On Friday night I had the pleasure of attending a Live From the NYPL panel discussion at New York Public Library’s Celeste Bartos Forum. I’ve got to hand it to them, NYPL really does get some amazing, world-class programming going on up in there. Friday it was a full house for Ferran Adrià, “the Salvador Dali of the Kitchen”, who came and spoke with Corby Kummer and Harold McGee about his unique culinary artistry and the dining experience offered at his exclusive and inventive restaurant elBulli. From Wikipedia about Adria:
‘Along with British chef Heston Blumenthal, Adrià is often associated with “molecular gastronomy,” although the Catalan chef does not consider his cuisine to be of this category. Instead, he has referred to his cooking as deconstructivist. Adrià’s stated goal is to “provide unexpected contrasts of flavour, temperature and texture. Nothing is what it seems. The idea is to provoke, surprise and delight the diner.”’
Pretty remarkable stuff, but hey, you aren’t reading a cooking blog. This is a library blog, and I do actually have a point.
Rebecca Federman is the librarian and curator of the menu and cookbook collection at NYPL, and before this blockbuster program began, she had an opportunity to stand up in front of this group of critics, chefs, hobbyists and foodies of all sorts and advocate for her library collection. She made it clear to the group in attendance that the menu and cookbook collection is a “living entity” and not just an archive; that they actively collect and make these resources available to the public. She smiled and projected her enthusiasm and interest in the old menus, and on a screen showed images of some of the extrasupercool items in the stacks upstairs. I’m pretty sure that I was one of very few librarians in the audience that night (correct me if I am wrong, librarians!), so I must say I was pleased to hear Federman so excited about her collections and so just “getting it”. She understood and explained to everyone in the room the crucial link between the panel discussion they were about to see and the books and media that the library preserves and ensures access to.
I left the Celeste Bartos forum that evening feeling like Rebecca Federman had been given me some kind of challenge, a challenge not just for me but one that I ought to share with the readers of the PLA blog. The New York Public Library is a remarkable and unique institution; the special collections there draw unique audiences from across the globe. In some ways this specialization makes it easier to advocate for the collections, or at least it makes it immediately visible that a specific audience needs to be engaged in some kind of dialogue with their library. How then are public librarians with our not-so-special “core” collections of fiction and non-fiction, children’s materials, manga, or DVDs supposed to exercise this same kind of promotion and awareness of the library collection? It is really not that easy, but we have an obligation to the public we serve to let them know what we have to offer.
The moral of the story is that at least in my mind, the ideal library program always has some kind of tie-in to the media we collect and distribute. That is not to say that there aren’t plenty of wonderful programs out there at public libraries across the country that stand on their own as educational, recreational, and inspiring. There are. But programming exposes, advertises, and merchandises library media and that is an opportunity we need to take advantage of as frequently as possible.
In the spirit of the interactivity and collaboration that I believe makes blogging so important, I invite readers to post their success stories of moments when they got to expose library collections because of a public program.
