Note: My new My Word's Worth column, titled Rites of Spring, is posted at http://marylaine.com/myword/baseball.html
NATURAL PARTNERS
by Marylaine Block
What do libraries share with museums, historical societies, schools, colleges, orchestras, and arts organizations? Well, yes, they ARE underfunded public agencies, true enough. But they are also the cultural infrastructure of the community they serve. When one of these organizations does well, the interests of that organization and its community are served. When all of them do well together, though, the community is even better served, because their combined effects is a sense of overall cultural vitality. That's not just a feel-good benefit for residents; it's an economic benefit that can make it easier for the town to attract new residents and businesses.
Forming stronger partnerships with these logical allies makes sense because they can leverage and amplify each other's limited resources, while marketing the joint cultural richness they provide. The analogy that comes to mind is the web ring, where members of groups all link to every other member's web site from their own.
How might these natural partners work together? These are the ones that occur to me; I'm sure you can think of others.
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Linking to each other's web sites
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Displaying each other's brochures and publicity.
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Staging complementary exhibits.
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Producing complementary programming.
- Creating joint special-purpose digital exhibits, programming
The bare minimum level of collaboration is placing prominent links on each agency's web site to all its partners. I would argue for placing the links on your site's front page even though that page is your most valuable real estate for conveying your own agency's message.
Why? Because the statement, "working together with the ___ Museum, the ____ County Historical Society, etc." sends several useful messages in one simple sentence. Message one: we're using your tax money wisely by working together. Message two: this community has a wealth of cultural resources. Message three: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts because of the synergy between our different constituencies and resources. Displaying each other's publicity is another way of reminding people of the other rich resources available to them.
Creating complementary exhibits and programming would allow us to explore common themes of interest to our community from a variety of perspectives. Consider, for example, my Quad Cities, "joined by a river," in the words of a long-ago tourism slogan. What might joint programming on the theme of the Mississippi River look like?
Each facility has unique resources. Libraries and local historical societies on both sides of the river have a wealth of photographs, county and city histories, maps, and diaries to draw on for displays. Local museums have steamboat memorabilia, exhibits on local flora and fauna, and river-themed local art. The Children's Museum could display river projects by children or appealing to children's curiosity and delight. Each facility could exhibit its own riches, in both physical and digital exhibits, and link to related exhibits by the other agencies.
The shared programming opportunities are equally rich. Local colleges have faculty who understand the region from different disciplinary perspectives. There are engineers and biologists and historians, as well as local businessmen, river volunteer organizations, parks and recreation staff, local tourism officials, the Corps of Engineers, and the Rock Island Arsenal, who could each bring their unique knowledge to discussions about shared public concerns like flood mitigation, or the future of the dams on the upper Mississippi, or tourism, or the building of a new bridge. Such multi-faceted discussions might even elevate public discussions by bringing a more complex understanding to hotly-argued local issues. The programming could be permanently captured in digital recordings and transcripts available from a joint-project web site.
While we're at it, we could invite local schools, colleges, and charities to participate, as well as businesses like bookstores and galleries that have similar interests. There could be student essay competitions, or special art projects, or tie-ins with units in science or social studies classes. All these agencies could even participate jointly in a "one city one book" project; Life on the Mississippi seems like one obvious possibility.
And that's just one theme; there are many others possible in my town, including projects coordinated with the annual celebration of native son Bix Beiderbecke, with its attendant jazz festival. We each do some of this themed programming now, individually, but we could do be doing it systematically, on an ongoing basis.
Those are some things my community could do. How about yours? What local topics could you and your logical partners work together on?
Coordinating such projects would require a lot of planning, and a lot of thinking outside the box our separate funding usually keeps us in. But I think it would pay off for all of us if we routinely remind our own customers of related public resources they might not be aware of; if we steer library users to the museums, and the museums steer their users to us, we both gain patrons and supporters.
I believe such shared activity would have a wonderfully unifying effect on the community. It could give present and potential residents a sense that their town is worth living in, because it's vividly alive, with ideas, books, music, history, art -- and interesting minds and public organizations that care about those things
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COOL QUOTE:
[T]he new neighborhood library functions as a kind of community center, a place where people get to know one another, where communities find themselves. The book discussions, readings and classes, the homework help after school, the nods and hellos people exchange when they see each other at the library for the second or fifth or twentieth time, the librarians greeting people by name, and even the artwork that reflects the talents and interests of the neighborhood all contribute to the connections that bind people in community. Death-of-the-library scenarios define libraries as information repositories. If they were no more than that, then their eventual displacement by more convenient electronic repositories would make perfect sense. But the library is a gathering place, too, like an old town square or the corner grocer. People may go to the library looking mainly for information, but they find each other there.
Robert D. Putnam. Better Together:Restoring the American Community. 2003.
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