Well, there goes the Wall Street Journal again. Just when we think they’re all about business, they do another feature in support of libraries of the future. This time Lucette Lagnado showcased libraries who lend everything from fishing tackle to musical instruments (subscription required for article).
Is this just a marketing ploy to pull the unsuspecting public into a library, only to have them leave with a fishing pole and a good book? Maybe, but maybe there’s more to it.
Here at the National Library of Medicine we regularly look for ways to help our patrons make better use of our resources. Toward that end, we carry out regular outreach to communities and audiences across the country and across the spectrum, from medical professionals and scientific researchers to students and the general public.
Outreach, by definition, means “to reach further than,” and in conducting outreach, we take this library further into those communities. In turn, the members of those communities are able to go further themselves, to learn more and to do more than they could have without us.
As part of our strategic planning process we are conducting an audit of the many approaches to outreach we employ. We send staff to powwows held by Native American nations and tribes, bringing on-the-spot coaching to attendees to help them find relevant health resources. We create YouTube videos to teach scientists how to effectively use dbGap, our best-known and most highly used database of genetic sequences. Through our National Network of Libraries of Medicine, we attend community meetings and health fairs to ensure people everywhere know about our valuable, authoritative health information. We make informative websites that walk users through the best ways to search PubMed, and we publish a magazine as a free, trusted consumer guide to the latest medical research and quality health information coming out of NIH and NLM.
At first pass, these efforts look like NLM has taken on a health information mission, just like the libraries visited by Ms. Lagnado seem like music rooms.
But look deeper.
What we are actually doing is bringing the library to life—ensuring NLM’s resources are accessible not only in the traditional, well-understood ways of reading and reflection, but by ensuring those accessing our resources have the skills to use them.
After all you can’t catch a fish by reading a book about fishing, and you can’t play the ukulele by simply looking at a musical score. You need to do, and the new “libraries of things” support that.
And when it comes to NLM’s vast resources, we help you do—to effectively find what you need, assess what you find, and apply what you learn—to help us all reach further and do more than we did before.