Audio version

10 • COGNOTES 2015 ANNUAL HIGHLIGHTS ISSUE

Offerman Entertains with History and Giggles

By Sara Zettervall, Hennepin County Library (Minn.)

Nick Offerman would like to make sure everyone knows he does not hate librarians. His character on “Parks and Rec,” Ron Swanson, is still collecting YouTube hits on clips that creatively insult the public library. “That's just comedy,” he told a standing-room-only crowd of librarians on June 27. “Librarians were chosen as the most unassailable group of professionals.”

He needn't have worried, though. Before he even had a chance to speak, he was greeted by a standing ovation. Still, he took the time to explain that his sister runs the library in his home town of Minooka, Illinois, and his sister-in-law also works there. His family, he explained, are “great lovers of librarians — both figuratively and literally.”

Like librarians, Offerman is a shameless fan of his favorite writers. His new book, Gumption: Relighting the Torch of Freedom with America's Gutsiest Troublemakers, highlights 21 Americans who have inspired him. Several of those are authors who are alive today, and Offerman was clearly thrilled to be able to use the excuse of writing his book to spend time with the likes of George Saunders and Michael Pollan. But his favorite author seemed to be Wendell Berry, whom he described as a “well of common sense.” Be sure to check out the audio-book version of Gumption, which includes Of-ferman's recording of a Berry poem that Saunders set to music.

Following a reading that was punctuated by his infamous giggle, Offerman was joined on stage by fellow comedian-author Sarah Vowell. She teased him for being too much like Theodore Roosevelt, who is featured in the book, calling him “annoyingly well-rounded.” Offerman admitted that Roosevelt was “kind of a freak” who hired men to wrestle with him in the Oval Office, but he wanted to highlight that kind of gumption in the book. They also swapped stories of admiration for Conan O'Brien, credited by both for giving their careers and comedic self-esteem a boost.

On a more serious note, Vowell suggested there was a tension in Offerman's book between each figure's “niceness” and their simultaneous ability to blow off the opinions of people who opposed them.

Offerman agreed, saying, “I want to live somewhere where we can disagree and then shake hands afterward.” He admired each figure for “making the Robert Frost choice” to take the road less traveled and hoped to inspire others to do so, too.

Deep Reading in the Digital Age

By Robert Manzo, Student to ALA

The Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) invited Maryanne Wolf to speak at this year's ALCTS President's Program on Monday, June 29. Wolf is director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, Massachusetts. Her talk, “Three Short Stories about Deep Reading in the Digital Age,” centered on the concept of “deep reading” or focused, contemplative reading.

She contrasted deep reading with distracted reading, which readers using digital devices often experience. Distracted reading happens because digital devices support applications other than ebooks or have access to a hypertext-based internet. Wolf pointed out that no media, new or old, is perfect; each has its own pros and cons. Socrates scorned writing, believing its practice clouded memory and true contemplation. Similarly, in the 21^st century, we as a society must ask what are the pros and cons, for example of the ebb of handwriting as a cultural practice and the advent of digital new media to replace analog (particularly print) media.

Wolf's research explores the effect of digital media on literacy development, the connections between reading and writing, and the influence of how we read on how we think (and vice versa). She stated that we are not only what we read but also how we read. In the era of digital devices, “skimming is the new normal.” Studies by reading researcher Naomi Baron, whom Wolf frequently cites, show that people aged 30 or younger spend less time in deep reading and are distracted, or move attention between texts or media objects, 27 times per hour on average.

Research by Baron and others show that the materiality of paper books and the fixed position of text on printed pages encourages slower, more focused reading and results in easier reading. If distracted while reading a print text, for example, the ease of going back to a fixed place on the page is greater. Human memory has a more difficult time navigating digital media that zooms in and out, or text that scrolls on and offscreen. However, Wolf believes that digital reading devices will fix these problems as technology improves.

Wolf's professional stance, to be clear, is not against any type of media, including digital. She embraces any means by which knowledge is transferred from one person to another. In fact, her most recent project is an initiative to deliver tablet computers to poorer parts of the world. These tablets, she hopes, will help the 57 million children worldwide who have no access to school or teachers learn to read. So far Wolf's initiative has delivered tablets loaded with literacy applications to Ethiopia, Uganda, South Africa, and, in the U.S., rural Alabama, and Georgia. In Ethiopia, within one month children had gained facility with the tablets and were reading English words on sight, although not yet sentences or paragraphs.

In closing, Wolf called on librarians as the “informed curators of knowledge” to understand how different media influence human literacy development and to facilitate a positive relationship for users between media they use and literacy.

Relationships with Social Services Build Library Presence

Dozens of librarians gathered on Monday morning for the conversation starter, “..And Social Justice for All: How Can Librarians and Social Workers Collaborate?” Librarian Sara Zettervall (Hennepin County Library, Minnesota) and social work PhD candidate Mary Nienow (University of Minnesota) led the discussion. Their focus was on the experiences and questions that participants brought to the session.

San Francisco Public Library was the first library in the nation to hire a full-time social worker. In recent years, many urban library systems have followed its model, including Washington, D.C., Denver, Dallas, and Edmonton (Canada). These large-scale models are blazing the trail into this new realm of collaboration, and staff from the Washington, D.C., Public Library were present and contributed to the discussion of how those models work. Much of the conversation, though, turned on how smaller libraries that don't have the capacity to hire a full-time social worker can get involved.

Some tips and takeaways that are scalable to all library systems are:

Invite social work interns into your library. Social work students are all required to complete an extensive internship. Contact your local college or university's school of social work and ask to speak to the internship director to get started. One participant gave the example that Stony Brook University (New York) has been consistently placing MSW interns in the local public library system.

Contact local social service agencies. What do you do when one of your patrons is clearly in crisis, and you don't know how to help? Call up a social service agency and ask them. This kind of relationship-building helps library staff gain new skills and teaches social service providers about the work of librarians.

San Francisco Public Library was the first library in the nation to hire a full-time social worker.

Take advantage of free or low-cost training sessions for staff. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (http://www.nami.org), for example, has a presence throughout the United States and can connect libraries with resources. Many local nonprofits can also provide trainings as part of their missions for outreach and advocacy.

In addition, the presenters encourage continued conversation on their blog, Whole Person Librarianship (http://mlismsw.wordpress.com). This session was truly a conversation starter, and the discussion should continue far beyond the conference.

al-Mansour

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upcoming debut middle-grade novel The Green Bicycle. She told the audience that writing the book granted her the opportunity to introduce information that was not addressed in the film. For al-Mansour, the ability to fight against a restrictive environment comes with having an unwavering resilience and desire to “embrace the love of life,” much like the female characters have in her narratives.

The Green Bicycle will be released by Dial Books for Young Readers in September 2015. Her next film, “A Storm in the Stars,” is about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and stars Elle Fanning.