Arnold Van Der Leden : Fishmarket Seattle 2e partie
2ème partie de la vidéo diffusée lors de l'intervention de M. Van Der Leden
Arnold Van Der Leden : Fishmarket Seattle 1ère partie
Vidéo diffusée lors de l'intervention de M. Van Der Leden
Henryk Hollender Kundengewinnung: Strategien der Bibliotheken in Polen On Winning of the Customers – the Strategies for Libraries in Poland
Thank you for inviting me to speak on libraries in Poland: their customers, the need to win them, and the strategies which guide the librarians. I wholeheartedly accept the formula. Indeed, library users or readers are customers, and it does take an effort to attract them to your services. Most of them would rather rush out on the market to capture other goods than those the libraries have to offer. I believe most of colleagues from my country would agree on such a setting of a stage for discussion. Veterans of the profession, who taught me decades ago to wait at the library for a person with an “information need”, arguing if they need us, they will find a way to locate us – are long gone (perhaps with some exception for scholarly libraries, to which I will return later). Also, I believe it makes sense to speak in the European context about the vast Czech, Hungarian or Polish library experience; the inclusion of the sole Poland into EU has brought about the increase of European population by 8%. The sense is in similarities and it is in differences.
Poland is a democracy with a library law, which makes it compulsory for each unit of self-government to establish a public library, but defines neither the standards the library has to conform to, nor its minimal budget. Instead, it prohibits merging of libraries belonging to what is believed to be “different types” of institutions, like public libraries and school libraries, save public libraries and private enterprises. Other Polish laws make it practically impossible to establish a non-for-profit consortium. Yet another let public libraries benefit from special grants from the Ministry of Culture, which are to be used towards acquisitions of new publications. Many libraries benefitted from European funding to expand their services or improve their premises. In these mixed conditions, over the last 15 years, many public libraries managed to become the pride of the local government. We increasingly find them well equipped, in new or refurbished sites. Academic libraries also tend to have new buildings, are ahead with automation, and engage in bottom-up initiatives aimed at making the work more rationalistic (shared cataloguing, jointly operated digital libraries etc.).
In such a milieu, the old stereotype of the librarian might have already vanished for good, but we find it surprisingly persistent. This is perhaps because libraries lack trend-setting institutions. The National Library only recently has tried to be the leader in the profession (mostly by faithful participation in The European Library project), and the library schools teach an amazing conglomerate of historical subjects and computer skills, with no eye on information services as the field which could be researched or regulated. With no leaders, no prevailing opinion; indeed – no professional mainstream, libraries tend to be surprisingly divergent in their practices and seldom look on “the best practice” when taking up a decision. Library cooperation is below the needs, and policies in various regions are different – for instance towards library networking, selection of software, location of local branches, cataloguing standards, new media, and open stacks.
With less than a half of the whole society using library services, the general public does not seem to know what libraries are all about; librarians are considered narrow-minded and boring. There is no doubt that the identity of the librarians is no longer based on political values of the Communist past, which put them quite highly as educators and guardians of correct reading. But the identity of the contemporary librarian is also hardly based on knowledge, efficiency or social responsibility. Librarians like to repeat buzzword about digitization, the knowledge society, and the Web 2.0, but this does not convert them into heroes of the information age.
The way librarians want to perceive themselves has more to do with new lifestyles and relative economic prosperity. Let us take a look at the Calendar for the year 2008, published by one regional branch of Polish Library Association. For the first time we see pictures of the actual library staff, with captions with their names and positions. They of course are not the average library staff, they are apparently selected as the good looking guys. In “Poradnik Bibliotekarza” monthly we see a page form the Calendar reproduced, with a young man holding up a young woman – both from the Lódz University Library, and both dressed up for the session. The columnist commenting on the Calendar is astonished that they are posing without embarrassment and ads a few words in a fake slang of the youth, which is supposed to sound hip, but which we find a little sarcastic, next to being tasteless and sexist. Our comment could also be sarcastic: librarians are unable to think of themselves as simply men and women at work and have to make a TV-like appearance to show their human face to the public. But the very revealing of names and faces is a new, fresh and noble an idea, and we can only wish some more balanced pictorial material followed to convince the customers that librarians are humans. And this will anyway make only the beginning, as there are no librarians known to the wider public, and personnel changes on managerial positions are seldom covered even in the professional press.
Generally, librarians serve the best just those which want to be served. Children enjoy all the possible action from the librarians, and pensioners are also their traditional stronghold. Also, librarians assist thousands part-time and extramural students. In children’s libraries you have nicely arranged interiors, storytelling, contests, games, art lessons, and lots of so called “library lessons”, i.e. workshops planned to teach some new skill using library resources. You can come to the library to admire your Teddy Bear (in whichever brand) or to prove that you are familiar with the story Ann of Green Gables (the character probably better known in Poland than in most of other European countries), or if you want to learn acting. For students there are books and bibliographic instruction. Pensioners frequent meetings with authors and other celebrities; needles to say, truly controversial celebrities are never invited to libraries, but for many library users a chance to ask a question a well-known author in a library is really some kind of a peak experience. As it is for the library staff, which feel proud and distinguished when a writer or film director includes a visit at a library in her or his busy schedule. As for the elderly citizens, it is normal in Poland for a local public library to announce that it is willing to deliver library materials home, but without a prior appointment the library messenger may be not permitted to enter an apartment, because it is not consider safe to open the door to strangers.
More ambitious readers (school students working on their essays, university students, teachers seeking new themes for the class, amateurs of regional history, local journalists and media people) make use of regional files and other library-compiled finding tools, often unpublished, occasionally – manual. These are now being supplemented or replaced by digital libraries, offering full text online editions of books and journals, mostly from before the II World War; these are lavishly accompanied by postcards, address books, posters, ephemera. Yes, the digital world of Poland puts up an antiquarian face, but what we recently also see in the contents of digital libraries are also scientific works, student textbooks, current scholarly journals, theses and dissertations. Most of those projects are based on the same software dLibra, a product of Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, which is what permits federated searches of most of the digital libraries’ contents; the Center offers a search engine, which is truly a “one-stop shopping” opportunity for the customers which might have not practiced it earlier on online catalogues. DLibra digital libraries tend to be institutional or regional, and most regions have one or more projects like this, a rare place where academic and public libraries meet and cooperate. For the wider public, in a decade or so, digital libraries may become the only libraries which count, and may educate the new generation of users, for whom all the stereotypes and clichés associated until recently with librarianship will no longer be understandable.
For the time being, however, most of the customers are won on the library premises, not on the Internet. Or on the town, but under the sign of the library. Or on YouTube. Especially around The Librarian’s Day (May 8th) most municipal libraries organize parades, shows, happenings, decorating of shop windows, by which the city mayor and the counselors are to be alerted as much as the public. Images and gadgets: t-shirts, badges, posters, are issued widely. Bigger events, like touring a city in a rented bus with loudspeakers and a decoration intended to resemble bookshelves may be a little strange in a country in which no bookmobiles are deployed. We can vaguely say that librarians like to show off, and the way samba dancers move on their floats during the Rio de Janeiro Carnival would very much suit their taste and fulfill their ambition. On the other hand, libraries keep off from issues considered political. The library “carnival” is always safe and polite. Sexual education, gay rights and gay literature have yet to be reported as part of such festivities. Any hot public issue – the abortion law, religion lessons in schools, anti-Semitism, family violence, paedophilia in the Church or on the Net – are not included. By which we are not saying that libraries practice censorship of any kind. The picture is just more complex. Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, born in 1894 and publishing in Yiddish, was not remembered one hundred years later in his birthplace of Leoncin near Warsaw, but there were conferences and exhibitions devoted to him in other places where his ancestors lived, and public libraries participated in a vivid way. One is at loss whether to admit that by selecting neutral areas libraries stay aside from the unsafe world of politics, or whether to regret that they are losing those who might become their dearest customers – children and young adults with conscience and sensitivity, seeking self awareness and independence.
Anyway, the library scene in Poland has it that minorities are not its favourite customers. We do not offer them materials in their language (which would mostly be Ukrainian or Vietnamese); we do not offer advice to illegal immigrants, and we do not want to work which non-bibliothecal types, like the homeless. Libraries do not streetwork. They don’t even go for the computer skills courses for the elderly or the unemployed. On rare occasions they try to focus on some underpriviledged a group, and the results are seldom encouraging. For instance, a municipal library locates a refuge for women with family problems and tries to offer them some noble reading, and is very disappointed when the ladies neglect to return the borrowed items.
Traditionally, libraries try to market themselves by celebrating holidays which otherwise are observed by few. Do you know that April 7th is the International Health Day? On that day, you may come across a medical crew at the library, offering blood pressure measurement or advice how to early detect breast cancer. On March 8th discussion on equal status for women are held in some libraries, but they will not draw any audience if some celebrities fail to show up. On April 11th (International Radio Day), there may be a broadcast from the library on your local FM radio.
Librarians have eagerly entered the realm dominated by media. This, however, does not convert them into marketing experts or lobbyists. On the state level, it is mostly the Polish Library Association which makes some kind of library policy, and presumably meets politicians. It is also the Standing Conference of Directors of Regional Libraries, which seems to speak mostly to the National Library (if the Minister of Culture needs an information on libraries, he has it form the National) and the Standing Conference of Directors of Academic Libraries, having its natural partner in the Standing Conference of Rectors of Academic Schools. If there is a need, for instance, for a legal amendment, the Conference of Directors asks respective officials for a meeting and writes formal letters. The officials usually respond with approbation, expressing solidarity and support, but this is where the action ends. Legislation process in Poland is still very slow and lacks transparency. Also, as it has already been mentioned, no real strong pressure to change the law is ever exerted since professionals differ in their opinion, and scholars, remaining indifferent towards practical problems of the library world, avoid the role of public leaders.
In this context, some libraries are clearly different from the others. First of all, it is “model libraries” established in Poland by municipal libraries in Wroclaw/Breslau in Lower Silesia (Niederschlesien) and Olsztyn/Allenstein in Masuria (Masuren) with financial aid and concepts from Bertelsmann Stiftung, which they won on a basis of a contest. They have followers in various parts of the country now. They are actually mediatheques, located in busy parts of towns (a privilege which regular public branches often lacked), and designed to bring about a contrast with a traditional view on how a library looks like. They collected and circulated media – mostly films, computer games, and audio recordings, missing from “normal” libraries. The books, to be sure, were also carefully collected, with a stress on intellectual diversity and practical application, mostly for teenagers. And the borrowers, for the first time in the country, were offered a chance to return them easily any time, day and night, by using a book drop. New complete Web pages for the libraries were designed, with good online catalogues and careful linking to external resources. Materials were arranged on shelves under signage, which departed from regular numeric symbols of Universal Decimals Classification, and introduced instead word labels, somewhat emotionally flavoured. The collections were to suit the lifestyles and meet the needs of the customers: help reflect on basic issues of life and death, love and sex, understand how to continuously learn and how to find a job, meet the others, and have fun.
The staffing of the new libraries was a project in itself. New crews introduced a new feeling of friendship between customers and librarians. Volunteers – including visitors from the other countries – were invited to conduct conversation meetings and language classes. The “model libraries” offered a wide variety of programmes with a mildly liberal bias. Mediateka in Wroclaw is inviting us today (Sept. 11) to its Chocolate Shop, Language Café and the MultiCentrum – a lab equipped with computers for scientific demonstrations. Cogitus, “the Academy for Mental Development” is announcing a quick reading course for people of different ages. A manual for a job-seeking person is enclosed on the Mediateka home page. Planeta 11 in Olsztyn is announcing a festival of Jewish Culture, a session on rights of animals, a series of meetings devoted to the active way of life, and a bicycle rally through natural reservations of the Masurian Lakeland. A local branch of the Centre for Documentation of Antiquities is announcing a SuperHero contest – the winner will have created a new character (describe it, draw it) of a mighty defender of monuments of the past and a logotype of the project to consolidate a “Denkmalpfelge” action in the region. Another contest is, believe it or not, aimed at creating a comic strip explaining the economy of the country. Participants have to choose one thread of those: inflation, savings and investments, taxes, early retirement, privatization, free versus commercialized health service, and free versus commercialized higher education. To be sure, these are issues rising public attention, but not a mass movement, as, for instance, inflation in Poland does not exceed 4.5%, and high school graduates have a wide selection of tertiary programmes, both paid and unpaid. Planeta 11 also assists graduates who need a career advise and provides vocational counseling.
Both new libraries are very successful, and their performance indicators are very high. What was a little disappointing was that the audience they drew was a little older than expected; many visitors were in their thirties of fourties. This seems to be telling much on cultural patterns in Poland. There are other “mediatekas” opening in various municipal systems, and it is too early to predict whether they will have anything genuine to propose, or whether they will redirect the trend by diluting the genuine Bertelsmann ideas. Many libraries seem to think that Bertelsmann Stiftung wanted to show us the vanguard of the library practice, not its desired mainstream, and while “experimenting” should continue, normal libraries face no need to reconsider their design, visage, and programmes.
The library scene within the academic world is similar. Next to selling gadgets, maintaining decent Web pages and online catalogues, and introducing new access systems (like electronic student ID), they have done little to win new customers. In fact, since the early nineties they were winning them anyway, since many more people started entering universities than previously; thus all the research libraries showed much higher numbers of visitors and circulation figures. Most of newly established private colleges had very poor library facilities, and their students rushed to all the serious research libraries available. (The Library Act forces the public institutions to serve anybody interested, with the exclusion of lending them items.) This new crowd showed very simple information needs, generally restricted to the demand for basic textbooks. Information seeking behaviour tended to lack sophistication. Databases and online journals offered their own search and retrieval apparatus, which some of the users mastered far beyond the skills of librarians themselves, while the others needed assistance in just about anything. And please take into consideration that since most academic libraries in Poland have not and still do not offer part time employment for students, the reference work remained in hands of the experienced staff. There was much stress on helping the users – especially professors – in the actual searches, and not enough stress on educating the new proficient user of the scientific information. Despite the progress in information technologies and availability of scholarly publications (two heavy problems of libraries operating in the conditions of the Communist economy), all the bad stereotypes of academic libraries continued to dominate the popular imagination.
Some kind of breakthrough, however, followed opening of new library buildings, of which the best known is the Warsaw (Warchau, Varsovie) University Library. The new structure, in operation since December 1999, had all the features the librarians requested, of which the most important was open stacks holding items with Library of Congress call numbers. The architects, Marek Budzynski and Zbigniew Badowski, added a few other distinctive features: plants inside and outside of the building, a scenic garden on the roof of the Library, and the carpet all over the public area inside the building. Moreover, the building is far from colorful – the architects insisted on somewhat “hard” materials: concrete, steel, and glass. They clearly had the idea of people and books, and not interior materials to bring color inside the library. Then it was the Library’s turn to change the rules and regulations, to permit as much freedom for users as possible, but to restrict entrance to those only to whom a library card was issued, and to secure the rights or traditional customers, like university professors entitled to their individual study cells, or graduate students permitted to enter a highly guarded special collections area.
The new structure was by no means accepted by everybody, but it eventually became the favourite visiting place and an icon of new Warsaw. The average of 4 thousand users per day seemed happy with what the library had to offer, enjoying the most the social dimension of the structure. Indeed, it is a place in which it is the customer decides how will she or he work (if at all), in what corner, with what company. A place in which you can watch and be watched (Walter Benjamin), but also which efficiently supports the serious study and group work. Visiting “BUW” (Biblioteka Uniwersytecka w Warszawie) has become the valued status indicator, and within the youth culture of Warsaw the booving term was coined – to stand for coming to BUW, looking around (and looking good, to be sure), and planning the day with all the flexibility the institution (closing at 9 pm) permitted. And while it was never true that customers were allowed to take the library items on the roof of the building, or that sexual intercourses occurred between the stacks (which is what some newspapers wrote), it is definitely true that people liked sitting on the floor with their term paper notes, books, journals, magazines, mobile phones, MP3 players, bottles of mineral water all around; kicked off shoes often supplemented the list. They enjoyed it and they practiced it widely, being the first generation of students in Poland to whom using of a library seemed linked to their own emancipation, self-expression, and physical pleasure. It is only the future which will show to what extend these habits went together with high productivity in research. The variety of topics raised in today’s graduate work of Warsaw University makes us optimistic in this respect. Also, several other universities copied the basic architectural and functional ideas of the Warsaw University Library.
And, to be sure, the others have not. The experience of WUL has not become the part of what library science students are taught. Their marketing lessons are mostly reviews of marketing theories, free from case studies the instructors do not have to offer, and personal involvement the course of studies does not require. Most of the librarians rely on their in-the-job training anyway, and this is really a good opportunity to learn that library users and non-users are just customers, and that they have to be “won” for the library. Today’s practice is diversified and promising. Alas, it is not distributed evenly on libraries of all types and in all regions. Also, it does not seem to translate to the library policy on the level of the country and its elites.
Poland is a democracy with a library law, which makes it compulsory for each unit of self-government to establish a public library, but defines neither the standards the library has to conform to, nor its minimal budget. Instead, it prohibits merging of libraries belonging to what is believed to be “different types” of institutions, like public libraries and school libraries, save public libraries and private enterprises. Other Polish laws make it practically impossible to establish a non-for-profit consortium. Yet another let public libraries benefit from special grants from the Ministry of Culture, which are to be used towards acquisitions of new publications. Many libraries benefitted from European funding to expand their services or improve their premises. In these mixed conditions, over the last 15 years, many public libraries managed to become the pride of the local government. We increasingly find them well equipped, in new or refurbished sites. Academic libraries also tend to have new buildings, are ahead with automation, and engage in bottom-up initiatives aimed at making the work more rationalistic (shared cataloguing, jointly operated digital libraries etc.).
In such a milieu, the old stereotype of the librarian might have already vanished for good, but we find it surprisingly persistent. This is perhaps because libraries lack trend-setting institutions. The National Library only recently has tried to be the leader in the profession (mostly by faithful participation in The European Library project), and the library schools teach an amazing conglomerate of historical subjects and computer skills, with no eye on information services as the field which could be researched or regulated. With no leaders, no prevailing opinion; indeed – no professional mainstream, libraries tend to be surprisingly divergent in their practices and seldom look on “the best practice” when taking up a decision. Library cooperation is below the needs, and policies in various regions are different – for instance towards library networking, selection of software, location of local branches, cataloguing standards, new media, and open stacks.
With less than a half of the whole society using library services, the general public does not seem to know what libraries are all about; librarians are considered narrow-minded and boring. There is no doubt that the identity of the librarians is no longer based on political values of the Communist past, which put them quite highly as educators and guardians of correct reading. But the identity of the contemporary librarian is also hardly based on knowledge, efficiency or social responsibility. Librarians like to repeat buzzword about digitization, the knowledge society, and the Web 2.0, but this does not convert them into heroes of the information age.
The way librarians want to perceive themselves has more to do with new lifestyles and relative economic prosperity. Let us take a look at the Calendar for the year 2008, published by one regional branch of Polish Library Association. For the first time we see pictures of the actual library staff, with captions with their names and positions. They of course are not the average library staff, they are apparently selected as the good looking guys. In “Poradnik Bibliotekarza” monthly we see a page form the Calendar reproduced, with a young man holding up a young woman – both from the Lódz University Library, and both dressed up for the session. The columnist commenting on the Calendar is astonished that they are posing without embarrassment and ads a few words in a fake slang of the youth, which is supposed to sound hip, but which we find a little sarcastic, next to being tasteless and sexist. Our comment could also be sarcastic: librarians are unable to think of themselves as simply men and women at work and have to make a TV-like appearance to show their human face to the public. But the very revealing of names and faces is a new, fresh and noble an idea, and we can only wish some more balanced pictorial material followed to convince the customers that librarians are humans. And this will anyway make only the beginning, as there are no librarians known to the wider public, and personnel changes on managerial positions are seldom covered even in the professional press.
Generally, librarians serve the best just those which want to be served. Children enjoy all the possible action from the librarians, and pensioners are also their traditional stronghold. Also, librarians assist thousands part-time and extramural students. In children’s libraries you have nicely arranged interiors, storytelling, contests, games, art lessons, and lots of so called “library lessons”, i.e. workshops planned to teach some new skill using library resources. You can come to the library to admire your Teddy Bear (in whichever brand) or to prove that you are familiar with the story Ann of Green Gables (the character probably better known in Poland than in most of other European countries), or if you want to learn acting. For students there are books and bibliographic instruction. Pensioners frequent meetings with authors and other celebrities; needles to say, truly controversial celebrities are never invited to libraries, but for many library users a chance to ask a question a well-known author in a library is really some kind of a peak experience. As it is for the library staff, which feel proud and distinguished when a writer or film director includes a visit at a library in her or his busy schedule. As for the elderly citizens, it is normal in Poland for a local public library to announce that it is willing to deliver library materials home, but without a prior appointment the library messenger may be not permitted to enter an apartment, because it is not consider safe to open the door to strangers.
More ambitious readers (school students working on their essays, university students, teachers seeking new themes for the class, amateurs of regional history, local journalists and media people) make use of regional files and other library-compiled finding tools, often unpublished, occasionally – manual. These are now being supplemented or replaced by digital libraries, offering full text online editions of books and journals, mostly from before the II World War; these are lavishly accompanied by postcards, address books, posters, ephemera. Yes, the digital world of Poland puts up an antiquarian face, but what we recently also see in the contents of digital libraries are also scientific works, student textbooks, current scholarly journals, theses and dissertations. Most of those projects are based on the same software dLibra, a product of Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, which is what permits federated searches of most of the digital libraries’ contents; the Center offers a search engine, which is truly a “one-stop shopping” opportunity for the customers which might have not practiced it earlier on online catalogues. DLibra digital libraries tend to be institutional or regional, and most regions have one or more projects like this, a rare place where academic and public libraries meet and cooperate. For the wider public, in a decade or so, digital libraries may become the only libraries which count, and may educate the new generation of users, for whom all the stereotypes and clichés associated until recently with librarianship will no longer be understandable.
For the time being, however, most of the customers are won on the library premises, not on the Internet. Or on the town, but under the sign of the library. Or on YouTube. Especially around The Librarian’s Day (May 8th) most municipal libraries organize parades, shows, happenings, decorating of shop windows, by which the city mayor and the counselors are to be alerted as much as the public. Images and gadgets: t-shirts, badges, posters, are issued widely. Bigger events, like touring a city in a rented bus with loudspeakers and a decoration intended to resemble bookshelves may be a little strange in a country in which no bookmobiles are deployed. We can vaguely say that librarians like to show off, and the way samba dancers move on their floats during the Rio de Janeiro Carnival would very much suit their taste and fulfill their ambition. On the other hand, libraries keep off from issues considered political. The library “carnival” is always safe and polite. Sexual education, gay rights and gay literature have yet to be reported as part of such festivities. Any hot public issue – the abortion law, religion lessons in schools, anti-Semitism, family violence, paedophilia in the Church or on the Net – are not included. By which we are not saying that libraries practice censorship of any kind. The picture is just more complex. Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, born in 1894 and publishing in Yiddish, was not remembered one hundred years later in his birthplace of Leoncin near Warsaw, but there were conferences and exhibitions devoted to him in other places where his ancestors lived, and public libraries participated in a vivid way. One is at loss whether to admit that by selecting neutral areas libraries stay aside from the unsafe world of politics, or whether to regret that they are losing those who might become their dearest customers – children and young adults with conscience and sensitivity, seeking self awareness and independence.
Anyway, the library scene in Poland has it that minorities are not its favourite customers. We do not offer them materials in their language (which would mostly be Ukrainian or Vietnamese); we do not offer advice to illegal immigrants, and we do not want to work which non-bibliothecal types, like the homeless. Libraries do not streetwork. They don’t even go for the computer skills courses for the elderly or the unemployed. On rare occasions they try to focus on some underpriviledged a group, and the results are seldom encouraging. For instance, a municipal library locates a refuge for women with family problems and tries to offer them some noble reading, and is very disappointed when the ladies neglect to return the borrowed items.
Traditionally, libraries try to market themselves by celebrating holidays which otherwise are observed by few. Do you know that April 7th is the International Health Day? On that day, you may come across a medical crew at the library, offering blood pressure measurement or advice how to early detect breast cancer. On March 8th discussion on equal status for women are held in some libraries, but they will not draw any audience if some celebrities fail to show up. On April 11th (International Radio Day), there may be a broadcast from the library on your local FM radio.
Librarians have eagerly entered the realm dominated by media. This, however, does not convert them into marketing experts or lobbyists. On the state level, it is mostly the Polish Library Association which makes some kind of library policy, and presumably meets politicians. It is also the Standing Conference of Directors of Regional Libraries, which seems to speak mostly to the National Library (if the Minister of Culture needs an information on libraries, he has it form the National) and the Standing Conference of Directors of Academic Libraries, having its natural partner in the Standing Conference of Rectors of Academic Schools. If there is a need, for instance, for a legal amendment, the Conference of Directors asks respective officials for a meeting and writes formal letters. The officials usually respond with approbation, expressing solidarity and support, but this is where the action ends. Legislation process in Poland is still very slow and lacks transparency. Also, as it has already been mentioned, no real strong pressure to change the law is ever exerted since professionals differ in their opinion, and scholars, remaining indifferent towards practical problems of the library world, avoid the role of public leaders.
In this context, some libraries are clearly different from the others. First of all, it is “model libraries” established in Poland by municipal libraries in Wroclaw/Breslau in Lower Silesia (Niederschlesien) and Olsztyn/Allenstein in Masuria (Masuren) with financial aid and concepts from Bertelsmann Stiftung, which they won on a basis of a contest. They have followers in various parts of the country now. They are actually mediatheques, located in busy parts of towns (a privilege which regular public branches often lacked), and designed to bring about a contrast with a traditional view on how a library looks like. They collected and circulated media – mostly films, computer games, and audio recordings, missing from “normal” libraries. The books, to be sure, were also carefully collected, with a stress on intellectual diversity and practical application, mostly for teenagers. And the borrowers, for the first time in the country, were offered a chance to return them easily any time, day and night, by using a book drop. New complete Web pages for the libraries were designed, with good online catalogues and careful linking to external resources. Materials were arranged on shelves under signage, which departed from regular numeric symbols of Universal Decimals Classification, and introduced instead word labels, somewhat emotionally flavoured. The collections were to suit the lifestyles and meet the needs of the customers: help reflect on basic issues of life and death, love and sex, understand how to continuously learn and how to find a job, meet the others, and have fun.
The staffing of the new libraries was a project in itself. New crews introduced a new feeling of friendship between customers and librarians. Volunteers – including visitors from the other countries – were invited to conduct conversation meetings and language classes. The “model libraries” offered a wide variety of programmes with a mildly liberal bias. Mediateka in Wroclaw is inviting us today (Sept. 11) to its Chocolate Shop, Language Café and the MultiCentrum – a lab equipped with computers for scientific demonstrations. Cogitus, “the Academy for Mental Development” is announcing a quick reading course for people of different ages. A manual for a job-seeking person is enclosed on the Mediateka home page. Planeta 11 in Olsztyn is announcing a festival of Jewish Culture, a session on rights of animals, a series of meetings devoted to the active way of life, and a bicycle rally through natural reservations of the Masurian Lakeland. A local branch of the Centre for Documentation of Antiquities is announcing a SuperHero contest – the winner will have created a new character (describe it, draw it) of a mighty defender of monuments of the past and a logotype of the project to consolidate a “Denkmalpfelge” action in the region. Another contest is, believe it or not, aimed at creating a comic strip explaining the economy of the country. Participants have to choose one thread of those: inflation, savings and investments, taxes, early retirement, privatization, free versus commercialized health service, and free versus commercialized higher education. To be sure, these are issues rising public attention, but not a mass movement, as, for instance, inflation in Poland does not exceed 4.5%, and high school graduates have a wide selection of tertiary programmes, both paid and unpaid. Planeta 11 also assists graduates who need a career advise and provides vocational counseling.
Both new libraries are very successful, and their performance indicators are very high. What was a little disappointing was that the audience they drew was a little older than expected; many visitors were in their thirties of fourties. This seems to be telling much on cultural patterns in Poland. There are other “mediatekas” opening in various municipal systems, and it is too early to predict whether they will have anything genuine to propose, or whether they will redirect the trend by diluting the genuine Bertelsmann ideas. Many libraries seem to think that Bertelsmann Stiftung wanted to show us the vanguard of the library practice, not its desired mainstream, and while “experimenting” should continue, normal libraries face no need to reconsider their design, visage, and programmes.
The library scene within the academic world is similar. Next to selling gadgets, maintaining decent Web pages and online catalogues, and introducing new access systems (like electronic student ID), they have done little to win new customers. In fact, since the early nineties they were winning them anyway, since many more people started entering universities than previously; thus all the research libraries showed much higher numbers of visitors and circulation figures. Most of newly established private colleges had very poor library facilities, and their students rushed to all the serious research libraries available. (The Library Act forces the public institutions to serve anybody interested, with the exclusion of lending them items.) This new crowd showed very simple information needs, generally restricted to the demand for basic textbooks. Information seeking behaviour tended to lack sophistication. Databases and online journals offered their own search and retrieval apparatus, which some of the users mastered far beyond the skills of librarians themselves, while the others needed assistance in just about anything. And please take into consideration that since most academic libraries in Poland have not and still do not offer part time employment for students, the reference work remained in hands of the experienced staff. There was much stress on helping the users – especially professors – in the actual searches, and not enough stress on educating the new proficient user of the scientific information. Despite the progress in information technologies and availability of scholarly publications (two heavy problems of libraries operating in the conditions of the Communist economy), all the bad stereotypes of academic libraries continued to dominate the popular imagination.
Some kind of breakthrough, however, followed opening of new library buildings, of which the best known is the Warsaw (Warchau, Varsovie) University Library. The new structure, in operation since December 1999, had all the features the librarians requested, of which the most important was open stacks holding items with Library of Congress call numbers. The architects, Marek Budzynski and Zbigniew Badowski, added a few other distinctive features: plants inside and outside of the building, a scenic garden on the roof of the Library, and the carpet all over the public area inside the building. Moreover, the building is far from colorful – the architects insisted on somewhat “hard” materials: concrete, steel, and glass. They clearly had the idea of people and books, and not interior materials to bring color inside the library. Then it was the Library’s turn to change the rules and regulations, to permit as much freedom for users as possible, but to restrict entrance to those only to whom a library card was issued, and to secure the rights or traditional customers, like university professors entitled to their individual study cells, or graduate students permitted to enter a highly guarded special collections area.
The new structure was by no means accepted by everybody, but it eventually became the favourite visiting place and an icon of new Warsaw. The average of 4 thousand users per day seemed happy with what the library had to offer, enjoying the most the social dimension of the structure. Indeed, it is a place in which it is the customer decides how will she or he work (if at all), in what corner, with what company. A place in which you can watch and be watched (Walter Benjamin), but also which efficiently supports the serious study and group work. Visiting “BUW” (Biblioteka Uniwersytecka w Warszawie) has become the valued status indicator, and within the youth culture of Warsaw the booving term was coined – to stand for coming to BUW, looking around (and looking good, to be sure), and planning the day with all the flexibility the institution (closing at 9 pm) permitted. And while it was never true that customers were allowed to take the library items on the roof of the building, or that sexual intercourses occurred between the stacks (which is what some newspapers wrote), it is definitely true that people liked sitting on the floor with their term paper notes, books, journals, magazines, mobile phones, MP3 players, bottles of mineral water all around; kicked off shoes often supplemented the list. They enjoyed it and they practiced it widely, being the first generation of students in Poland to whom using of a library seemed linked to their own emancipation, self-expression, and physical pleasure. It is only the future which will show to what extend these habits went together with high productivity in research. The variety of topics raised in today’s graduate work of Warsaw University makes us optimistic in this respect. Also, several other universities copied the basic architectural and functional ideas of the Warsaw University Library.
And, to be sure, the others have not. The experience of WUL has not become the part of what library science students are taught. Their marketing lessons are mostly reviews of marketing theories, free from case studies the instructors do not have to offer, and personal involvement the course of studies does not require. Most of the librarians rely on their in-the-job training anyway, and this is really a good opportunity to learn that library users and non-users are just customers, and that they have to be “won” for the library. Today’s practice is diversified and promising. Alas, it is not distributed evenly on libraries of all types and in all regions. Also, it does not seem to translate to the library policy on the level of the country and its elites.
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