IL2009: Tuesday Morning Keynote: Libraries of the Future: Places of Desire
Paul Holdengraber was interviewed by Erik Boekesteijn. Paul was recruited from Los Angeles to New York Public Library to be the Director of Public Programs (LIVE from the NYPL). Instead of writing the whole talk, I wanted to just pull out some excellent quotes from Paul, who is an amazing and inspiring speaker.
“Most of what I learned I learned ouside of school.”
“For my boys, I hope that the teachers can’t get to the button called curiosity, because if they can get to it they can turn it off.”
“Part of what I do, to try to give a word to what I do, I am making a very private experience, the experience of reading, public.”
“For at least a part of this group, you read a book…a teacher or a professor told you of a book…and you were transformed by it.”
“Sometimes meeting people in the flesh can be a source of great disappointment.”
“It isn’t important that you know how to write, but how to talk.”
“…the cognitive theatre…”
“I want to make the library irresistable.”
“After a while of hearing people at the library say “at the library we don’t…,” I asked to meet ‘the library.’ Can I have lunch with ‘the library’?”
“You want to make an event people will go to. Why would you want to make ean event people don’t want to go to?”
“It’s so hard to encourage some of the great writers, thinkers, musicians, and poltiicians to come to the library.”
“You have to be passionate about what you do.”
“You have to get to know your audience, who they are, what they desire, and then learn how to offer them something that they don’t expect.”
“Make it a happening; make it an event; make it less desperate than some of the other programs that libraries are doing.”
“I think to some extent this desire to get a young audience at all costs may be slightly worrisome to invest in what they already know instead of having the library be a little something different than what is on the streets. Sometimes it feels a little desperate. Does gaming lead to another activity? You have statistics showing that young people are in the library, but what are they doing in the library? What are they reading? What are they getting from the library?”
“I love the resonance and wonder that a book affords you in the company of no one else by yourself.”
“One should approach some reading with fear and trembling, because obviously there is just you and the work. There is not the entertainment factor. That private experience prepares you for work, and for the ultimate journey.”
They also showed a clip from Paul’s interview with Antonio Lohme and another with John Lithgow. Illustrated on the screen as the author was talking — very nice! As Erik said, what Paul does is an “example of how you can make something exciting, something surprising, from an interview…to make it something that the public wants to go to.”
IL2009
December 3rd, 2009 at 10:37 pm
I agree with Paul’s comment on “getting a young audience at all costs”. I have questioned the same thing — even it we have a lot of kids come to the library on a gaming night, can we call it successful. I too feel it “a little desperate”.
To me, the library has been “irresistible” all the time. I want to see how Paul makes it irresistible to more New Yorkers.