Launching the Library Ideas Podcast
My mom told me at an early age to never be afraid of running out of ideas. Ideas aren’t a stockpile, made up of a finite amount, acquired through a hunt or a trade, and then horded for yourself. Ideas are like a river. Having ideas and sharing them leads to more ideas, you want to keep the conditions of the riverbed healthy, and let it flow. Damming leads to stagnation. Take only what you need, and trust that the stream will still be there, flowing with fresh water, when you need again.
I’ve largely found that to be true. I have far more ideas than I could ever hope to carry out. I can’t help but share them freely, I want to see them become something tangible, even if I can’t be the one to manifest something, it does feel good to see it out there in the world, working. A grown child, its own entity. And as bittersweet as it is to not be a part of its life, the truth is ideas I give away aren’t raised by me. Someone else did the hard work. And I’m not altogether convinced the ideas are mine, any more than the water in a river I have stumbled across is mine. I maintain my bend in the river, I’ve set up a comfortable encampment here, and have all the fresh water I could ever hope to need.
My doodled plan for our logo image
When I started at the Richfield Library six years ago, I had the privilege of working for a woman who also had more ideas than she could hope to institute. Over the years, we would have some really fantastic conversations about the library’s mission, the community’s expectations and needs, and customer service more generally. If we had a great retail experience, we’d share it with each other, and pick it apart for elements to steal for our patrons. We took a series of free Design Thinking courses from IDEO, and developed a few catchphrases we’d use to remind each other of our own self-driven campaign to remake our location into the best version of itself every day. One of my favorites is “surprise and delight.” We don’t just want to meet our patron’s baseline expectations for a library. We want to surprise our patrons when they walk in the door with a creative display, a fun activity, or a browse-able lobby. And we want them to leave delighted that they came. Those kinds of experiences are “sticky,” meaning, memorable in a feelings-sort-of-a-way, and make you want to come back, and look forward to visiting. And that hard work every day was paying off, you could see it in our stats.
We’d talked for years about turning these conversations into a podcast. We had many ideas we couldn’t implement, or knew weren’t right for our community, but we knew they were good, and might be just what someone else was looking for. A podcast seemed like a natural way to share them.
Then the pandemic hit and suddenly we had a lot of time to play with the equipment and editing, and could only talk online or over the phone. It seemed silly not to record our conversations, and actually very helpful to focus them around a topic, because where do you even begin? When you have something this large, an event that is ongoing in the way this pandemic is, that has and is still reshaping society, how do you begin to make sense of the ways in which you will need to shift your thinking to meet the need you see around you?
So we’re using this time for conversation, and hoping that our discussions will expand to include what you are seeing and pondering and hoping to see from the organizations, institutions, schools, and businesses around you.
Here are a few of my favorite moments from our first two episodes, both of which are live at https://libraryideaspod.simplecast.com/. And we’re getting an ongoing conversation going at https://twitter.com/LibraryIdeasPod.
This clip from Episode 1 talks about the only truly successful use of VR in a museum context that I have experienced: Dreams of Dali, which you can view in a diminished form on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1eLeIocAcU. The unsettling quality of VR feeds into Dali’s work, and they did a fantastic job with the details. It feels like the sort of thing Dali would actually have loved, which is so rare with these tech-driven supplements. But then, many 20th century artists were proudly Luddite curmudgeons as a way of displaying their masculinity, but that’s another post.
Here’s another clip from Episode 1 that talks about balancing what you’re able to do now in terms of getting meaningful content that you were providing in person before online, with figuring out how to do it online in the way you wish you knew how to do (for example, this podcast. We could have started just recording Zoom calls and dumping unedited videos on you, but by pushing ourselves a little bit, in about 6 weeks, we’re now producing them the way we always wished we could. We had to learn some new things, but it was worth it.)
Here’s a clip from Episode 2 about older institutions having a different view of time than younger institutions and their patrons.
Here’s a clip from Episode 2 where we talk about patterns for resource distribution in nature and how we, as a society, need to rethink crowds. And we, as institutions, organizations, and businesses, need to find new goals and ways of measuring success that actively steer programming away from crowded situations.
Finally, a clip from the end of Episode 2 where Jen talks about how emotionally vulnerable our patrons will be when we return to active service, in some new capacity, and how we need to think about how we reinsert ourselves into people’s lives at this moment. It is such a gift to work for someone who is concerned about and actively processing these things.
If you enjoyed those snippets, give our podcast a try. It’s available on Spotify and Apple, as well as through our Simplecast site, where episode outlines and links to everything we discuss are available as well. libraryideaspod.simplecast.com