Librarian: Let's stay together, despite technology's isolation

In the age of technology, we still need each other to help navigate all the information, a librarian says. And understanding what makes us tick can help us work together better.

By Michael Kruse, Times Staff Writer
Published February 14, 2008

Librarian Kevin Griffith cares about how people connect with each other, especially during our high-tech age, and our fear of losing that connection. He recently taught a session at the Tampa Bay Library Consortium on the Enneagram personality test, which he says will facilitate connections.
	[Stephen J. Coddington | Times]

"For it is inescapable that every culture must negotiate with technology, whether it does so intelligently or not. A bargain is struck in which technology giveth and technology taketh away."
-- Neil Postman, Technopoly

TAMPA - Kevin Griffith, a bearded, bespectacled librarian from Hudson, went to the Tampa Bay Library Consortium not long ago to teach a training session. A flyer on the wall announced other "think tanks" throughout the year about blogs, podcasts, vodcasts, gaming and instant messaging. Kevin's session, though, was about something else altogether.

His session, he told the 16 assembled librarians, was about how we connect to people.

"Our mortal fear is losing that connection," he told them. "It means everything to us."

Kevin is an interesting guy, and a good, willing conversationalist. And he's into big ideas. How's the weather? The latest with Britney? No thanks. He likes the huge stuff - why we are who we are, why we do what we do.

The session, specifically, was about a personality test called the Enneagram. This, he told his fellow librarians, is a way to think about how certain people tick, and therefore have good relationships with co-workers, to play office politics when necessary, to better serve the users of the library - and also to grapple with the question Kevin asks a lot.

How, in libraries, and everywhere else, for that matter, can we use all these new technologies without compromising the dignity and authenticity of humanity?

"A lot of this is going to pay off later," he said.

- - -

There was a time, not that long ago, when people said libraries were on their way to becoming obsolete because of the Internet, and Google, and online databases, and all these new possibilities that seemed to lessen the need to ever talk face-to-face with another human being.

That hasn't happened. What's most remarkable, though, is that it hasn't happened at all.

According to a recent survey by the American Library Association, library use is up, everywhere and among all kinds of people, and that has been the case for a decade.

People come for the computers and the free wireless.

They come for tax information and legal and medical information.

They come for the graphic novels, the manga, the free movies and popcorn in the evenings, the after-hours dances for teens, the databases like FedStats and General Business ASAP.

They come, still, for the books.

All this is happening even as libraries have made a sea-change shift from old book repository to new "information commons," in the phraseology of Hudson librarian Sue Griffiths. Go to the parking lot in the Hudson branch about 8:56 on a weekday morning, and watch all the people sitting in their cars or on the benches outside, waiting for the doors to be unlocked at 9.

That includes traditional librarygoers - senior citizens, of course, and parents and their children. But the group that uses libraries the most is surprising: Generation Y, ages 18 to 30.

And of all the people who use the library, seven of 10, according to the survey, ask a librarian for help.

"Since I started," said Ann Coppola, a librarian in Hudson since 2005, "our questions have increased."

"Definitely," said Nancy Fredericks, the branch manager in Land O'Lakes. "The amount of information is huge, just so vast, you need someone to help you navigate it."

The point is that the more technology, the more necessary people have become.

"There's something about seeing a person," Fredericks said, "that makes it real."

- - -

Kevin Griffith is 47. He grew up in Akron, Ohio, the son of a nurse and a salesman. Before he got his bachelor's degree, from the University of South Florida, at 37, he was in the Air Force and worked in maintenance and security at a hospital up North. His wife is an elementary school teacher. They met in church. His co-workers say he's a good boss and a good listener.

The way Kevin sees it, librarians should be the bridges between what he calls the software and the "wetware" - the technology and the people who have to use it.

In his session at the library consortium, he wrote, in squeaky marker, on the dry erase board.

ENNEAGRAM BENEFITS:

1. CREATES SELF AWARENESS & SELF ESTEEM.

2. CREATES RELATIONSHIPS THAT ARE BASED ON UNDERSTANDING AND DIGNITY.

Kevin got interested in the test three or four years ago. The Enneagram splits people into nine main personality types. The types have names like the helper, the achiever, the individualist, the observer, the guardian, the peacemaker and others.

He doesn't get paid by Enneagram or anybody else to promote it. He's not so much concerned with the test or the labels. It's the idea behind them. A personality test is one way to better understand where people are coming from, he said, and if you use it, then your relationships can be better than they are now.

He doesn't have a MySpace page. The kids who know him at the library ask him why. He says he doesn't want to sell himself that way. Doesn't want to turn himself into a product. A friendship on MySpace, he says, is like trying to get to know someone through a pane of glass: You can see, but you can't touch.

He wonders what human relationships are going to be like a generation from now.

Here is where librarians might be on a frontline of sorts. They're middlemen, they're sensemakers, they're filters of information - or can be. Technology is an important tool, he said, but it's people who need to decide how to use it best.

Hence Kevin's sessions.

He ended this one. He gave everybody his card.

"Contact me," he told them.

He got back into his car and started the drive back up to Pasco.

"We focus so much on the stuff that changes," he said. "If we center ourselves, ground ourselves in the things that don't change, I think that's the best way we can meet these challenges.

"We're spending a lot of time training people to use the technology," he said. "I want to make sure we don't lose track of the human element."

Remember the question?

How can we use all these new technologies without compromising the dignity and authenticity of humanity?

The answer is to keep asking the question.

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or (813) 909-4617.

[Last modified February 13, 2008, 15:46:21]