Communities

Thread 4 Communities

I’ll start with my favorite dialogue from this thread.

---“So what exactly should I be doing?”

---“Ask your community.” (From the Atlas P83)

Librarians improve knowledge creation in their communities, so they should provide what their communities need by asking their communities. “What we do is a joint agreement with our communities. Why we do them, that’s ours. That is what makes us a profession.” (The Atlas P84) Librarians shape their services by asking their communities, in other words getting their communities involved. It’s participation. The participatory librarianship in my opinion is like extrinsic motivation. Sounds like librarians compel their communities to participate. And participation needs a member, turns into a conversation, and then creates knowledge.

Talking about participation, in my experience, I never participate in any other conversations with librarians, except for greetings. I often ask my friends or roommates for advices, such as “is there any books on HCI?” or “I can’t find it, could you help me?” I think the librarians both from my province public library and undergraduate school library have no sense of making conversations. They will never speak to you, if you don’t ask questions. Though the pressure of participation may occur during the interaction between librarians and patrons, librarians should invite patrons to conversations to create knowledge.

While librarians change their communities, the pressure of participation occurs. Members need to be active in the learning processes. It’s the first form of the pressure from the Atlas. In 605 last week, one of the reading materials is “I Can't Tell You What I Want, But I'll Know It When I See It”. (Author: Goodrum, Abby A, Fall 2005) It talks about the importance of reference interview, and librarians must provide service to help members figure out what they want. It’s quite difficult to find what members from communities want, and how to translate their information into verbal expression. Also, you can never know what they may ask. In the reference interview part for IST605, when I was playing the role of reference librarian, the patron came in and asked me a question. I got stuck. I never thought I might face that kind of question, I could hardly answer it. I think that’s one of the pressures from participation.

When I play archery, I felt pressure.

It’s taken last year when I was traveling in the Ancient City of Ping Yao China. It's fabulous!