece of scholarship about library engagement.   Tharani is the IT Librarian at the University of Saskatchewan who helped develop the Ginan Central digital collection.   As an initiative to digitally curate an oral tradition, the project shows how librarians can improve discoverability of non-Western knowledge materials in libraries.  In the context of the Ismaili Muslim community, the term ginan is used for the community’s collection of oral tradition of gnostic and devotional hymns.

Canada, as in most Western societies, the primary medium to codify knowledge continues to be written text, whether in print or electronic format.  Consequently, bibliographic standards and practices in academic libraries have evolved to be very efficient in managing textual knowledge materials and making them accessible.  This specialized operational efficiency, however, comes at the cost of marginalizing non-textual, and by extension non-Western, knowledge carriers, including oral traditions.  

1. Value Relationships Over Tasks - Establishing trust with community elders, leaders, and youth is vital in uncovering and understanding the needs and challenges of the community.   As this may be counter to the efficient workflows and tasks of academic institutions used to one-off projects that have predetermined timelines, librarians need to sustain relationships that are forged as part of these projects.

2.  Accept Community Engagement as a Continuum - Communities are like families and consists of individuals with different personalities, experiences, and perspectives.  Though a community may share a common history, their opinions, preferences, decisions, are not monolithic.   Librarians need to be appreciative and sensitive to these varying sentiments in order to be productive and successful in their work with communities.  

3.  Learn to Appreciate Rather than Appropriate Materials - The history of colonization is embedded in appropriation, including the practice of physically relocating materials for processing which can be a culturally traumatic process.   Librarians need to demonstrate an appreciative mindset by exercising flexibility in processing community collections, which again counters a typical operational workflow of libraries in which materials are selected, acquired, and described before being made available through discovery systems and catalogues.    For true collaboration to happen, librarians need to shift their mindset from physically gathering collections in libraries to one that prioritizes work to happen off-campus locations in the community.  

4.  Consider Oral Sources to Be As Important as Textual Ones - Libraries are used to working with tangible, text-based knowledge carriers grounded in physical convenience that is contrary to the value of orality of knowledge based on traditions that are alive and current.   Librarians need to shift their thinking that Indigenous knowledge as 'static' to one that is as continuing.  

5.  Accept Community Materials as Credible Knowledge Resources -  As Western scholarship tends to reduce oral traditions to textual renditions for research, such as prioritizing ancient manuscripts, this questionable practice is inconsistent with how communities prefer to render oral traditions to text and other media to complement rather than replace their traditional ways of transmitting oral knowledge.  Librarians need to be cognizant and respectful of these traditions when working with their communities and integrating these communal materials into scholarly discourses.

I value Karim Tharani's contribution to this area of scholarship and appreciate the best practices he's laid out when working with communities.  As I move into the deep and enriching work of library engagement with our diverse communities in British Columbia and Canada, this will be a strong reminder of the continuing evolution of programs and services and how they fit in the paradigm of community engagement.   "Outreach" is an outdated terminology that activates and transmits knowledge in a very surface-level contact with a community, community engagement continues to evolve not as a   'model' so much as by a framework of guiding principles, strategies, and approaches, one based on principles that respect the right of all community members to be informed, consulted, involved and empowered.   Things move quickly; certainly, my research and scholarship in this area has changed so much that many of my earlier thoughts as a librarian need to be updated.

Broken Publishing Gone Wild - Time for a Change

The recent shock on Wall Street amateur investors used Reddit to challenge the investment establishment, stocks in GameStop rose suddenly from about $18 dollars a share to $347 dollars within hours.   When the dust finally settles, scores of business and history books will emerge about the saga.  GameStop will forever be remembered as a 'meme stock,' a reminder that the power of social media can challenge big money corporations.  While some deny it is nothing more than a symptom of the 'infodemic' of conspiracy theories and false claims, I instead argue that this is an evolution of the deep distrust of 'elitist' capitalism.   The argument has been that these too-big-to-fail institutions have taken advantage of investors, often bilking them of fees and talking down to the so-called 'uneducated' everyday investor while reaping profits at their expense.   The GameStop incident is the 'wisdom of the crowds', and I think the financial industry is undergoing a tectonic shift, and long before GameStop happened, discount brokerages have already given autonomy to individual retail investors.    But it's not the only industry that is about to be shaken.

Currently, the current academic publishing industry is dominated by monopolies.  Academic libraries have cut subscriptions over the past two decades with journals often consuming sometimes more than half of their budgets.  While other industries, such as the news, tend to pay their staff and writers for the content they sell, academic publishers don't even need to do that and, instead, getting their articles, their peer reviewing, and even much of their editing for free.  Something doesn't quite look right with this model.  Content funded by the government and student tuition goes directly to these publishers while universities are locked into buying their products. Academic journals are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their research areas. 

Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent because different journals can't publish the same material. In many cases, the publishers oblige the libraries to buy a large package of journals, whether or not they want them all.   They refer to this as journal bundling, and no one really knows who is paying what.  The monopoly of for-profit publishers Routledge, Elsevier, Springer, Elsevier, Emerald, Sage, and Wiley-Blackwell have a dominant grip on even the open-access market, as Shaun Khoo's piece in Liber Quarterly argues that article processing charges (APC) have opened up huge opportunities for big publishers by "going gold OA" to grow their revenue base even more.    This is unsustainable, but faculty and researchers are complicit as they need the publishing houses to secure tenure and promotion.   Academic libraries are on their own for the most part to resolving this, and it's happening one way or another.    The publishers know timing is running out, but they're prolonging the inevitable fall of this vicious cycle as long as possible.