Michael Kevane

The 9th International Symposium on Library Services for Children and Young Adults is hosted by the National Library for Children and Young Adults (NLCY) in South Korea. The conference starts on Tuesday Sept. 8 in Seoul and Buyeo Island.

Lots of distinguished librarians have attended in the past. Kate McDowell from the ischool at University of Illinois, and Sarah Flowers who blogs at YALSA. The program this year looks really interesting, on the theme of “Libraries Building Future and Presenting Pleasure for Young Adults.” That is very aligned with FAVL, where we try to see libraries more as place for leisure reading and “getting lost in a book” than as the “information center” model where farmers are going to learn how to build compost pits. Of course, we’d like to do both, but energies and resources are more directed towards the leisure reading.

Started to morning bright and early at 8am with colleagues at the Section for Children and Young Adults.  The chair of the IFLA section was passed from Viviana Quinones to Ingrid Bon.  Ingrid turned straight to me: What about this satellite meeting in San Jose.  Yes, get ready, IFLA invades San Jose and Santa Clara in a joint SJSU-SCU satellite workshop on youth and reading and the transition to a digital culture.  August 11.  Mark the date.  A call for papers will come out soon.

The section meeting continued with lots of other issues.   We are going to organize an off-site panel in the meetings in Columbus, Ohio, probably Wednesday August 17.  Brooklyn librarian Karen Keyes and I were tasked with organizing that, and it was so easy.  I just walked down to the exhibition hall and there was Wendy Ramsey, Team Leader in the Outreach Services division at the Columbus Metropolitan Library and the CEO, Pat Losinski, and they both readily agreed.

After the section meeting, went to a Literacy and Reading section panel, to hear Air Katz of Beyond Access talk about their new training manual for librarians, and Chiristine Nel talk about reading competitions at the libraries she manages in Greater Tzaneen Municipality in northern South Africa.  At Christine’s, and a bunch of other talks, it was always like, “Wow, we should try that at FAVL!” and that is the benefit of IFLA.

After that I played hooky and went for a long walk.  I had seen a small restaurant called Bread, Milk and Honey, and was intrigued.  They offered a lunch buffet.  It was delicious, and moreover a wonderful, fully integrated (well, for upper-class Capetonians, it seemed), very lively café.  Great ambiance of professional urban Cape Town downtown at midday.  Then I walk around the Company Gardens, all the way up to the Jewish Museum.  After viewing the interesting exhibit (and later I had to Wikipedia Barney Barnato, amazing!), I spent an hour in their lovely café. Riteve, named after a town in Lithuania.  I continued my walk, through Company Garden’s.  Table Mountain in the background, a cool crisp Fallish day.  Happened upon a delightful café tucked into the gardens, full of wicker sculptures that children could climb into and around.  Decided to have an early (and quite delicious) dinner there.

And then I went back to hotel, worked for awhile, and went to bed!  Dutch Manor Inn is really a very nice hotel.

After another delicious and friendly breakfast at Dutch Manor Inn (I feel sorry for all of you delegated staying at the Westin!), I headed down to catch the long morning session on evidence and library impacts.

Got to hear the tail end of Fiona Bradley’s talk on the Sustainable Development Goals.  Then David Streatfield and Sharon Markless, a team of Global Libraries impact assessment consultants, gave an overview of their work.  Unfortunately, appears that Global Libraries did not build in any randomized trials for evaluating their ICT buildout to whole library systems.  Maybe Global Libraries was not really sure what to be measuring.  or maybe worried that conclusion might be: “public access to Internet in every library in Chile enabled lots more people to play online poker and surf you-know-what.”  Probably though, since digital/Internet access is framed in rights-talk, then cost-benefit really did not matter, and there was no compelling reason to waste resources in measurement.  That is, there probably was not going to be any likely measurement, after a pilot, that would have led Gates Foundation to say: “Let’s NOT help libraries have Internet access.”

Jessica Dorr of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation then spoke on the Global Libraries data portal Global Libraries Atlas.  This is a very worthy effort and the site is fantastic.  But I am of two minds about data visualization work like this.  Very expensive, I imagine, to build the interactive website.  And since no measurement of benefits (either) of usage of such a website, not really clear that money is well-spent.  How do we know this is better than just posting the an Excel file and letting researchers write R scripts to visualize?  Is this data visualization really going to help in advocacy?  Is advocacy really more successful because the advocate has a great infographic?  Does the Gates Foundation itself make funding decisions based on infographics?  And while we are on that subject, I wish glatlas.org would just have a button to download the whole dataset.  Seems like that should be gold standard for transparency and open data.

Finally Karin de Jager spoke about ISO standard for measuring library impact.  She gave a nice overview of the issues, and it sounds like a very good resource.

The questions and discussion that followed rehashed some basic debates about what should library advocates be looking for. To an economist, I hate to say this, the debate sounded like something from 50 years ago.  Yes, data does tell the story, and the best impact evaluation studies in the social sciences do indeed let the statistics talk.  Good impact evaluations do not need anecdotes.  Indeed, since we know just how powerful story-anecdotes are, we should be extra careful about using them, because they easily lead us to bias.

Part of me prefers to be explicit: If you want a warm-glow story to make people feel good about donating, or convince people to allocate tax dollars to the purpose, just say so, and don’t call that impact evaluation.  But don’t say that a set of non-randomly selected stories (chosen by you to resonate with donors and advocates) is impact evaluation.  I support libraries and reading because I like libraries and reading.  Libraries enable lots of people to read a lot more than they would otherwise (though surprising how little we know about that basic effect, but all the small-scale studies we have done in Burkina Faso find large increases in reading).  Does reading more books then do something else, other than increase vocabulary?  There is little social science research to answer that question.

The “Beyond Access” and “libraries for development” thrust is trying to build an evidence-base and rhetoric that can shout an enthusiastic YES to that question.  It would be great if more research funding comes along so that the claims can be evaluated and replicated.  But social scientists cannot even agree on measuring the effects of deworming pills…. and extra reading is quite different from a pill.

Got a tweet from Sarah Jaffe, Senior Manager of Research at Worldreader, so we had a nice chat over coffee.  They are expanding rapidly, soon to be putting Kindles (not sure exactly how many- sounds like 10 or 20) in every Kenyan public library (there are about 50).  Would be neat to explore whether availability of e-readers turns out to be complementary to paper book sales.

After that I heard a great presentation by Bookdash.  Wish we could do something like that in Burkina Faso, but it sounds like something for a rich country… costs about $10,000 for the event itself, where 30 illustrators, editors and authors come together for an all day session to make 10 children’s books.  I am very partisan to that approach: make them quickly and get them printed and available.  In Burkina Faso, the problem is we have absolutely no institutional buyers or sponsors.

Then walked around downtown Cape Town with Hui-Yun Sung, a library science researcher from National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan.  Found the tourist market and had fun bargaining a bit.  Lots of the usual stuff: beaded elephants and masks.

Had dinner later at Bocca near my hotel. Very good Neapolitan pizza!

A very fine article Acts of mutiny: the Caine Prize and ‘African Literature’ by Ranka Primorac.  In the end, labeling is marketing.  A writer can object to labeling, and refuse to be labelled: but then they have to be prepared for the consequence that their book might not sell.

Serpell went on to win the Caine prize – the first Zambian ever, and the only Zambian this year on a strong shortlist populated by representatives of literary superpowers Nigeria and South Africa. In a congratulatory speech at Oxford, the Chair of the judging panel, Zoe Wicomb, advised prospective readers to read the winning story, ‘The Sack’, very slowly. She had good reason to do so. ‘The Sack’ is an accomplished textual achievement: using a pared-down narrating style, the story sets out a complex interplay of emotions among its characters by deliberately delaying, suppressing and defamiliarising the information it provides about how they are all related to one another. At one point, one of the narrators says: ‘I wonder at the dwindling of our cares. We began with the widest compass, a society of the people, we said. But somehow we narrowed until it was just three. Jacob, Joseph, Naila.’ Readers who rush over these simple sentences will miss a key inflection: Zambia once aspired to be an African humanist society, and this political and ethical outlook arguably infuses every line of Serpell’s story.

On winning, Serpell made history by a further, more radical intervention. In her acceptance speech, she said she wanted to reconfigure the competitive structure of the prize (which, for her, had unwelcome resonances with American Idol), and that she would be sharing the prize money equally with the other four participants. She is the first prize winner to have done this. It was, for her, a long-overdue ‘act of mutiny’, she said.

As with any conference, the fun part is time between sessions when you get to have more in-depth chats about library stuff.  This afternoon I had coffee with Ari Katz from Beyond Access, who is now based in Thailand working on a multi-year capacity building project with libraries in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Philippines and Thailand.  There were so many commonalities between the work he is doing and our work at FAVL, and of course having the same questions (how effective is this?) and concerns (can we succeed in sharing a culture of innovation and creativity with staff of library service providers?).  He shared with me a great Android app, Com Phone, that I am going to have the staff in Burkina Faso test.  He also suggested using surveymonkey as a way to have librarians (if they can connect to the Internet) update library usage statistics at the end of every month.  Great idea!  Finally, he promised to share a bunch of training tools (and a lengthy manual) that was developed for the program.  Would be fantastic to use for our upcoming training of 20 librarians!  We both agreed that library enabling legislation needs to be updated from the 1960s…

Later this evening I got to finally sit down for 30 minutes with Viviana Quinones, children’s library section at the Centre national de la littérature pour la jeunesse, Bibliothèque nationale de France.  Viviana is so wonderful, and produces the fantastic resource Takam Tikou, which for Francophone Africa is an essential service, and she also edited and brought to publication Faire vivre une bibliotheque de jeunesse, a great guide for library activities.  We’re both optimistic about a likely resurgence of interest in Francophone countries in promoting reading and libraries.  (being in South Africa you cannot help but be optimistic: the country now have almost 2000 libraries for 50 million people… Burkina Faso has maybe 50 for 17 million people.  So the library per person ration of South Africa to Burkina Faso is like 40:3 or 13:1…. while GDP per capita ratio is about 10:1.  If Burkina grows at 7%, it will get to South Africa level in about 30 years… and libraries will grow from the present 50 to about 600 libraries (and more if population keep growing).  That is a lot of libraries!  They will be more effective if Burkina Faso starts investing now, and learns (institutionally) from the investments and experiments that are made early on.

Oh, my talk went well, I think.  Hard to tell when you are up at the podium and there are 250 people scattered in the hall that is built for 1,000!  I really enjoyed presentations by Carole Bloch, Jane Meyers, Ahiauzu Blessing  who spoke of reading programs they operate in libraries in Africa.

Worked on my presentation all morning… realizing audience will probably be like 300 people…. and they strictly enforce time limits, so have to say everything in 15 min, so have to practice a dozen times…
Walked down to convention center… Capetown like a post-apocalyptic novel… Saturday afternoon, everything closed, barely a single pedestrian, cars rushing by in the misty rain, security guard in front of each building… why am I the only person walking?
Convention Center amazing and new.  Wow!  Registered in like 30 seconds.  Had a delicious (but small) Middle Eastern plate for 50 rand (about $4).  And then a cappuccino for $1.50.  I think I’ll be drinking a lot of higher end coffee drinks here; I can never justify paying $3.50 for a latte in the States.
Went to Libraries for Children and Young Adults section meeting.  Good to see some familiar faces.  Viviana Quinones as usual ran the meeting like clockwork, getting through a very long agenda right on schedule.
Walked back to hotel, now raining a bit more, but still very nice.  A note from a fellow IFLA delegate at the desk, so I got to eat dinner with librarian Christina Nell, who supervises five libraries in northern South Africa.  We went to The Africa Cafe, very nicely decorated with lively art and colors, a bit touristy, but the food was fine. They offer a fixed-price “buffet” of a variety of African food.  Music and singing by the wait-staff.  Could have been a Greek restaurant in Carmel… Opa!  All the vegetarian selections were great.  Talking library shop all evening was fun, too!