I really like what you are saying in this post, and I think I sort of understand what you are saying about an opportunity to be a citizen.

Sort of like what a good police department does. People do not view a good police department as a business they pay to keep crime down. A good police department inspires its community to create neighborhood watch groups, raise funds to buy lights in parks and other things to promote a healthy community.

Most people seem to understand that their needs are being served when they participate with the police, or fire, or ambulance or whatever.

I think people (librarians included) need to be reminded that it is a library not a librar’me’ (sorry, that last bit was way too lame to keep to myself).

thanks, librar’me’, i love it. I wonder, actually, if police and fire etc have experienced the same attitude from citizens in their communities. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that that was the case…that in some communities people do, on some level, see the police department as a business they pay to keep crime down. Actually, the massive push toward privatization of services (libraries, schools, fire, prisons, police, military, you name it) is directly related to this. if you don’t see yourself as a citizen in the first place, you don’t see what you’re losing when you give over control of public institutions to private businesses. Because, ignoring any questions of whether or not privatization actually makes anything run more efficiently (recent experience and research would suggest not but we don’t have to get into that), that “citizen” role is precisely what you give up….well, j. just told me dinner was served so i’d better go eat.

aces, this is great.

do you think it is feasible, then, to come up with some characteristics of “citizen service” and list compare/contrast to customer service?

one of the reason *i* enjoy libraries because they are public spaces and i think some citizen feel the same way, but it probably doesn’t go through everyone’s head. is it pessimistic for me to think you lucked out that you were talking to the right irate person when you gave your citizen pep talk?

i’m often an advocate of radical customer service (by whatever name) both in my library and out and about, mostly because i think we need to make libraries as easy to use as possible. part of this is making libraries part of people’s path of least resistance. i’d rather cause warm and fuzzy feelings by eating the cost of a $20 book than causing friction.

so if you have any notions about how citizen service can help with making things easier i’d really like to know.

mostly i’m afraid that things are so far gone and if we treat people as citizens in our libraries it’ll come off with some “we know what’s good for you” paternalism.

totally related, i think you’ll like this 20 minute TED talk by Kunstler on places not worth caring about: http://tinyurl.com/44xjfz

well, first, the easy question - yes, i was totally lucky that i was talking to the right patron when i gave my citizen talk. frankly, i remain stunned that that worked. part of it may have been how sincerely i meant it but, yeah, i think mostly that wouldn’t work.

the rest of it…man…i was worried someone would ask me for, you know, practical details. i guess i’m not prepared to provide a checklist/roadmap at the moment, this was more me thinking off the cuff about the decline of the citizen in the US than specific library stuff but i will say a couple of things that you’re sure not to like. One is that “citizen service” will almost by definition be less easy than customer service. I agree with you that libraries should be easy to use and there are a lot of lessons we can learn from customer service about doing that. But, actually, I’m not even sure that the “path of least resistance” is what we should be aiming for…i’ll try to expand on that thought at some point. To some degree I think that its largely about underlying philosophies and that on a day-to-day operations level excellent “citizen service” can/should look a lot like excellent “customer service”.

regarding paternalism…this is the tension right? wait til you read my next post which advocates an even more paternalistic approach! I guess when i get really honest with myself, and with y’all, i think we SHOULD be doing a certain amount of “we know what’s good for you”. I mean, isn’t that why we are professionals? Isn’t that part of our role? If our only role is stock popular books and make sure no one is ever anything short of happy and unchallenged I guess I don’t understand why there needs to be most librarians. Or maybe we want to know what’s good for them but we don’t want them know that we know what’s good for them? Secret, hidden expertise?

I agree, though, that libraries can’t take on this issue of declining feelings of citizenship alone or even first. In fact, I’m quickly talking myself back into being discouraged because I have a truly hard time imagining a path away from consumer culture. But I really hope we don’t just reject that as a goal just because it’s easier to imagine how to make our libraries into bookstores and have everybody like us. Not to say I don’t want everyone to like us, that would be swell.

I think this is as good as an opportunity as ever to brainstorm what ‘good citizen service’ would be in comparison to ‘good customer service’.

Pulling from Rachel’s example, my first thought is “citizens recognize that a service is good for the community” vs. “customers recognize that a service is good for themselves”.

Aren’t there reams of data showing that people support libraries even when they aren’t the ones using them? There’s a standard belief that libraries are good for the community. It’s great to challenge that belief, but we can also embrace it, articulate it, build on it, and prove it.

I feel like a citizen when I vote, when I serve jury duty, when I give directions to a stranger, when I report an accident, and when we planted trees.

About the trees - in my neighborhood, lots of the older people have bars on their windows and doors. It’s a busy street, no one goes outside much, and drug dealers moved in on our corner. Thinking for myself, as a customer, we should have sold the house and moved - did we want to raise kids with those toothless guys hanging out all the time?

Thinking for the community, we planted two dwarf crabapples and spent a lot of time out front in the garden. Our neighbors came out to talk to us, and the dealers moved on. I like to pretend they got other jobs. Maybe it was because of our trees, maybe not, but feeling and acting like citizens was key to our happiness and pride in our neighborhood.

In this way, citizenship is also about leaving the control of the environment in the hands of the people, and not an overseeing institution. I didn’t believe that calling the police would help anyone.

There’s a lot of web 2.0 in the ‘control of the environment’ idea, but in terms of libraries I think of book suggestion forms - when I suggest something at my library, they buy a copy for me and 1-51 other people. Also, we act on patrons complaints about other patrons looking at porn.

Just brainstorming still, citizen service means making public records, and protecting those records when doing otherwise would infringe on citizens’ freedom of inquiry.

What else?

see, i like this, i throw a rant-y complaint out there and then let Caleb do the heavy-lifting of actually making it a coherent and useful argument! sweet! Have i told you lately how much i like you? I think your tree planting metaphor is perfect. The customer approach would definitely to have sold the house and moved. Or maybe to noisily demand that someone take care of the problem for you, after all you’re a taxpayer and you’re paying for safe neighborhoods. And, of course, that’s not wrong. But the citizen also sees that they have a role in that process.

Like Aaron, I tend to think that libraries could probably do themselves some good by “eating the cost of the $20 book” rather than having someone angry. My goal would be that the person wouldn’t WANT to get out of paying the $20 in the first place because they saw the book as a common good.

Like I said before, a lot of what citizen service is is similar or the same as customer service in what it “looks” like but has a different philosophy underneath it. Privacy is another good example. Caleb, you and I have spoken a lot about how to make patron privacy a conversation. In my ideal world we’d have circulation systems that would allow patrons to access their complete borrowing history and allow the library to access none of it. Technically, that is completely possible. Giving the patron control over their level of privacy. But not leaving it there, our MARKETING should be about free inquiry. It should be about WHY privacy matters in a participatory democracy. I gotta think there’re ways to make that sexy to people who, unlike me, aren’t civics geeks?! Gah, lots of reference questions, must run!

It’s a mutual admiration society, remember?

I thought of this also, that citizenship is knowing the ‘rights and responsibilities’ of individuals and communities and … government?

Navigating that territory is hard and part of why I think libraries are poised to do it well is that for government agencies, they aren’t very stately. And more than that, not all of them are government agencies.

So perhaps citizen service is when an institution serves an individual as a member of a community.

This is incomplete - libraries aren’t the only ones that do this. Certainly the sports industry uses this tactic (’Red Sox Nation’), but I also see it as advertising for all kinds of things.

So there is much to sort out, but I think the whole idea rights the world for me just a little.

[...] Rachel said: “So, yeah, when I hear all the stuff about trying to make our libraries more like businesses and trying to make our patrons more like customers it makes me despair.  Despair because, for one, if we seriously think we can compete with commercial booksellers at their game we’re seriously effing deluded but more importantly, I despair that we would even want to.” [...]