WWW.LIBRARIESLIVE.COM
Digital Media is the Message
While there are a wide variety of worthwhile suggestions, strategies, and approaches to expanding, enhancing, and enlivening the offerings and activities of our libraries, the focus of the Libraries Live program is limited and focused on a primary proposition: the universal magnetism of music. Music today is a powerful presence and attractor in all walks of life and learning to make music and music videos is one of the most persistent dreams of tens of millions of kids across the world. Millions of U.S. teens (13-17) are making their own music every day. TikTok music videos are now more pervasive and widely used, distributed, and shared by them than thru similar activities on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and Twitch. Most importantly, a rapidly emerging trend is that millions of these short videos are more focused on demonstrating, teaching, and training their viewers on a wide variety of subjects and skills rather than on the earlier more trivial and escapist content. In addition, tens of millions of adults are also actively engaged in creating daily digital media as a new and highly flexible revenue source and, in many cases, as a form of alternative employment.
While the students can learn and experiment with some programs and systems on their own phones (and make their “beats”), the next steps up in terms of preparation, quality, equipment, production, and professionalism are largely beyond their individual training and financial resources and are only rarely available in their local junior high and high schools. There are already local libraries in other cities like Boston and San Jose that are creating recording studios to address this need (See https://www.sjpl.org/teenhq-record.) but the larger objective here is to create a template and scalable model that can be used throughout the country. This is the primary opportunity which Libraries Live wants to seize along with our Illinois libraries as a tool and path to encourage and incent digital “musicians” of all ages to return to their local libraries in order to take advantage of upgraded and more professional equipment and facilities in order to work on their own projects and to work collaboratively with other peers, musicians, mentors, and educators to create all kinds of digital media.
Music, music videos, podcasts, PSAs, documentaries, and other educational and vocational materials (including self-published material such as blogs) would all be part of the explosion of new content made possible by the Libraries Live program. We believe that the shortest path to scalable and long-term success is not to persuade patrons to change their behaviors or their interests, but to enable and enhance their ability to pursue their given goals, desires, and objectives at the library. We want to ride the horse in the direction that it’s already headed.
Kids today don’t just want to make music, they need to learn to understand and appreciate the preparation, perseverance, perspiration, and patience that it takes to craft and create music that they can be proud to share with their peers, parents, and the world. Much like teaching students to code, where which type of coding language they learn may be irrelevant in a couple of years, the thought processes, organizational skills, focused attention, and iterative (trial and error) practices are lifetime and lifelong capabilities which they will retain forever and build their futures and careers upon.
This is why the prospect of reactivating, enriching, and showering the libraries in a deluge of exciting new user-created and widely shared digital content as well as a continuing and substantial influx of new, returning, and reawakened patrons of all ages desiring to explore and employ the library’s novel and accessible tools and technologies to discover and create their own dreams is only an important part and the initial impact of the LL program.
To truly succeed, the program needs to serve not only the interests and objectives of the libraries, but those of the students and other patrons as well and especially those desires, needs and interests which can be awakened and directed toward these individuals’ long-term livelihoods. Digitally oriented vocational training of millions of highly motivated and excited teens is the slightly subversive silver lining of the LL program. We want kids who can’t wait for the school day to end so they can get back to their “real” work at the neighborhood library.