Outreach is dead. It’s time we put its body in a coffin, say our collective prayers and move on.
You see, for most of the summer I undertook a long series of “outreach” trips to promote and educate the public at large about a grant-funded project I’d been working on for the past year. I drove all over the state of Oregon, to the desert in the East, the rolling mountains in the South, up and down the rocky coast, and through the farm and ranch land in Western and Central Oregon. During these long trips (imagine expanses of high desert for 200 miles before you hit a rest stop or gas station) I had a lingering feeling that what I was doing was definitely NOT outreach. Instead, I was promoting and marketing a service and tool that, for the past year, I had been helping to build at my place of employ.

What IS outreach in libraries today? It became my mission to discover a succinct working definition of what we do that so many of us consider outreach, yet my conclusion remained embedded in that same violent phrase: outreach is dead. When this thought first occurred to me my brain immediately began singing the lyrics to Bauhaus’s hit Goth Rock song Bela Lugosi’s Dead. (“…Bela Lugosi’s dead/ undead undead undead/Oh, Bela/Bela’s undead…)

We need to lay rest to outreach’s physical body–that separate entity that comprises library departments and ancillary programs. As well we need to lay to rest the word “outreach,” whose separate existence inhibits and deters us from doing what we as libraries, librarians, and information professionals should be doing. Instead of integrating library promotion, advocacy, and community-specific targeted services, we have left “outreach” outside of the inclusive library whole to be an afterthought, a department more likely to get cut, or work function of only a few, such as your subject librarians. If we kill this notion, if we consider the word and the separate entity of outreach as dead, we are more likely to be able to embrace and participate in activities formerly known as outreach and incorporate this essential part of our jobs into our daily work routine.

Definitions

Before I came to the conclusion that outreach is dead, I attempted to re-define outreach as such: Outreach is marketing. If the people who you’re attempting to reach seek services from you (rather than you reaching them) it is not outreach. The agenda behind library outreach should be to offer services without monetary gain, and to identify and fill service voids for people who are not looking for them. Unsatisfied with my definition I asked my dad. His response was “I let the NSF [National Science Foundation] define that for me.” (My dad is an organic chemistry professor.) I was not convinced that a funding agency should have the ultimate say in what “outreach” activities should be or include; particularly in libraries. It was then that I decided to turn to my colleagues and professional literature to seek a good definition.

Scott Pointon (Public Libraries, 2009) refers to the following definition: “Draw a circle around the central or main library building–every library service, program, or library-related endeavor taking place outside that circle is outreach.” (5-6).  Likewise, in her introduction to the Extraordinary Outreach section of Public Libraries last winter, Nann Hilyard points to the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary definition of outreach, “noun: the act of extending community services to a wider section of the population. Transitive Verb: to reach beyond, exceed” (20). Unsatisfied with both of these definitions I turned to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) online (thanks, Multnomah County Library, for my remote access to this!) I found:

Outreach. Noun.  b. spec. The activity of an organization in making contact and fostering relations with people unconnected with it, esp. for the purpose of support or education and for increasing awareness of the organization’s aims or message; the fact or extent of this activity.

None of these definitions are satisfactory to me. And none of us define outreach in the same way. Pointon’s definition is great, but it pulls into play the struggle libraries are having with “library as place,” an issue recently addressed in The Journal of Academic Librarianship by Sennyey et al., 2009. Current library services transcend the physical boundaries of a library building. Many collections and services offered by public and academic libraries are used remotely. Users access library services from home, in their offices, and even via mobile devices. “…the bond between users and the physical library will change and if poorly managed the “library as place” will become just another campus building” (Sennyey, et al., 2009). In this way, defining outreach by physical boundaries (a body) does not reflect the wealth of services that libraries provide and undermine our community-centered work.

The OED definition is great, but to me this definition gets back to my first instinct: this is marketing, not outreach. In fact, I looked at the OED definition of marketing, and felt that the two, for our intent, are almost interchangeable.

Marketing  b. The action or business of bringing or sending a product or commodity to market; (now chiefly, Business) the action, business, or process of promoting and selling a product, etc., including market research, advertising, and distribution.

Our product is our service. To many librarians marketing can be a dirty word and outreach almost saintly. But in so many articles about outreach authors seem to refer to library service promotion as marketing anyway.  (see  Dawn Bussey’s Getting the Word Out, Eugene Jeffers’s Electronic Outreach and Our Internet Patrons, and Rebecca Donnelly’s The Misguided Relationship.) I think we should embrace marketing for what it is, and let outreach diffuse into our daily routine. Moreover, the first use of the word outreach in this way was over 100 years ago, in 1899 according to the OED. Since libraries have changed so much over the past 100 years isn’t it time we find a new way to express and incorporate community-centered work? The OED definition reminds me of a picture I snapped while on my outreach excursions.

The paint is peeling. Obviously its current physical manifestation could use some help. Likewise, when we use the term “outreach” we typically refer to an older and more traditional notion of what the word means. For us to move beyond this idea, we just might have to start using different words and detach current assumptions about “outreach” to discuss our “outreach” activities.

Differences Between Academic and Public Libraries

In academic libraries outreach seems to mean one of a few things. First, you have to reach your constituents. Some libraries have a Facebook page and some libraries tweet. You might also provide orientations to new student cohorts or you might offer satellite library services in a different building such as a dorm or a student center. Other examples could be creating relationships with faculty to provide services that support teaching as well as to their students to support course-specific learning. These examples seem to encompass much of what academic “outreach” focused activities include. To me, all of these services should not be contained within a separate body, department, or undertaken by just the “Outreach Librarian.” Instead, they are part in parcel what we do. As professionals we should all be talking about the library in our communities and fostering relationships. We should be offering satellite services and, yes, we should all have down pat our 30 second “why the library is important” elevator speech. These are essential aspects of a library and of any librarian’s job. They are not separate nor should they be contained in a different or a sole unit or entity.

Unlike academic libraries, Public library outreach programs seem much more identified by space and place. Bookmobile services, library services provided to those in jail, services at senior centers and in schools are all examples of what would fall under the “outreach” umbrella. Dawn Bussey discusses the various things that the Glen Ellyn Public Library has done in their community and outside the library’s walls (Public Libraries, 2009). But let’s face it, these services and the community-based nature of public libraries are essential to what today’s library is. It is not extra, it is mandatory and we should all be engaged and providing targeted, community-based services to our constituents.

Community Engagement and Marketing are Essential

The nature of libraries has changed enormously. The physical building is less important. Books are less important. Due to these changes libraries will become obsolete in today’s current market where information needs are created and fulfilled by (my favorite “frenemies”) Google and Facebook. People purchase books from Amazon, they read blogs, wikis and other online commercial (and non-commercial) information sources. But libraries have what they don’t and we need to let our users know this. We have the ability to be in our communities, to engage them and offer specific targeted services. Our engagement with our communities can be the defining aspect of what a library is to any given community—and that sounds a whole lot like what one “outreach librarian” was doing or one “outreach department” does in the old “outreach” paradigm. I am not trying to undermine the importance of marketing, advocacy, or library services. Traditional “outreach” services should be an integrated part of what we do, not an aside, a tacked on item.

Problems We Face in Death

Just because libraries need to change and have changed does not mean that the politics of our respective institutions and governing bodies have. Many institutions, such as my own, have “outreach” outlined in their missions. Institutions might use “outreach” to exemplify their worth for grant or other funding sources, which frequently require “outreach” activities be incorporated into funded projects. (Much like my dad’s example and my recent travel around the state of Oregon.)  We need for our city governments and our library and university administrations to advocate for libraries and library services in the manner I have described.  When crucial administrative decisions get made, for example to open a new campus, build a new building, or to add a new degree program at a college or university, libraries and their services need to be represented. If we have successfully advocated for our constituents by providing them with quality targeted, community-centered services, they will advocate for us. In the end, we might be able to provide those essential library services without being restricted by traditional “outreach” departments or initiatives.

Another issue facing libraries and library staff is training. How are we going to train library staff to provide those 30 second elevator speeches? Who will take the lead to ensure that circulation staff, reference staff, and others know how to engage in the services we’ve been calling outreach? If we expect everyone to engage in this work, staff need to have the skills and knowledge to be able to do so.

Finally, outreach is usually considered a separate department, when marketing and promotion of outreach activities within institutions get delegated to separate “marketing,” “communications,” or “public relations” departments. Wouldn’t it be best if the two were integrated? These departments often produce and distribute printed and written materials such as press releases, brochures and flyers, or craft an organizational mission statement. This kind of community engagement remains essential. We must learn to embrace marketing and collaborate with our marketing and communications departments for our community-centered services to achieve their potential.

The Undead

Kill your notion of outreach. We should demolish the body of outreach, but keep outreach activities alive. We should disallow outreach a separate body, but fold its spirit into our daily work and activities, for it is this spirit of work that is the very kernel of what makes a library. Let’s use different words to talk about what we do. (Please, if you have a suggestion on a new term to replace “outreach” leave a comment!) Let’s work to engage our administrators and our institutions in changing the attitude and political structure surrounding “outreach.” Let’s bridge the divide by collaborating with community and institutional partners to create and promote services. Let’s make sure library staff has the training to be able to give an elevator speech about why the library is important to community. Finally, let’s reshape our attitude and view community-based library services as essential; as the core of what keeps libraries strong and relevant to our communities.

Thanks to Gail Kouame for providing her thoughtful feedback to this post. Also thanks to Lead Pipe Colleagues Derik Badman, Ellie Collier, and Hilary Davis for their edits and feedback. Additionally, thanks to my office-mate, Andrew Hamilton, who is a great springboard for ideas.

References and Further Reading

Adams, T. M., & Sean Evans, R. (2004). Educating the educators: Outreach to the college of education distance faculty and native american students. Journal of Library Administration, 41(1), 3-18.

Aguilar, P., & Keating, K. (2009). Satellite outreach services program to under-represented students: Being in their space, not on MySpace. The Reference Librarian, 50(1), 14-28.

Bussey, D. (2009). Getting the word out. Public Libraries, 48(1), 20-21.

Connell, R. S. (2009). Academic libraries, Facebook and MySpace, and student outreach: A survey of student opinion. Portal: Libraries & the Academy, 9(1), 25-36.

Donnelly, R. (2009). The misguided relationship: Learning from outreach experiences. Public Libraries, 48(1), 24-25.

Hilyard, N. B. (2009). Cultivating support for library advocacy. Public Libraries, 48(3), 16-19.

Jeffers, E. J. (2009). Electronic outreach and our internet patrons. Public Libraries, 48(1), 21-23.

Pointon, S. E. (2009). Library outreach is the future! Public Libraries, 48(2), 2-5, 24.

Sennyey, P., Ross, L., & Mills, C. (2009). Exploring the future of academic libraries: A definitional approach. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 35(3), 252-259.

Scenes From The MOMA: sometaithurts © LarimdaME / CC-BY-NC

In 1968, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, a couple of newlywed architects, had the humility to laugh with Las Vegas rather than at it. A few years earlier, Tom Wolfe had written,

Las Vegas has become, just as Bugsy Siegel dreamed, the American Monte Carlo-without any of the inevitable upper-class baggage of the casinos… At Monte Carlo there are still Wrong Forks, Deficient Accents, Poor Tailoring, Gauche Displays, Nouveau Richeness, Cultural Aridity-concepts unknown in Las Vegas. For the grand debut of Monte Carlo as a resort in 1879 the architect Charles Garnier designed an opera house for the Place du Casino; and Sarah Bernhardt read a symbolic poem. For the debut of Las Vegas as a resort in 1946 Bugsy Siegel hired Abbot and Costello, and there, in a way, you have it all.

For Wolfe, this was neither a good nor a bad thing, but many architects found Las Vegas and what it represented (such as Route 66′s commercial strips and the emergence of suburban Levittowns) less than inspiring. Venturi and Scott Brown thought architects should “suspend judgment on it in order to learn and, by learning, to make subsequent judgment more sensitive.”

Though relatively young—Venturi was 43, Scott Brown, 37—they were established and confident. Influenced as much by Pop artists as by Rome’s piazzas, they believed Las Vegas could help their peers “learn a new receptivity to the tastes and values of other people and a new modesty.” For them, the charm of Las Vegas was inextricable from its neon-steepled wedding chapels (“credit cards accepted”) and reproductions of Venus and David with “slight anatomical exaggerations;” they described the exaggeratedly phallic sign at the Dunes as “an erection 22 stories high that pulsates at night,” yet still declared it “more chaste” than the sign for the Aladdin. They saw in Las Vegas an architecture that acknowledged Americans’ desire for pleasure and catered to their taste.

Venturi and Scott Brown first published their thoughts on Las Vegas in the March 1968 issue of Architectural Forum. A few months later they turned their article into a graduate studio course at Yale: for the fall semester, thirteen students and three instructors—Venturi, Scott Brown, and their partner, Steven Izenour—“spent three weeks in the library, four days in Los Angeles, and ten days in Las Vegas,” followed by ten weeks back in New Haven. In 1972, Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour documented their article and course, and detailed their philosophy of Pop-influenced architecture, in Learning from Las Vegas, “a collage of passages, short essays, maps and diagrams… meant to evoke the lived experience of the Strip (and) challenge traditional two-dimensional modes of representation.” The book included frames from a movie, tourist brochures, and their students’ studio notes.

Like Learning from Las Vegas, Sophie Brookover and Elizabeth Burns’s Pop Goes the Library is part textbook and part manifesto. Instead of growing out of an article and a studio, it grew out of a blog, also called Pop Goes the Library, that Brookover founded in 2004 and has since expanded to include eight regular contributors, including her co-author, Burns. In place of studio notes, Pop Goes the Library has survey responses from librarians—they call these “Voices from the Field”—that read very much like comments on a blog post. And, as Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour did in Learning from Las Vegas, Brookover and Burns in Pop Goes the Library argue that understanding, anticipating, and accommodating popular taste is a professional responsibility:

You don’t have to like pop culture to embrace its importance in your library. You read that right: You can be uninterested in pop culture, or even harbor a bit of antipathy toward at least some aspects of it, and still put it to use in your library’s collections, services, and programming. So take a deep breath—if you don’t watch American Idol, have no interest in anime, or think most Top 40 music is unlistenable—it’s okay. Obviously, we encourage you to enjoy a varied media diet and to experiment with your listening, viewing, and reading habits—after all, having access to your library’s holdings is one of the small luxuries of working there, right? But we recognize that not every pop culture trend is going to float everyone’s boat. That’s reality, and it’s perfectly fine. What’s not fine is dismissing pop culture as something that’s of interest only to teens (or any other demographic group) to rationalize its perceived unimportance.

Brookover, the Library Media Specialist at Eastern Regional High School in Voorhees, New Jersey, and Burns, the Head of Youth Services for the New Jersey State Library for the Blind and Handicapped, have written a book “about identifying and harvesting the power of your community’s pop culture… about your library, your community, and how to build better and stronger relationships between the two using pop culture,” which they define as “whatever people in your community are talking, thinking, and reading about”—an intentionally broad definition. Anything and everything can be pop; readers are taught how to identify what pops in their community, as well as how to make it as accessible as possible for their neighbors.

The book is itself as accessible as possible. Where Learning from Las Vegas is occasionally tongue—in-cheek-like Warhol’s soup cans it is a high art appreciation of low art—Pop Goes the Library is written like the well crafted blog entries that Brookover and Burns and their blogging collaborators produce, in general, a few times each week. Imagine an articulate, pragmatic how to article in a glossy magazine or a great email from a friend, useful yet chatty, full of rhetorical questions and exclamation points. For instance, here’s a typical passage, taken from its chapter on advocacy, marketing, public relations, and outreach: “Since outreach is about going where you patrons are, don’t forget the patron at home. We don’t mean instituting door-to-door outreach projects! Just don’t forget the person sitting in front of his or her computer. Knowing that your website reaches a sizeable portion of your audience, why not view it as an outreach opportunity?”

There is a message, and that message is important, but Brookover and Burns have decided not to dress that message up in theory or historical context. Instead, they focus on combining practical advice with serious fun: Melanie Griffith’s character in Working Girl provides an example of applied research; Angelina Jolie’s transformation from wild child into latter day Mia Farrow illustrates good public relations; and Johnny Cash, David Bowie, martinis, and iPods are listed as celebrities and trends that are Cool (Kenny Chesney, KC & the Sunshine Band, cosmopolitans, and Zunes are Not Cool).

If you’re not interested in pop culture, it may be tempting to dismiss the importance of this book’s message or to overlook its ambitiousness. That would be a mistake: Brookover and Burns cover most of the important lessons on librarianship that can be taught in a book: creating a niche; building a collection; using technology; and developing crowd-pleasing programming, among others. As an added bonus, their writing style is as much fun to read as Michael Buckland, S.R. Ranganathan, Jesse Shera, or Elaine Svenonius. (Speaking of pop culture: does anyone know if Elaine is related to Ian?)

Like Learning from Las Vegas, Pop Goes the Library is meant as an example of the ideas it is promoting. In addition to its pop-inflected, chatty tone and “Voices from the Field,” it includes interviews and guest essays as sidebars, an extensive list of links and other resources, a calendar of events for pop-related programming, and it features a companion wiki. Some of this works marvelously—think Martha Stewart meets Jesse Shera—and some of it seems less effective. As with Learning from Las Vegas, there may be a need to publish a revised edition before this book reaches its full potential. The first edition of Learning from Las Vegas was expensive, included pieces that were not central to its thesis, and suffered from some design flaws. It still deserved the attention it got, and would likely have remained influential had its authors not released a smaller, more tightly edited, and less expensive revised edition, but it’s likely the work they put into their revisions helped their book remain a generalist classic.

If Brookover and Burns decide to produce a revised edition, they might consider:

• Making the sidebars into traditional sidebars, with text adjacent to the narrative. Right now, the text is periodically interrupted, a guest writer takes over for a couple of pages, and then the narrative resumes. Because adjacent sidebars are tough to include in a small paperback, it may have made more sense to include these pieces at the end of chapters or in the appendix. Another option: go larger. Edward Tufte’s beautifully designed and manufactured, full color, hard back books on information design have about the same retail price as Pop Goes the Library. It would be fun to see what Brookover and Burns would do with added space and color, and with better print quality;
• Deleting anonymous responses from “Voices from the Field.” It didn’t seem like the anonymous responses were needed, since none of the responses seemed to require anonymity, and dozens of respondents to this survey identified themselves and were comfortable with attribution. It is also useful to know what type of library the respondent is referring to, as well as its location;
• Making “Voices from the Field” easier to read. The responses are presented in a tiny typeface against a grey background, which is not a reader-friendly combination;
• Focusing as much attention on recipes as ingredients: that is, there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of exceptionally good ideas, but little explanation of how to assign those ideas a priority or sequence;
• Providing a conclusion. The book just sort of ends after the chapter on pop programming year-round.

It’s worth mentioning that Sophie Brookover lives in a neighboring town and she gave me my copy of Pop Goes the Library. However, we’ve only met once and I’ve enjoyed her writing for a number of years. Her generosity was certainly welcome and appreciated, but not enough to compromise my objectivity. The fact is, I very much like this book’s execution and I strongly agree with its message: we’re going to remain relevant by acquiring and marketing materials, and by providing programs, that appeal to the people whose libraries we steward. You don’t have to like every popular item in the collection, you just have to make sure it’s available.

As Denise Scott Brown wrote a year before the publication of Learning from Las Vegas,  “…liking the whole of pop culture is as irrational as hating the whole of it, and it calls forth the vision of a general and indiscriminate hopping on the pop bandwagon, where everything is good and judgment is abandoned rather than deferred. Yet artists, architects, actors, must judge, albeit, one hopes, with a sigh. After a decent interval, suitable criteria must grow out of the new source. Judgment is merely deferred to make subsequent judgments more sensitive.” Scott Brown and her co-authors succeeded, not just in deferring judgment about architecture, but in making sensitive subsequent judgments about their own work. Brookover and Burns excel at figuring out what people want and delivering it to them, so they’re certainly capable of doing the same. They’ve already done a wonderful job of creating a book that everyone who cares about libraries should read. And they may well have a book, in this version or a revision, that attracts a far greater audience to the sort of questions we ask ourselves on a regular basis.

Reaching a general audience is a tall order. Few fields have a Stephen Jay Gould, Paul Krugman, or Atul Gawande, serious practitioners who document the major issues of their field in popular essays that are collected in bestselling books. In Pop Goes the Library, we have an encouraging sign that librarianship might someday produce its own bestselling scholar.