It’s sure been a whirlwind couple of days. On Tuesday, a project that’s been brewing in our heads for quite some time now launched. Buffy tweeted, blogged, Facebooked, Ninged, and generally blasted out the information about our project.
And boy, it’s been kind of awesome to see the response. Most people we contact say yes to our request to say a few words about the future of school libraries.
We had to think hard about what we wanted to get out of this project. To be sure, we wanted to do something that had a collective feel. Though we’d shoulder the bulk of the responsibility for shepherding the individual essays into a collected volume, chose the areas for discussion, and set the submission guidelines, we decided to take a democratic approach when it came to who was included in the volume.
One of the things that excites me most about eBooks is the possibility of shattering the restraints of size, word count, and length that print publications require. Too long or too short, and it won’t bind properly and/or has to charge a certain cost in order to recoup copyediting and printing costs. And so we agreed that if we were really committed to a participatory culture in our libraries and classrooms, we would take everyone who agreed to format their work according to our guidelines (which were mostly about making the essays ready-to-publish so we could minimize time spent on layout) as long as they didn’t point fingers, muckrake, or flame others.
This is, of course, extremely scary. It means that although we anticipate getting entries that will make our hearts sing and our pulses race, it means we could also get entries that reflect mindsets that we don’t agree with.
It reminds me of those political rallies where the stage is crammed with dignitaries and party leaders. Everybody is there to sing the same song and to agree. It’s tidy, and it’s politically necessary, but it’s not necessarily democratic.
Democracy is messy, isn’t it? And so we know, don’t we, that this will be a very different kind of book. It will be messy. Probably a bit chaotic. And yet, ultimately, we hope that it is the very cacophony that will make it compelling.
Just today, I heard from one librarian who is planning to write in free verse. And another voice from general education will join us. We have feelers out to a few publishers.
Come and join us — the conversation about the future of school libraries is too important for your voice to be missing.
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PS – I usually blog over at the SLM blog. Hop on over!
