How big is your mission?
Last Christmas I was evangelizing about Flickr to a local library. I stole a photo from her Recent Photos page and uploaded it to my Flickr account to demonstrate tagging, commenting, notes, sets and all that great stuff. Important holiday festivities then beckoned and we drifted away.
I all but forgot about the photo until someone favorited it in the beginning of July. Days later I received an email:
hey - an out-the-blue question here - did you work at the chocorua public library, ’round 2002-03?
someone just sent me an email about some tamworth-related photos i had uploaded, and it sent me off on a wild tangent of tamworth + chocorua + nh, etc, cluster searches; this led me to your delightful george-as-grover cleveland photo. clicking thru your stream, saw your photo which looked really familiar. my parents live right in chocorua village, and when i was in high school i was in and out of the chocorua and tamworth libraries all the time, abusing their ILL services. my name’s colin. thought i’d say hi.
This touched off a series of email exchanges between Colin and me about our respective efforts getting non-profits to recast their understanding of the internet from publish-a-site-and-they-will-come to participate-and-integrate. Describing his effort on this front with an Indian NGO, Colin actually used the words “the director just_didn’t_get_it”.
The interesting thing here is that the geographic community that both Colin and I existed in and which we have both departed from is exactly what provided the context for a renewed contact years later. I don’t think any libraries would argue that their primary mission is to serve a community - but what happens when people leave it? Is your job as a library done, then? I would tender that those people carry the community with them and it’s still within the libraries mission to do what they can to serve us.
Tags: chocorua, Colin Ashe, community, flickr, library, mission, non-profits, tamworth