Photo by Stephen Mease

 

I think @champlib should rent out puppies tostudents to help you study and deal with stress. Everyones GPA would increase #campchamp #btv

— Marc Rizzi (@MarcRizzi) April 1, 2012

It all started with a tweet. At the start of the month a student made an off-hand comment on Twitter about renting puppies to deal with stress. Last week several of us were chatting at an event about finals coming up and I mentioned the idea of pet therapy for helping with stress. Gloria, one of our awesome circulation assistants is also a dog-sitter/walker,  and she was thrilled with the idea. She knew the perfect fun and relaxed dogs to bring (Thea and Pippin).

We floated the idea by our director Janet and she asked a lot of good questions about things like noise, safety and logistics. She also believes in the value of experimentation and trying new things, so together we devised a plan to have a puppy VIP room that kept people, dogs, and noise contained. We decided we would offer dog-therapy on Monday and Tuesday from 5-8:30 (we had to work around the dogs schedules).

Since it was a fairly last minute idea, I began promoting it with signs Friday and more importantly via social media. The posts on Twitter and Facebook began to get some buzz.

@champlib puppies are the best idea ever! Yay!

— nicole handel (@nicole_handel) April 21, 2012

So gross in #btv and finals suck but @champlib has puppies so everything is okay again. #campchamp

— Casey Reagan (@cereags) April 22, 2012

It was mentioned and retweeted a pretty good amount over the weekend. When it came time to host the puppies on Monday we got a few more people than we expected. In fact, we were swamped!

Our original idea of having the puppy VIP room in a good-sized office had to be replaced with a plan B of a large meeting room in the library. Once my office-mate Lindsey skillfully shuffled everyone upstairs, the event went swimmingly. Everyone had a smile on their face, and it was a completely calm and relaxed environment. A news crew even ended up covering the story!

There were plenty more tweets from students either asking about the dogs, posting pictures, talking about how Champlain is the best school ever, or posting our news video. I heard from multiple students either on social media or in person how awesome an event this was and how it actually helped during this stressful week.

My school is the best school, my school has puppies #campchamp twitter.com/molly_emerson8… — Molly Emerson(@molly_emerson8) April 23, 2012

This event is a great example of how social media can be leveraged by libraries and organizations. It’s a tool for listening to your community, responding to your users, promoting relevant services that meet their needs, telling stories, and demonstrating value.

How better to demonstrate value than having students tweet things like #bestschoolever, my college > than your college, or proud to be a Champlain alum.

We had our celebration for the ACRL Excellence in Academic Libraries Award on Monday. You can check out some of the pictures from the reception on Champlain College’s Facebook page. We got to celebrate with students, our student workers, the library staff, the faculty, the administration and even trustees. It was truly a community event which is exactly what library events should be.

Another really fun aspect of the party was a video that an alumni of our digital film-making program produced for us. It highlighted the importance of the award and some of the things that make our library great. But my favorite part of the video is at the end when my good friend Steve Wehmeyer, a professor in our Core Division, is talking about the work that librarians do. He says, “Whether they’re coming into the classroom doing creative info literacy sessions, or whether they’re helping us develop engaging activities for first-year students, I’ve really come to see librarians as our allies in education.”

I loved that phrase “allies in education.” That’s how we have to think of our work. We’re not just running a library and curating collections. We’re educators who are partnering with other educators to provide the types of environments, resources, curriculum and events that facilitate and empower learning.

Our library team is really dedicated to the work we do. We were all excited to win this award, but we also know that our work isn’t done. There is still a lot of room for growth and improvement. There is a lot that we can learn from other libraries who are also doing amazing things. If as Aristotle said, excellence is not an act but a habit, we have to continue our work and keep building on our successes. The work of an educator is never done.

David Lankes wrote an truly excellent post a few months back discussing the issue of some working librarians worrying that libraries are doomed, complaining, finding excuses, and saying “yeah, but…” when faced with change. He went on to talk about how librarians should somehow find ways to stop “worrying about their future, but instead go about creating it.” It was a really great post and touched on a lot of things I had been thinking about recently.

There can be a fair amount of negativity in librarianship. People worry about the future of libraries. I hear complaining about resistance to change.

These concerns are real and should be critically examined and addressed. There certainly are problems that we need to be solving and challenges that we are facing, but it is easy for all the positive, awesome stuff to get drowned out. It’s easy to get discouraged when all the messages that you are hearing are negative. But that’s not what I see, and I don’t want that to be what others always see.

I see and meet so many passionate, fun, engaged new librarians coming into the field. I hear about colleagues building libraries in Uganda. I read about library educators who are constantly coming up with creative ways to reach their students and teach them to think critically about information. I hear about libraries popping up as part of the communities at Occupy Wall Street and elsewhere. Awesomeness abounds in libraries and among librarians.

Consequently, I wanted there to be a fun way for people to regularly share and be aware of all the awesome that goes on in libraries. The things libraries and librarians do, and the things they allow their members to do are awesome. They promote literacy, inspire creativity, strengthen communities, educate citizens, and do meaningful good around the world. In that spirit, I set up a Tumblr called…

Library Awesome!

On it you can share videos, links, images, quotes, or stories of awesomeness related to libraries. They can be your own stories or ones that you come across and you feel need sharing. In a world where there can be a lot of negativity and un-awesomeness, hopefully this will be a place where you can share inspirations and be inspired by others.

Share your awesome today!

I really enjoy a lot of the blogs that won and were nominated. I was excited to see the Hack Library School won for best newcomer. It is written by some great folks, and they post on much needed topics for students. Many library schools are severely behind, and this group of folks are helping students be more proactive and working to make sure that a library school education does not get in the way of learning. I really admire what they are doing and was delighted to have the chance to post on their blog about some of my experiences in school.

I also feel honored to be in the company of such smart, enthusiastic and dynamic people like Buffy Hamilton, Sarah Houghton-Jan, and Brian Herzog. I have been subscribed to all of their blogs for a while. In addition, I appreciate what Salem Press is doing in putting on these awards. Not only does it incorporate a little fun into staying current in the profession, it also allows people to discover new blogs that hadn’t been on their radar. I just discovered and subscribed to the Waki Librarian.

Also, most importantly, I don’t want to forget the people who read this blog and voted for it. Thank you so much for reading, commenting and chatting with me on Twitter. I get tons of ideas from people’s comments and conversations with me, and I’m glad you all are getting ideas too. I really appreciate this and I look forward to continuing the conversation here.

This doesn’t mean that we’re not doing really important work though. It also doesn’t mean we’re not serving our patrons. In fact our patrons take notice. This past semester I had a student ask me “why do you librarians smile so much?” The reason we smile is because we’re having fun. Having fun allows us to better serve our students and makes for a more welcoming, encouraging environment.

But having fun isn’t just about improving the service that we deliver to our users. It also has to do with learning. In the book Homo Ludens, a book dealing with the element of play in culture, the Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga has a great quote. “Let my playing be my learning, and my learning be my playing.” Learning and play are very closely tied. Learning doesn’t just have to be all-nighters and 10 page papers. Most of the time learning is fun.

By creating an atmosphere of fun and play and not taking ourselves too seriously we are creating a place where it is safe for students to experiment, test out ideas, and even fail. That is not always true in the classroom. Students need to succeed in the classroom to get a grade. They need to do the reading and pay attention to the professor. In the library they can be curious and explore their interests in more depth. They don’t have to be bounded by the right answer.

At the NELIG conference last week, the keynote speaker Randy Hensley, said that by calling something play we can pretend that it doesn’t matter. Normally we think about things very practically. But by calling something play we give ourselves permission to be creative and explore different possibilities without having to say “that’ll never work,” or “that’s a stupid idea.” In play all ideas are equally as stupid, thus making them all equally as good. Having a place to play and have fun is important for creativity and learning.

It’s not always easy to create an environment like this though, so how do you go about doing it? Here are a few ideas:

• Get a motto, mantra, or philosophy -” All fun, all the time” seems to work for us. Huizinga’s “let my playing be my learning, and my learning be my playing” could be another good one. Find one that works for your staff and then infuse it into everything you do.
• Don’t make everything about academics or tie fun things to academic things – We hosted a Harry Potter exhibit that was tied to several of our general education courses about the scientific revolution and religious and secular traditions. We also have a chili cook-off every year that has nothing to do with academics. Not everything has to be scholarly.
• Play with each other as a staff –  Recently our awesome new Scholarly Resource and Academic Outreach Librarian Hanna organized a staff button making afternoon where we created buttons from book images to hand out to students. I was really busy and felt like I had no time for button making. But once I started I couldn’t stop. We were all joking with each other, having fun and being creative. It was really energizing. I highly recommend getting a button machine to anyone. Instant team-building excercise.
• Build fun into your teaching – Be willing to try new things in the classroom. We tried integrating mobile phone polling as a pedagogical tool this fall and it made the classroom dynamic so much more fun. Not only because students enjoyed it but also because it we got to try a new technology. Another example is Amy Springer’s Jersey Shore themed library instruction. Trying out new things keeps your teaching fresh and keeps it fun.
• Integrate games into the library – Fairfield Library, for example, has created a fun, interactive, online game that orients new students to the library and all it has to offer. There are other games out there and they don’t have to all be electronic. But games are great for injecting fun and play into learning.

These are just a few ideas, but I’m sure you’ve got some others. How do you keep things fun at your library?

If you still need more convincing about the power of fun and play, check out this thought provoking TED talk about Serious Play.

A student from SGA approached our manager of circulation and our director with an idea for a flash mob rave. After some thought and further organization (and realizing it’s a fair amount of work to set up and tear down speakers) it became just a somewhat abbreviated rave. There was some wariness on our part because of concerns about students studying and having to ask one of our circulation managers to stay late, but ultimately we agreed.

The word was spread by mouth and a Facebook event page. At 11:30pm the DJs (curiously named Laserdisk Party Sex) set up their gear and started doing their thing. The event was filmed and edited by one of our digital film-making students. As you can see in the video, there were a lot of people dancing and enjoying themselves. After several encores, it wrapped at around 12:30am.

Overall it seemed like a fun way to de-stress before finals. There were no formal complaints that I know of (though I heard mild complaining on Twitter). I think it helped that they decided to do it close to closing time. The thing I think that is really cool about it is that it was completely student organized and they chose the library for their venue. I like to see students making the library their own and taking it over for something like this.

As a side note I’m liking the stormtrooper shtick by Laserdisk Party Sex as well as their track Lemonade is Still Popular:
Lemonade is Still Popular by LAZERDISK PARTY SEX

Photo from v.h.d. on Flickr

Libraries come down to two key concepts: learning and fun (in the context of information). We’ve known this for years. An example is our collection of both scholarly works  and more leisurely reading.

These two concepts are the reason why we collect content in varied forms. They are the reasons we host events for our users. They are the reason we provide access to the web. They’re the reason why there are librarians working at the library. Libraries are all about learning and fun.

We have books and ebooks so people can gain new ideas or enjoy a tale of adventure or suspense. We have videos and games so users can be entertained or educated. Events hosted by the library allow people to have fun as a community or arouse their curiosity together. People go to the library so they can interact with other folks who are learning and having fun, or they’re going to find a quiet place to learn or have fun by themselves. Use of the internet allows users to access a vast array of resources that can contribute to both fun and learning.

Moreover, fun and learning must not be too out of balance. If we became places that only had first person shooter games and romance novels, we’d quickly become obsolete. Humans need intellectual fulfillment.  Conversely if we only have scholarly tomes and documentaries, users will quickly become bored.

Libraries improve people’s lives through free access to information that contributes to their fun and learning. Keeping these two concepts in mind when delivering or improving services is key. “Did I help this patron learn or have fun?” “How does this new initiative contribute to patron fun or learning?”

I feel really honored to get something like this. I’m really thankful to my colleagues  who nominated me and recognized my efforts. I know that what I’m doing is making a difference, but it’s really nice to get something like this to reinforce it. I’m definitely going to start nominating people who I know are rocking it for awards for that same reason.