On Pushing the Cause of Public Libraries

It has been close to three weeks since I last posted a blog. I had been immersed writing an advocacy paper on reader development and about mainstreaming public libraries. I hope it is good enough excuse.

The past days, I interviewed two colleagues working for public libraries here in South Cotabato relative to the paper I am writing. Both expressed rather depressing realities of the diminishing motivation to push the cause of public libraries because efforts seem to go nowhere and the usual constraints due to lack of funds that paralyze their creativity. I perfectly understand where thay come from. It must be very difficult where they are -- boxed in by seemingly hopeless circumstances. It is a bit easier where I am, looking at them from afar, trying to articulate their concerns and trying to lift my fingers to be able to help them in any way I could. Then I realize that there is a difference between being there where these public librarians are and looking, empathizing and articulating their realities from the outside. There definitely is more to the advocacy on mainstreaming public libraries than just writing and delivering papers at conferences.

Then just now, I have spoken with a former colleague from the Notre Dame of Marbel University Mr. Arvin M. Tejada who is much into the same advocacy as I am. Talking to him lifted my spirits, kept me motivated and all the more challenged to push this common advocacy. Never mind if to others these may seem as time-consuming, old-fashioned, or even hopeless pursuits. It's admirable how librarians like Arvin can choose not to be constrained nor limited by circumstances, no matter how hard it is to navigate just to get the cause of public libraries to the mainstream. It is always a choice.

I wish there were more fellow Mindanao librarians with a heart and passion for community development work like those I have spoken and interviewed, so we can pull our resources and capacities together in order to push this advocacy far enough to be felt and understood.

On Embracing Change and Trusting the Future

Embrace the change. Trust the future.

In a recently-concluded Strategic Planning I attended, we were asked to write down our thoughts after the first day’s session. I had written down three, but the one that caught the facilatator’s attention was that I wrote about embracing change and trusting the future. The following day, she flashed it on screen and invited everyone to adopt it as their mantra.

Now I am starting to ask what exactly prompted me to write it, and if I can consistently live by this mantra myself.

Which brings me to a favorite book I read some thirtreen years back. The book, The Songs of Salanda and Other Stories of Sulu, was written by anthropologist H. Arlo Nimmo. It was an anthology of short stories about his own personal encounters while immersed working with the people of Sulu. Towards the end of the last chapter he wrote that, “change is relentless in its demands, and there are casualties.”

In my whole lifetime, I saw myself navigating through so many life changes, some I managed to survive unscathed, the others I either helplessly resisted or tried hard to control. Some of these changes consumed me; the others made me fly high. Change is demanding, indeed; and trusting a constantly metamorphosing future requires faith greater than one’s own.

When I came home to Mindanao in 1998, I planned of working full-time in a big academic institution. I thought of seeing myself either heading an academic library until retirement, or becoming a full-time faculty of Library Science, or working both as a librarian and a faculty on a part-time basis. I did have a taste of life as an academic, but it was not meant to be for long. Certain circumstances would always get in the way. It took a while before it dawned on me I was probably never meant to work as I planned. I was not going to be a librarian working around a physical space called the library. I embraced this twist in my career plans and went with the flow.

Today, I use the same skills I learned back in college doing other things. I do not manage an academic library and do not organize books. Instead, I make sense of and organize organizational (explicit) content, and devise a system for capturing human interactions and tacit knowledge. It's a pretty interesting job, a huge canvass from which I can still learn many other things. I still am passionate about libraries, but this time, my personal interest is geared towards public libraries. I still long to one day see more public libraries built, and more children reading inside these libraries.

So when asked about my profession, I’d gladly say I am a librarian. But not in the strictest sense. I still teach, although I am not quite a teacher, either. I am a metamorposed librarian. As soon as I embraced change, I have experienced what I did not plan -- i.e., to be in professions not exactly my own but which require the skills I have been taught in library and information science school. I wonder if this would have happened if I resisted change. Looking back now, I am glad I refused to be a casualty of my own limited notion, or of the changing information landscape. I think that as soon as we embrace change and trust the future, we'd be brought to where we can be our “best” and where we can give the most profound meaning to our existence.

Change, I learned, is pointless to resist. I have no option but to live by the mantra. I know that I shared it both as an invitation and an inspiration.

Lamentations Over the Death of a Public Library

For somebody who looks upon the public library as a community's intellectual lifeline and an agent of social inclusion, the death of the Cebu City Public Library is indeed a blow to Philippine public librarianship with the strength equivalent to a million Manny Pacquiao punches! It does not make any sense at all to justify the death of a public library with the birth of a museum. Both institutions should co-exist in a community. While public libraries and museums are both learning spaces serving the same community, they offer rather different goods, and serve different purposes. To the intellectually starved, especially those coming from weak economic backgrounds who are unable or cannot afford to access information in schools and cyberspace, the public library is a sanctuary, a last bastion of hope. To declare a public library dead, therefore, is like cutting off the intellectual lifeline that binds a significant percentage of the (marginalized) populace to the information it needs to equip itself in order to better navigate this rapidly-changing world.

And so, I am one with those who lament the death of the Cebu City Public Library.

I lament the utter disregard for Philippine laws, in particular, R.A. 7743, which mandates local government units to establish congressional, provincial, city, municipal libraries and reading centers at the barangay (village) level. In Southern Mindanao where I come from, we are lobbying hard for the LGUs compliance to this 15-year old mandate. We are groundworking (and groundworking religiously) to mainstreaming public libraries, and bringing them back to the consciousness of Southern Mindanaoans.

I lament the sheer insensitivity on the part of the proponents (Education Consultant and the LGU at that!) to decide unilaterally over a matter that requires intensive public consultations. There is no word to describe the wanton disregard by the proponent for the community that the Cebu City Public Library served amidst its dwindling resources and lack of government support.

I lament the fact that few seem to understand that a public library can be many things to many people -- source of information, learning and collaboration space, experience.
All of these, therefore, die unjustly with the closure of a public library.

I lament the fact that few seem to understand that Library Hubs are not libraries. They are transitory depositories of books to be "loaned" to what they call the satellite libraries in public elementary schools. Therefore, a Library Hub (or two library hubs for that matter) cannot replace one public library that already served thousands in its 69-year existence. Satellite libraries cater primarily to its own constitutuents. The notion of "attachment" connotes ownership, boundaries or parameters that automatically deter other community members who are not in school, or are elderly from using this facility. Satellite libraries are simply are not as socially-inclusive a learning space as public libraries are.

It is sad that just as our neighboring Southeast Asian countries are scrounging for funds to build public libraries, we are doing otherwise. Talk about governance.

Mindanao Librarian to Conquer Hanoi, Vietnam

14 January 2009, I received notification that the abstract I submitted for the 14th Congress of Southeast Asian Librarians (CONSAL XIV) was among those selected for this prestigious conference of librarians/information professionals. I am both excited and challenged to take with me to a wider audience issues such as community librarianship, social inclusion and forging multi-stakeholder partnerships. Writing the full paper has not yet commenced, but ideas are flowing, even if they are just in my head at the moment.

Of Christmas, 2008 and 2009

I must say that 2008 ended with dreams waiting and wanting to come true. And I welcome 2009 in the same light. I sealed 2008 with wishes for myself and my family, my work and my advocacy. While I am not comfortable disclosing these wishes in cyberspace, suffice it to say that these were wishes & hopes for better days ahead for all of us.

I visited home in Tacurong on the first day of 2009. The house used to be a seat of laughter and fun when I was a child. An aging aunt and mother now calls it home. I missed my Papang and little brother Francis as I smelled and savored the old stuff that remain so familiar and close to my heart. I saw (albeit only in imagination) my father tending his backyard garden and relished the thought of being able to talk to him again, about Christmas, about things I wish for. I saw Francis merry-making with his self-made tambol humming his self-composed tune in a world only he knows and understands. My brother loved this Season so much! Then it came to me I was just imagining people and things. And I begin to feel a huge sense of loss.

Christmas to me now has become more of remembering or going back to the past -- to the child's world I used to know. It also has become a reminder of Christmases past, and the many years I saw Christmas unveil its different faces. It is too profound to dig deeper into the abyss of my emotions that come with this Season. What I am most sure of is that there is something so spiritual about Christmas that hardly surfaces against this very flimsy and material world.

I thank 2008 for the days I saw my family finding simple joys -- Papee immersed exposing his thougths on cyberspace via his blog, my son Ivan Anakin in his make-believe war while I am just whiling time away either reading or watching The Buzz and Showbiz Central.

I thank 2008 for the occasional visits of my mother, my brother Dino and his family, for occasions that allow me to see my other brother Geoffrey and his kids, for visits to my in-laws.

I thank 2008 for the many times we've conquered stressful situations -- of family members getting sick or problematic, of complicated people in the workplace, of frustrations that come with not getting what we wish or hope for.

In many ways, I am grateful for everything about 2008. I welcome 2009 just as grateful as I was in 2008. I hope this year will be kind.

Happy New Year!