O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in't!

William Shakespeare
The Tempest
Act 5, Scene 1

“The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” – Plato

Nonprofit Tech 2.0

On happiness...

"In primeval times, when evolution was laying down our inborn qualities..." We were hunter gatherers for a million or so years, it was only 10,000 years ago we started to settle into agricultural communities. We are essentially still the hunter gatherers that we evolved as. (From The Nature of Happiness by Desmond Morris.)

"The fear programme [feeling fear, an inborn quality, which we evolved as hunter gatherers] is designed to get us away from things that are likely to harm us. If we had to make an analogous claim about the purpose of the happiness system [feeling happy, another evolved inborn quality], we would be most likely to say that it is there to keep us moving towards things that are likely to be good for us in some appropriate biological sense--mating, good food, pleasant environment--and away from things that are bad for us." (Happiness: The Science behind your smile by Daniel Nettle.)

So! When we feel happy we know we are getting our values right?

The Dream of Democracy

"The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois." Gustave Flaubert

There is a serious side to that though, and that is if we are going to have a democracy with the people making decisions, the people should be as highly educated as possible. The libraries make that possible, with their scope for people to learn unconditionally.

What exactly is the 'dream of democracy', and where do the libraries fit in?

Stories

I like this quote:

"Storytelling is at the very root of what makes us uniquely human ... It is how we share our experiences, learn from our past, and imagine our future" Saving the Story at MIT

It seems to hit the head on the nail with what libraries are about.

Brave new library world cancelled

It looks like the brave new library world outlined by Andrew Burnham (see previous post) has been cancelled; 10 Downing Street read the bad press following and told the DCMS to rethink... ref. Discouraging from The Good Library Blog (aka Tim Coates).

Public Library Authorities conference

We have just had the Public Library Authorities conference here in the UK, during which the Culture Secretary made a speech (the fallout from which can be seen e.g. here). There is a lot being said in the public library world at the moment and the trick I think is to pick out the good ideas. Tim Coates has some good ideas, but so do the library reformers in the profession.

I think at the moment we are in a period where the libraries in the first instance became less salient than they once were as books became cheaper and more sources of information were to be had, with the libraries then very much finding themselves competing for the leisure time of patrons. So as issues and visits over the past 10 years take a dive, it is perhaps a good point to carry out an audit and say what
could we be doing better, or what should we do differently, given the changes that are upon us. How should we respond?

One approach is to say that we should make the libraries welcoming to all sectors of the community, allowing computer gaming, screening football matches, and so on. Also the idea of making the library the hub of a community with a cafe, allowing mobile 'phones and food, and even turning the IT suite into an Internet cafe (a noisy library is a joyful library). But as Caroline Moss-Gibbons reminds us, libraries are also places where many different communities have to get on
together: "It is important that there are no artificial barriers restricting use, although inevitably, as requirements will differ between various groups, trade-offs and compromises will be necessary."[1]
[1] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article4798653.ece

Tim Coates' approach to say let's take for e.g. the gardening section of 180 books, let's also look at a list of the top best sellers of gardening books, and fill that gardening section with 4 each of the 6 top best sellers, and 156 of the remaining best sellers. The result is a selection second only to that in the best stocked bookshop! He also has other ideas about how libraries should be run that largely
mimic how bookshops are managed (a 50% reduction in the overheads incurred by non-front line staff being one).

That about I think sums it up!