A small-town public librarian has been missing from thesteering committee of the Digital Public Library of America—a troubling omission we’ve noted several times since the DPLA’s founding last year.
But now the Harvard-based DPLA has filled in the gap with the appointment of Dwight McInvaill, Director of theGeorgetown County Library in a rural and costal area of South Carolina. Great move. McInvaill has won national recognition for working with other cultural agencies todigitally preserve old photos, maps and other local content, including newspapers. A press release from the Carnegie Corporation also mentions his interest in literacy issues:
“To combat at its roots a county illiteracy rate approaching 30%, the library has established—in concert with Georgetown County First Steps [link added; Web site image below]—collections of books in approximately 40 childcare centers. The library has also developed a special curriculum which a library storyteller uses to teach youngsters basic language and motor skills. The library also offers childcare providers quarterly training sessions for accreditation. For this work, the library received in 2003 the first ‘Counties Care for Kids Award’ given by the National Association of Counties.”
This is exactly what I’d like to see more of, especially as the prices of tablets and other hardware drop and they can actually be given away to low-income mothers and fathers—with face-to-face help from librarians, teachers, health and social workers and others, as opposed to simply expecting electronics to replace human contact. Ideally the tablets would work with physical keyboards and let TVs and other gadgets serve as optional monitors, allowing them to be used for much else beyond parent-to-child reading and other tasks (such as conveyance of health and job-hunting and -training information in text and multimedia). Perhaps DPLA-related people, in consultation with focus groups of library users without tech savvy, could help develop extra-easy-to-use freeware to facilitate such a project.
Mass use of tablets in rural communities couldn’t happen overnight, but the DPLA and others can at least work toward it. Without access issues dealt with, national collections will be far, far less helpful to ordinary Americans hoping to use libraries to improve themselves educationally, economically and otherwise. Given the existence of First Steps, it would appear from afar that Georgetown County might be a terrific test bed for a DPLA-style effort as long as connectivity issues could be addressed and staff training and proper technical support provided—just so sufficient enthusiasm existed locally among library staffers and the community.
As for existing e-books, yes, Georgetown County has some, via OverDrive, which I envision as one of many possible contractors of for a genuine public national library system. But the books and other media should reside on library servers controlled by librarians; and public and scholarly library systems should be intertwined but separate—considering the vast breadth of services to be provided by the systems. The public library side could use a mix of traditional business models and open content to multiply the number of e-books and other librarian-selected items and weave in up vast collections from the scholarly side. In addition, the DPLA should spin off a technical services organization shared by both the public and scholarly sides to work on issues such as access for the masses, standards in partnership with organizations like the IDPF, and a common technological infrastructure shared by both sides.
Still missing from the 17-member DPLA board are any school librarians or other K-12 educators, or librarians and academics from the fields of science, medicine, and technology, and minorities are still underrepresented. More public librarians, including at least one more from a small town, would be good, too. I also am disappointed by the board’s failure to hold public meetings in person and online (at least as far as I know). A big public meeting in Washington, DC, planned for October 21, is no substitute for routine meetings in the open—a way to increase the amount of grassroots interest and input, not just honor the best librarians’ traditional passion for openness.
That said, I remain a big fan of the DPLA’s Beta Sprint project and continue to see potential in the initiative—here are some past suggestions. I expect to offer more ideas in the next few weeks. I wanted to do this earlier but got unavoidably sidetracked by other projects.
A few more bio details on McInvaill: “From 2002-2004, he chaired the American Library Association’s Taskforce on Rural School, Tribal, and Public Libraries. In 2003-2005 and 2007-2008, he chaired the Rural Libraries Committee of the Public Library Association. He served recently on the Gaming Experts Panel of the American Library Association. He is also a Board Member of the Association of Rural and Small Libraries.”
A random fact: Farther down the South Carolina coast from Georgetown is Beaufort, where Pat Conroy, perhaps the state’s best-known writer, taught. Last I knew, Conroy was hardly a big e-book fan, probably just the opposite—but imagine what a younger, more tech-hip Conroy could have done with a wealth of e-books and other digital items available to the kids, including the locally digitized variety.
Related: Writings on the national digital library issue, with links to LibraryCity-related writings in the Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere.
