James LaRue - myliblog

Ever since my days as a wandering poet, I've believed in the power of story.  As I was hitchhiking around the country, I once wandered into a biker bar in Phoenix. Being young, poor, and desperate, I asked the bartender if I could give a 45 minute poetry reading. In exchange, if I could hold the attention of the customers , could I have a pitcher of beer and a pizza? The bartender actually snorted. "You're going to read poetry to this crowd? This I gotta see!" I not only got my beer and pizza (after an hour of performance), I got lots of deeply insightful comments from the audience. I say this not because bikers have the souls of poets (some do!), but because I learned, as I knocked about and gave readings, that dense and deeply allusive verse (academic poetry) left most folks cold. What they wanted were  stories . So my poetry tended toward dramatic narratives. The closer I got to an authentic experience, the more it resonated.  The same is true of library stories. ...

I've been doing a talk for a while now about what I believe to be the five transformative trends most deeply affecting libraries today. But after each talk, I pick up a lot of insights from the audiences. After my last talk (for NEFLIN, in Jacksonville FL), I realized that I now think there are SIX trends. And I have begun to think of them as a movement from one thing to another. So it looks something like this: EMERGENT LITERACY ==> from book desert  to book abundance DIGITAL PUBLISHING ==> from gatekeeper  to gardener COMMUNITY REFERENCE ==> from embedded librarian to community leader SELF-DIRECTED, COLLABORATIVE LEARNING CENTER ==> from consumer  to creator GENERATIONAL TURNOVER ==> from Boomer to Millennial ADVOCACY ==> from head  to heart Literacy. That is, given what we have learned about the importance of early literacy, there's no excuse not to push more books in the homes of children between the ages of 0-5. And we can track th...

So I'm running for ALA presidency. And I'm trying to listen, and trying to make sense of what I hear. One of the big, recurring issues I heard at midwinter was a sense of a fragmented membership . ALA is a large, complex institution serving members with a multitude of highly specialized interests. How then, can they communicate not only to and from ALA leadership, but coordinate their activities with other divisions, committees, and roundtables? Yet there's also a lot of duplication in ALA. Almost every group I talked to mentioned "advocacy." But to frank, we have different understandings of that word. Effective advocacy, in my view, is based on three things: marketing strategy (reach and frequency); the findings of neuroscience (emotional appeal); the importance of planning (pulling it all together). Let's break those apart. Reach and frequency means getting a message to a target audience (that's the reach ), as many times as possible (that...

One of the challenges of my new consulting career is finding the succinct summary of just what it is that I do. Here's my latest attempt: I'm a full time public library thought leader. I've decided that the profession I love (librarianship!) is at a tipping point. With some attention on just the right things, I think we can earn long term mind share and support. The point isn't just to benefit libraries, it's to benefit the communities we serve. Libraries just happen to be an extraordinarily effective way to do that. So just what, exactly, are  the "right things" to focus on? Right now: planning. After PLA (where I offered some free consulting to the library world, and met some fascinating people), I spent some time thinking about processes to move quickly and precisely to true "strategic" planning -- not just a list of stuff to do, but a narrow focus on the things that matter most. trend tracking. Really, this is just a subset of plann...