Transcripts For CSPAN2 Panel Discussion On The Importance Of

Hello, good morning welcome to the seventh annual gaithersburg book festival. My name is gene taft khedama Committee Member the festival and the policy manager of Johns Hopkins university press. Please have you here but if i did make a couple of announcements here. Gaithersburg is a wonderful city that probably supports the arts and humanities will you please to bring the stay of this event thanks in part to generous support of our sponsors and volunteers. Our if you see our sponsors and volunteers please say thank you. Please silence all devices that might make any noise. If youre trading today pleasen use hashtag gpf really need your feedback. Surveys are available here and on our web site to give youan complete a survey you enter for a chance to win a 100 visa gift card. A quick word about buying books even though this is a free event it does help if you buy a book our friends at politics and prose are here on site and we appreciate your support. Our it supports our jobs and book festival. I hope you enjoy the festival on the program today and buy a book and come back and see us. I dont think im going out on a limb by saying if you were here or watching at home you are probably a book nerd. I wish being of book nerd was colon as a kid. Doesnt have the same connotation it has now been a member my first time going to library. My mother took my brother and i and we were probably two or three years old im a good barely walk. My brother distracted my mother and i ran out the other direction my found the most fabulous things. A place which is filled with stuff and two minutes into my venture the library and started yelling and my mother had to come running and pulled me out of the wishing well. Since then i have grown with the larger appreciation for libraries of all kinds, not just the wishing well. Libraries are great equalizer. They are open and free to the public and i also think one of the things i want to get to his libraries are not always what you think. They are not always the exact book line shelves and thats itn i do want to take a lot of time up here because we have bunch of great people here to talk about stuff so im going to give a real quick brief introduction to what their job titles are and let our panelists talk to about what they do and then move against questions. Do it like youd also ask questions later on so bear with me a minute here and i wanted his people and have them tell you about themselves. At the front of the table wet have becky clarke the director of Library Congress directing operas which collaborates with private sectors. For next to her we have Mary Ellen Icaza who is a Virtual Services manager in rockville maryland patient manages the Library Systems web and social social Media Presence as well as the Library System internet. Next to her we have Emily Sheketoff the executive director of the Washington Office of the American Library association where she has been for the past 17 years. L next to her we have Kiera Parrott to preview director for Library School general journal. Ldren so im going to start with becky on and and had to give them a quick synopsis of what they do beyond their title and then we will get to some of the fun. Thank you gene peer my name is Becky Brasington clark and im the director of publishing at the Library Congress party joined the library in march ofy this year so im still very new. I previously was one of genes colleagues at the Johns Hopkins press where i was director of marketing and institutional outreach for 12 and a half years and i can say that gene never stolen a change during a the time that we work together. Gene was the mission of the Publishing Office and that would include books as well as will be called sidelines in the industry calendars posters notecards that illuminate her shed light on the levers cannot collection. Most recent book is revealing new yorks other half and if you havent had enough literary Business Today and happened to be in washington monday theres going to be a hoax and beyonds pocket about the new book monday in the Madison Building at the library of congress and 12 00 to 1 00 so would be great to have either fear or just appeared out the events of the library are free. Im very happy to be here. My name is Mary Ellen Icaza and im from montgomery publicici am libraries. I managed our Virtual Services for the Library System. We have a very robust web site with access to our catalog and area ebooks, e. Magazine downloadable music and its all available for free with yourin library card anywhere where you are. We have 21 locations with active programming and activities for you to come to an and bring your children and families to and its all free. We also have are rich team here today so i hope that you will stop by and say hi to them at the table and they can tell you more about our services. T at running ims Emily Sheketoff and i have one of best jobs in the world because itss my job to make sure that the people in this country have access to the best libraries and so i get to talk to all kinds of librarians and find out the innovative things that they are doing and then make sure that Congress Passes no law that restricts them from continuing to make those things available to did i also tried and make sure that the funding is available so that everybody will matter where you live gets access to the best services because we are not your grandmothers library anymore. We are books, magazines and movies that we are also music, the internet, the computer, 3d printers. If its new and people in our Community Want it the library is going to work very hard to make sure its available to them and thats my job is to make sure that can happen. So in washington we do government relations. We work with the congress and the federal government. Also the legal system making sure if there is a law that is going to be restricted if we try to overturn it in the court and also supporting other lawsuits to make sure that services are available. We most recently were involved in the google book search suit to make sure the google could continue to make books available , all books available on line and also Information Technology policy. So 3d printers, we are working on all of that and thats why i love my job and you should love your library. Hi at morning my name is Kiera Parrott on the news director for a publication called Library Journal and school every journal. If you havent heard of them thats okay because their publications or. Mostly by the librarians. My job is to be in charge of the Editorial Team that reviews several thousand books every year in excess of 12,000 books and different materials, publishers, the big sized publishers, mediumsizedal bavarian dependent and self publishers send us all the books and all the materials in our job is to review it. Librarians when they are building their collections and making material available to the public they need to know that what they are buying is good and they need to know they are spending their budget dollars on materials that are going to behe useful and appreciated and used by their communities who are publications help them do that. Thank you all for introducing yourself and you did a much better job than i could have done. F what we are going to do is askve questions starting with specific questions but everyone feel free to jump in or however you might want to react. I thought we would start with kiera all that you are now curating the front end, you have also worked in the library, several libraries they believe. Can you tell us a little bit ofr behindthescenes how you comeon if you were to start a library today how would you start a . Every library is different because every community is different and when you are talking about building a a collection really your first turning point is your community, its your patrons and looking at the demographics in the community and what do the people want, what do people need, what are the age groups that areat ae mostly coming into kaminsky centers and starting there. If youre looking at a Specialized Library like a law word library it would have deep collection sort of the narrow tight focus and within a subject area super deep many materials for digging into that one feel. Your average Public Library is maybe not as much depth. We have a piece coming in with parents may be for story time. For we have teams working on assignments that need research and you might have businesslo leaders in the community needing access to Financial Information or job seekers that depending on your Community Needs that will determine what kind of collection you want. Thats the broad answer. More specifically when you start looking at here budget and how much money you have to spend and as i said libraries are not just a material but a huge part of our budget in a big part of what we do is get stuffing giveaway for free but its also services and programs and trying to figure out the balance in your spaces. Can you take a quick secondit in to talk about the Library Journal and as a publisher the publications you work for are just the basic fundamental first step. Can you explain that . The magazines i work for we feature stories and columns of whats happening in the Library Field and what are the innovative libraries doing and what are the programs andin services happening but the bulk of it is material review. That we have a core of several thousand librarians who arel th volunteering to send them the books and they think about it and they write their reviewshi with that audience in mind to its peers writing to peers. When a librarian since dont you think okay i need to buy some new fiction lets say for my collection they want to know what the book is about first of all because there are tens of thousands of books being published every single year. There are thousands, tens of thousands of books being published every single year and more and more it seems like. If you heard the reports that print is dead or dying dont believe it, print is alive and well. Come to my book room and i will show you the many boxes of books we get every single week. Librarians are faced with a deluge of material coming out, what do i buy, how do i buy it, that is what reviews do, give them a book they need so they dont have to read every single title and understand what they are getting. That is our main purpose but a Great Library and will never read one review. Other sources like publishers weekly, kirkus reviews, a Great Library and will never just read one source, she will be as diverse as possible and try to get diversity of opinion before making a selection. You were saying earlier you might not be familiar with the magazine. The reason you should be familiar with a magazine like Library Journal or publishers work lee is they do three publication reviews. When looking at your local newspaper, their reviews tell you the book is coming out months down the road. Savvy book people who want to get ahead of the curve i recommend looking at Library Journal. When we talk about libraries we often times, at least i tend to think more of Public Libraries. The second you talk a little more about the role of academic libraries. The most important thing a library can do is serve the community that surrounds us. For a Public Library that is a geographic face for geographic library, academic library, scholars and students who are on campus or within a campus system. Last week i heard a conference speaker discussed the difference between information and knowledge and i think that is a distinction that is really helpful in appreciating the importance of libraries. At their most basic level libraries are repositories of information but it is what they do to share that information through lending, programming and publishing that enables their patrons to transform that information into knowledge that is meaningful to their lives. The libraries cant fulfill that role effectively without understanding the needs of the communities they serve so the constituents of academic libraries are scholars and students and the activities that inform and support knowledge transformation in the Campus Library are focused on Effective Research and Scholarly Communication so in recent years academic libraries have become less quiet than they used to be. When i was in college a long time ago the library on campus was very very quiet. If you went in there to study you went in there to study alone. You were not there to talk about anything with your fellow students. He went into a study room and locked yourself in and didnt say a word to anybody. Today that is very different. There is a recognition on campus, it is a social process of academic libraries who created spaces for students and faculty members can come together and have conversations, study together, do work groups. I was attending a seminar at the university of north texas just yesterday and we were in a seminar room and there was a Student Group in the seminar room next to us and i dont know, i think they were doing a roleplay of some sort because they were really loud and animated and at first we were tempted to knock on the window and shush them the way librarians are supposed to do, used to do. But that social process, that information and exchange is what transforms information into knowledge. Anyone who wants to jump and jump in but i want to work through some questions i was interested in knowing. One of the things you were talking about earlier is you were talking about funding and a lot of interesting stuff in this area of the country. In the dc office whether it is lobbying or policy your bills, what are the things, you mentioned google books. What are the topics you are working on as far as issues right now . The big issues for us ivy implementation of the new Education Bill every Student Succeeds at. We need to make sure as this bill moves forward and is implement across the country that School Libraries are integrated into the learning environment at every school. Because we know a student who starts out in Elementary School, having access to an Effective School Library Program graduates from High School Ready to go on to Higher Learning or to begin a career. If they dont have access to an Effective School Library Program, when they go to college, it takes a year of remediation until they are on the same level with other students at that college and they have a great deal of difficulty finding 20 jobs because they dont have the Digital Literacy skills and other collaborative skills that you learn from a School Librarian. We are very focused on implementing that bill in a way that has School Libraries integrated right through it starting in Elementary School right through high school. We are also very concerned with workforce innovation and opportunity act which passed two years ago and we are waiting for the department of labor and the department of education to release the regulations to tell us how this bill is going to be implemented because as any of you who have been unemployed know, the place people go for assistance when they are out of work or looking to improve their skills is their local Public Library or Community College library. We want to make sure as the congress did when they passed this bill that in the 21 stoop century libraries are integrated within this nations Workforce Development system so that is for the state and local level. We are also very interested in cybersecurity and privacy. We are involved in student privacy, we are concerned with cataloguing at the library of congress and we want to make sure that as i said, no laws are passed that restrict librarians from doing their job and at the moment there is an appropriations bill with a rider that would restrict the library of congress from doing its job of updating catalog cataloguing headings which you would think is a boring subject, but because of what some members of congress are doing it makes it a quite interesting subject and so we are concerned about that. Every day there is something new. When i first started 17 years ago i thought it was going to be all about books. Boy was i wrong. Every day some new issue comes up and i think thank goodness i will not have to deal with that but there is a library component to it. Nothing goes on in this country that doe