On Saturday, as part of Arts in Bushwick’s SITE festival, Gabe McMackin and I had a community organizing event at my library called the Past, Present, and Future of Food: Bushwick, Brooklyn.  The event was an enormous success; it effectively harnessed the collective expertise of all the attendees and allowed everyone to create connections that would help them work efficiently and avoid duplicating their efforts.  I love using the public library as a community organizing space.  Just last night, at a benefit for the Progressive Technology Project, executive director Arif Mamdani spoke of community organizing as an activity that makes people “generators of governance rather than consumers of government.” How beautiful is that?  Public space is a rarity, and the library is an apt symbol of freedom, democracy, and access to the information that community organizers need.  Generally, people perceive libraries to be buildings full of knowledge stored in volumes, but at this event the knowledge was really stored in people’s heads.

Previous to the event, I’d been troubling over how I could respond to Aaron Schmidt’s blog post called “Libraries Might Not Provide Content in the Future and That’s OK.” There’s a number of comments from pretty smart people on that blog post that call this out as a ridiculous notion, and while in some ways it may be, I sympathize with Schmidt’s perspective.  After the Past, Present, and Future of Food event, I had dinner with some librarians and foodies and we discussed exactly WHY it was good that this event had been held in the library.  In conversation I suggested that the public library relies far too much on its reputation, provenance, and historical book-circulating model for its clout in the community.  The information that the attendees of the meeting needed to move forward with their projects of growing vegetables on their rooftops, organizing a food coop, organizing a CSA, becoming a part of their community garden, or even starting one themselves all exists online and simply needs to be organized, categorized, and centralized for their access.  They all know that the information is out there, but they wanted to come together, share experiences and best practices, and create some kind of centralized well of information that they can all drink from.

Here’s where things get troublesome.  The library’s reputation as a center for book-based knowledge is what made the venue feel appropriate for this meeting.  But the action item resulting from the meeting is really something more along the lines of creating a wiki: identifying information resources available on the internet, organizing them, and promoting them to the audience. With success, the result of that will be the creation of NEW information content.  People will blog their stories of successes and failures and a new ‘volume’ will be formed.  So how long can we count on the library’s old information reputation to draw people in for the new information services they need?

I’ve just described a program that does EXACTLY what Schmidt is talking about.  There is zero content provision, instead library service is all in reorganizing, remixing, redistributing, and recreating free resources.  When the content that library users need is all available on the internet, our role as librarians shifts to a curatorial role.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not a purist of this idea that libraries might not provide content in the future, but I do think it is a decreasingly key role.  I’m also aware that I’m not really addressing the issue of downloadable media either.  However, I am saying that clinging to materials circulation as our core mission is clinging to the very thing that makes us pose that annoying question time and time again: how can libraries remain relevant?  Librarians have the skills to engage their community by designing the information resources they need.  Librarians also have the skills to train their patrons to make their own information resources.  We should be psyched about this…. not freaking out.