John Krivak Interview Part 2

John Krivak Interview Part 2

PGCMLS Oral History

Interview with John Krivak about his experience as a Librarian III in Adult Services in the library system. Part two of two.

PGCMLS

Special Collections Staff

Apr 10, 2024

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English

Digital audio

200012

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52:20 Min

Project:  PGCMLS Oral History Project
Chapter: John Krivak Interview part 2
Date: Apr 10, 2024
Participants: 
Interviewer: Paul Moreno. 
Interviewee: John Krivak   

• 00:00 Paul: Would you be able to tell us more about the work that Adult Services Department at Hyattsville branch did while you worked there? We have heard that there was extensive outreach work in the community. Could you tell us about that? 

• 00:16 John: Yeah. And the library systems, during my time there was always interested in outreach, officially. And branches were like either eager to jump on that and do a lot of it. Or, oh my god, it's one more thing they're telling us we have to do. It's extra work. What's the minimum we can do to tick that box? And yeah. But I came out of bookmobiles, which was Extension Services, which was outreach. They were administered by one of the great librarians of the generation before me, one of the great African American librarians of the generation before me, Honore Francois. And when I was on bookmobile, not only did we go to the neighborhoods, but we went to Boys Village, which was a juvenile detention center down in Cheltenham. And I was on that assignment with a partner. And another two of the librarians went to the Edgemeade, which was an adult residential center for people with emotional handicaps. And when they disbanded the bookmobiles, one of the things we lost with those services, because those were never picked up by the branches. But so I was always personally dedicated to outreach and found that the Librarian III at Hyattsville was always willing to let me try things, even if they're things that she hadn't thought of. She was never, Oh, well, no, it wasn't my idea. So it won't work. Or it wasn't my idea. So who do you think you are? She was like, Okay, yeah, I see where you're going with that. Give it a try. If it works, it works. It doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't. So we did all different kinds of outreach. And of course, back in those days, the there were three age levels in the large branches, not just two. So instead of adult and children's, there was adult, young adult and children's. And the young adult were primarily doing, their outreach was primarily to the high schools. And was usually in the form of what they used to call booktalking. Where a booktalk is a librarian taking a book, a young adult book, a teen book, could be fiction, could be nonfiction, boiling it down to three minutes summary that make you want to read it. A real art, but I think it's been lost. I don't think the library does booktalking anymore. And I'm not partly because they're no longer separate young adult departments, their children's departments that include service to the high schools, or their adult departments that include service to the high schools. I know Oxon Hill, at least last I heard the their youth services person or teen services person, had moved into their adult department. But she's since retired, Josephine Ford was her name. She was a good woman. So I don't know what they may have reorganized after her retirement.

• 04:00 Paul: So that book talks.
• 04:00 John: While the young adult librarians went and did book talks at the high schools, we in adult recognized that there was another need that high school students had, some of them, particularly the college bound ones, how to do research. And so we taught research classes for high school students, usually through the history departments. And that, that again, that tied to the Maryland Room, although not necessarily depending on what has or hasn't been retained, always to the Prince George's room. Generations of Northwestern High, high school students did research papers on child labor along the C & O canal. That was up in Montgomery County and Frederick County, not in Prince George's. But we had the resources to make that because there were some really interesting books. 

• 05:01 Paul: Yeah, because it was Maryland Room. 
• 05:04 John: So the fact that it happened in up the river towards, towards Cumberland, that it happened in, in Montgomery, Frederick, Washington County didn't matter. There was still local history. Kids got interested in that because the whole child labor thing is inherently of interest to kids as a topic. Would you when you're in high school, would you rather think about and research and write about people your age that had to leave school to go and work on canal boats? Or would you rather write about coal miners who are, who are now in my grandparents' day, both my grandfathers had to leave school to go work in the coal mines, but that was not in Maryland, at age 9 and 13. So, there was that kind of outreach research skills for the high school students. We did because part of, part of it was expertise that I developed as far back as working at Oxon Hill. We done did a lot of business related outreach. We would go to our Rotary Clubs, Kiwanis Clubs, whatever to tell the businessmen who went to those meetings to drink and socialize, but would have a 10 minute session with a guest speaker to tell them what we had to offer them because they didn't know. At that time we had a lot more resources, I think, than the library does now in terms of answering practical questions that business people face during conducting, growing, saving from going out of business, instead of conducting a business. So we did that, and then I got more ambitious than I should have been by this time. By this time, I was the III at Hyattsville. As the III at Hyattsville, by saying, hey, I want to do this for the countywide groups, which aren't necessarily in Hyattsville. They might be in Upper Marlboro, they might be in Laurel if they're not a countywide group at the BW Corridor Chamber of Commerce. I want to do this for a bigger audience. And I talked to the director at the time, before they called them CEOs, they were library directors.
• 07:44 Paul: Yeah, library directors
•  07:45 John: I still think of directors and said, you know, I want to do this, but are you willing to come with? Because they're going to say yes, if I ask them using your name, more often than they're going to say yes, if I ask them using my name. So, you know, you, you come, you do your thing. And then I'll do the, here's the sources. Here's the sources that you really need. Here's, you know, and she said, sure, you know, let's do that. So we did that for about two years in different, different groups. And I said

• 08:33 Paul: So what was the 
• 08:34 John: I think, I think this could be a full-time job for somebody. I'm doing this and I'm doing everything else I'm doing. And I think this could be a full-time job for somebody to, to organize these kinds of things. And she said, well, yeah, do you want to? And I said, no, I want to be a Librarian III at Hyattsville, but I know a guy, I know a guy. He, in fact, he's the guy that replaced me at Oxon Hill. I know a guy that would be perfect for it, Mark Robinson. So he was our first business librarian. He reported to, through a very short line within the administrative offices to the director. And so that outreach went from being a Hyattsville branch to a county wide to a specific position and held on for a while. And then they eliminated it. And again, you hit a lean budget here and things get lopped. Things that weren't necessarily unsuccessful get lopped because you can't afford to do everything. And so that, I wish that had come back under our last strategic plan and it did not. I think that a techmobile with some books with a business librarian that went to the businesses, to the industrial parks, to the business centers would be a great way of doing outreach. But that didn't make the cut in the last strategic plan. That's the last one I'll have input into. For what it's worth. So we did business oriented. We did outreach, of course, the most and probably the thing I'm most proud of is the outreach we did to the immigrant communities. And this went back to shortly after I got to Hyattsville. You know, when I was at Oxon Hill, there was a little pocket that had been there since the Second World War of Tagalog speakers that lived down in Fort Washington, but they were within the Oxon Hill library service area. But when I got up to Hyattsville, it's like, man, there's lots of people that would benefit, who's teaching the classes. And of course, we found out there were classes, there were English classes. Are those English classes coming to the library? Can we get them to come to the library? And this was at the time of the so-called boat people who were heavily present in the Hyattsville service area, especially the apartments down in what's called Chillum, down along Chillum Road, uh, Vietnamese and certain degree Cambodians and even some Laotians and Hmongs, people that had fled Southeast Asia because of the war and spent a couple years usually in refugee camps in Thailand and then eventually found their way here. So they escaped in the boats from their country of origin to Thailand because you could get there by boat and it was organized to bring over refugees from Thailand to the United States. Then they were the boat people. And…so I knew this guy that I had met at the library and then he revealed that he teaches English as a second language to the adults from that community. And I'm like, okay, well, they can use the library if we make them want to use the library. Can you bring one of your classes by and let me talk to them and let them see the library? They'll…and he said yeah, let's try it. So I did that in 77, the first year I was at Hyattsville, and after the first time I did it, he said, you know, that could have been good, except you don't know how to talk to people that don't speak English. Let me give you some tips and we’ll try this again. If it seems like you are saying one word at a time, you might be speaking slowly enough. So think of, think, you know, think one word at a time, speak one word at a time, your clarity is great, your speed is way too fast. Let me tell you also, when people are at the level of class that I'm teaching right now, everything happens in the present tense. You are using future tenses, you are using past participles, all of that stuff is harder than it needs to be for people to understand what you're saying. So change your, think about your sentences, change your sentences, make them present tense. You said to the people, when you come to the library again, to my class, when is a question word. Who, what, when, where? Question words. So as soon as they hear you say, when you come to the library again, they think you're asking them when they are coming to the library again, and they don't know, they don't know, you put them on the spot. Say next time you come, that's your way of keeping it in the present tense and avoiding the question. So he gave me all these tips on how to do it better, and I've taught them to many people over the years. Over the years it came to the point where we had more bilingual library staff than we ever had before. We had Las Dos Marias at Hyattsville, Maria Martinez* followed by Maria Escobedo*. Back in the early days, there were total three Spanish speaking librarians in the county, there was one in Beltsville named Luz, and then it became more beyond Spanish. But there's so many languages that there's always an opportunity for a monolingual English speaking librarian to learn communication skills, to speak with people from any language in ways that can be understood. It's just hard work. You have to listen to yourself. If you use library jargon, don't say, oh, don't use it. Say, no, I use that because that's what we call it, we call it the circulation desk. Explain it
• 16:22 Paul: Yeah
• 16:23: John: because it doesn't mean anything to say the circulation desk. But if you explain what it means, then it means something. Don't say…don't use idioms, because everyone uses idioms. Listen to yourself, and when you use an idiom, stop and explain it. And even give lessons on idioms, let people guess what a certain idiom means. What does it mean when I say, I'm going green? Where the library is going green. So that kind of thing, I think that the person who still works at Hyattsville that did a really good job of learning how to do monolingual English ESL conversations is Susie Misleh*. Yeah.

• 17:34 Paul: Yeah, good tips for the ESL services. Okay, so let me move on. So from branch reports, we also noticed that Hyattsville library had a program called CLIC Project. Can you tell us about more about it? 

• 17:48 John:  Yes, I can. And that was actually a system project. It wasn't initial-, initiated by the Hyattsville branch. That was an Honore Francois project. And so I, you know, the kind of branding name, CLIC!, and you're supposed to pronounce the exclamation point as if it were okay, so that things click in people's mind that the library has information about the community, it actually had three parts to it. One was something we were already doing, rebranding what we already had, we're doing, in references, information about the community. I mean, it's not like before the Clic! Project, if someone came in and said, how do I get a pothole fixed, we'd say, well, gee, that's not what we do, you know, we'd always know this is who you call to get a pothole to report a pothole and get them to come out and fix it, etc. So the Community Library Information Center is what CLIC! stood for. So part of it was rebranding that part of our reference service that gave information about needs in the community. Part of it was really spending time and energy on beefing up materials designed for use by adults who are learning to read English. And that was done, not necessarily with the ESL community in mind, as much as with adult illiterates who were born and raised in the United States, because there was still, now people question the figures that were thrown around back then as to the extent of adult illiteracy, but there's still some degree of people who go to school and fail to learn to read. And that's a barrier that can follow them through their life. But some people realize it, just like people go back and get GEDs that never graduated from high school, people that never learned to read by the third grade and stop paying attention to school by the sixth grade and are having trouble even keeping manual labor jobs, something clicks.

• 20:18 John: I want to learn to read. So, Adult New Reader collection was built. And when I started working with the people that were working with the boat people, we actually had the commitment to go out and find dual language dictionaries for Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong. And you know what, they didn't exist. 
• 20:53 Paul:Yeah
• 20:54: John: But there was an organization that was affiliated with Georgetown where I’d gone called the Center for Applied Linguistics. We sold them the idea of publishing those four dictionaries. And then they did exist. And we were probably the first public library to have them. So there was an Adult New Reader component that became an ESL collection de facto, just because so many more people learning English as a second language have come into the county since then. And the third component was a directory of organizations in Prince George's County, which was a printed directory updated annually of nonprofit organizations in Prince George's County. So it was a local directory that did not exist. And that was produced not by the branch staff, but by two women who worked in Honore’s office and in Administrative Office’s, they did all the verifying the contact information for… we fed them some ideas of who they should contact, but they did all, the all of the hard work of verifying and keeping up to date. 
• 22:14 Paul: Yeah
• 22:15 John: They would go back to these organizations four times a year. And so just, you know, just want to go over the information we have is it still, you know, do you still call yourself this? Is this still what you do? Is there anything you have added in your services? Is there anything you used to do that you don't do anymore? Is your phone number still this? You know, is your address still this? Are you still on such and such a bus route? Whatever. And this was a great directory. And it was actually sold to the public at the, at the branches and used heavily by all the reference desks at the branches. And it lasted for a while. And then for some reason, again, probably that year's budget, we stopped doing it. And part of the excuse for stopping doing it is, well, people are looking that stuff up on the internet. No, you can't. That had a section with all the HOCs in Prince George's County. You know what an HOC is? 
• 23:18 Paul:No. 
• 23:19 John: Okay, if you buy a house in many communities, there's a homeowners coalition or whatever. There's a, it's a quasi governmental thing, because they have some authority over what you can and can't do with your own residence.
• 23:33 Paul:Ohh 
• 23:35 John: But it's not the government. 
• 23:38 Paul: It’s a community resource
• 23:38 John: It's you, you sign, you know, allegiance to them when you buy the house, or you're not allowed to buy the house. And so there is a state agency, not a county agency that registers them. And then doesn't publish a directory of them. Can you find out from that state agency, the HOCs? Yeah, if you want to spend a week, could you find out from the directory of organizations? Like that. So, you know, people say, Well, this is, you know, this part of reference is, you know, no one needs that anymore. It's all on the internet. No, it's not organized the same way. It's not structured the same way. There's not the understanding of how and where to get to it. 

• 24:28 Paul: No, probably a lot of things are right now on the internet, but the people don't have the skill to find the correct information online 

• 24:37 John: Or it's in there, but it's in 15 different places. 
• 24:41 Paul: Yes. 
• 24:42 John: Whereas when there was such a thing as the library produced directory of organizations in Prince George's County, it was one place, one place that you went. 

• 24:52 Paul: Yeah, you don't have the time to gather all the information. Right now, an adult services librarian in New Carrollton is trying to make some directories. 

• 25:03 John Right, right, right. Nici*, Yeah
• 25:04 Paul: Yeah. So she takes that work to verify numbers, websites, because the website changes quickly. 

• 25:13 John: Wouldn't it be nice if the library system officially supported that the way it once supported the CLIC! Project?

• 25:23 Paul: Yeah, no, that is unofficial. It's just a project, a personal project of Nici. Okay. Can you talk about the art and skill, you're very famous on that, of reference and how you approach it through your career?

• 25:42 John: Well, I think in some ways, I've begun to do that through my answers to some of the other questions. What I haven't talked about very much, I said you have to listen to people and figure out what they need. There's an art, and it's not one I invented. It was invented by library school professors around the time I was in library school. So there's an art of negotiating a reference question from what the person first says to what they really mean, to what it's actually possible to do, and then coming to an agreement of this is what we'll try, this is what we'll work on. There used to be an old commercial, and it was set on a bookmobile. A woman came in, the bookmobile librarian's name was Marge. A woman comes in and says, Marge, I need a book on biology. Marge, being the best there ever was, opens a little desk drawer, pulls out a laxative. It wasn't that easy. But that was a real example of where someone might start in telling you what they were going for and what they actually needed to know. So that art of negotiating a reference question is very, very important. And it was taught to me in library school. It was taught officially by PGCMLS to all the information staff for many years under the rubric of BRS, Better Reference Service, or Basic Reference Service. Basic Reference Service can be better Reference service of how to talk to people, how to ask open questions, how to paraphrase and say, well, I think I'm hearing you say that that you need this. Is that right or is that not quite what you're going for? Well, that's not quite, but let's just talk about that a little bit more. Of then when you get to the end of things saying, did that really answer your question? Does that do it for you? Do we need to keep going? So there's that, which the library system used to officially teach for many years. I think that they do cover that in the LATI* program. And so anyone who's for those who aren't insiders, anyone who's hired as a Library Associate that hasn't been to a library school is required to take the LATI program, which is a statewide program. And for a while, Honore Francois, who I mentioned before, was one of the teachers in that. That was after my time. I was in the very second ever LATI. They used to call it the Walker Workshops because there was this guy from South Carolina named Tom Walker that used to run, that ran it. And it was invented the year before, the last year I was a page at New Carrollton the year before I started working on the bookmobile. And so they used, they kept teaching it there, but they no longer required, it used to be required that any Librarian I who was not required by the state to take LATI took an internal course on better reference service. Several of us were part-time instructors for that for over the years.
• 29:40 Paul: Yeah, right now
• 29:41 John:  So that's a big part of it. The other big part of it is kind of what I alluded to when I said, well, you know, not everything's on the internet, or it's everything may be on the internet, but the best way to find things isn't always on the internet. And if it is, it's not often even well-constructed web searching. It's knowing how information is structured, who gathers information. I want to know how much people spend on pizza in Prince George's county every year. Well, who would know that? The county wouldn't know it. They don't, they don't keep track of that. Is there a trade association that uses some market research and some formulas? Okay, let's look at who are the trade associations that deal with pizza, pizza restaurants, et cetera. So thinking through who would collect that, why would they collect that? And sometimes the answer is no one in their right mind would collect that because it would take this much effort and yield so little result. So sometimes you got to the bad news with customers of, well, we're just not going to be able to do that. But that kind of understanding this, the structure of information spheres is part of mastering reference work, and an underrated and hard to explain part. But it's there.

• 31:29 Paul: Okay, what words of advice would you give someone who was starting out and wanting to acquire and maintain strong skills in the area of reference? 

• 31:39 John: Okay, well, it depends. If they work for me directly, two things are going to happen just as part of their job. When they first came into my department, I had ready exercises that I developed over the years that every new person got to do, every new person got to do my exercises on how to find legal information. And that would go through the different levels of government, county, municipal, state, federal, would go through what the sources are, would go through how to figure out who did what, and then how to find it, and would go through the difference between statutory law and case law. Because we used to have a little law library at the Hyattsville Library. We didn't by the time that it was torn down. So we don't here now. But there would be business reference exercises. There would be a variety of things that I kept in my drawer. I think I gave most of them to Hannah* when I retired, that you would use with a new person. But also everyone, new, old, in between, I would do monthly reference exercises, reference questions, question of the month, question of the month. This is what someone's looking for. They heard there was a ghost in Old Hyattsville, somewhere along Oglethorpe Street. What's the story? There's a way to find that answer. 

• 33:29 Paul: Yeah. Sometimes Hannah makes some exercises like that. So just throw out a question for the whole area and try to gather information from everybody
• 33:37 John: And just let everybody answer them. And you better have a, you better know the answer yourself before you put it out there, or know an answer, a way of answering. You're going to find out different ways of answering, because different people have different approaches which can work or not. And that's part of it. Well, could we look at this way? Could we look at it that way? Was there once a newspaper called the Gazette that actually covered that part of the world at that level of human interest? Does that still exist? No. Is there an archive anywhere on the internet? Yeah. Is that searchable? Okay. So if a person did not work for me, I had some opportunity over the years to advise people throughout the system, primarily during the years in which the Maryland Ask Us Now!* service operated. And I had the honor of being among the group that organized that service. That was a 24 hour, seven day a week, because we partnered with international partners, live online chat service for reference, for reference work. And we started one year in July with a guest speaker. She came down from New Jersey, which had a statewide public library service, chat service. That wasn't 24/7, but they became a partner of ours. And she spoke to, we invited people from across different libraries. It was public, there was college, there was school, there was special. Then after that meeting, which got everybody all excited, let's do this. 10 of us were the committee to make it happen. We started working on that in July. February of the next year we opened. We hope that was like the best committee ever. I've never, I've been on a lot of committees. 
• 35:53 Paul: Yeah. 
• 35:54 John: No one got that much stuff done in nine months.

• 35:57 Paul: Yeah in the system, there's a lot of committees
• 36:00 John: We had to figure out who we could partner with. We had to figure out what software we were going to use. We had to figure out how we were going to get the grant money for it, because it was primarily grant money. We had to, so the libraries that joined only had to commit staff time. They didn't have to commit actual budget dollars. We had to figure out, you know, all the details of, and we went live in eight months after we started working on it. I had a special role on that committee. I was not the chair of it. That was a guy named Joe Thompson, who at that time worked for Baltimore County Public Libraries. He's been elsewhere. He's been director at places by now. But I was the person that brought each meeting to a close by saying, yeah, now we've all listened to each other and we've heard a lot of good ideas, but we got to get something done. Let's turn those into some action assignments for the next, for the next month. And who's going to do this? Who's going to do this? Who's going to do this? And so I was the enforcer that made meetings not be unproductive. So that was, I was very proud of that. But after that service opened, I was also the Prince George's liaison to it. So I got a chance to look at every question asked by a Prince George's customer to the whole worldwide group and every question answered by a Prince George's librarian from the whole worldwide group of customers. And to coach up a lot of people on reference work by seeing with a transcript in front of me, how they approached a particular question, to praise when praise was, was all that was needed. And you don't forget to do that if you're a good supervisor. I wasn't really their supervisor. I was their coach, more or less. But supervisors should be coaches as part of their role. But also to say when someone could have done better, that was really good for how far it went. But think about what would happen if you had done this. And so in general learning, general coaching, I was never Bobby Knight, to never, never threw a chair at anybody. I wanted to sometimes, but never did. And so, but the way I started out, also, I would advise other people who didn't work for me to start out, although it was better advice back in my day because it was a better newspaper back in my day, to to read the Washington Post every day, read all of it.

• 38:54 Paul: Wow. Really?
• 38:55 John: Yeah, if you don't, if you never read the business section, because you don't care about it, read the business section, read every article. If you never read when they talked about the fashion industry, because you don't care about it, read all the fashion articles in the style section. The Post isn't as good a newspaper as it used to be. They've cut a lot of, they've cut a lot of their sections out, but it's still good advice. What else to do with that? Say you read an article in the post, and it's about how some states are strengthening their building codes in reaction to climate change. But it doesn't mention Maryland at all. Make up your own reference question. What is Maryland doing? Or you're going to find out, Maryland doesn't have a state building code. It leaves it up to the county. So then you, of course, what does Prince George's County use for their building code? That's basic information that it's awfully good to know if someone walks into that information desk and asks you a question about the building code, that it's the county adopts these codes that are made by associations of code administrators, and then amends them when the county council likes to, feels like it, in a certain section of the county ordinances. 

• 40:28 John: And then you can go on to look at those and see if the newest addition has things that you can attribute to being a reaction to climate change. That's heavy duty reference librarianship. 

• 40:46 Paul: Yeah that is a very complex question
• 40:46 John: That's how you get really good at it is make up hard questions before they throw them at you. Because they ain't pitying you. If they come in and they ask us and you're like, well, I don't know. I never really thought about the building code. They're like, well, what the hell are you doing here? I want to know.

• 41:06 Paul: Yeah, like I said before, they are very demanding in that kind of thing.
• 41:10 John: So, and they have their right to be, you know, whether their taxes really come to us or not.

• 41:16 Paul: Okay, in your opinion, what makes public libraries important in our communities?

• 41:21 John: And again, I'm not going very much new, but I'll see if I can go a little bit deeper. I already talked about community building when we talked about special collections, but that's true of all library services, not just the special collections. Special collections pin that community building on knowledge of local history but the community building can be anything that brings us together, all the programs we do, all the materials we collect. So, because our motive is not a profit motive, we're not unless we artificially make it, some stand in for profit that really isn't. And say, well, we're going to go, at one point it used to be, everything was, we would be able to quote you on the first day of each month, what the circulation in the branch had been for the previous month. You can't do that anymore, because it's not an artificial value now of, you're better if you had 51,000 and they had 50. We always had the highest one by a little bit over. So you can artificially declare a profit motive, a quasi profit motive, but in real life, no, when a person comes to us, we're not figuring, well, what's in it for us, we're just figuring what's in it for them. And that's what makes it a community building institution. It enables people to participate as citizens, as informed citizens, it enables people to fulfill themselves as human beings by providing access to literature, access to information, access to community activities. At a deeper level, because I like to think about things deeply,  there's this concept called entropy. Came out of physical sciences really. And it's, it was the observation that over time, systems tend to wear down. Systems that operate at a certain high level, over time, the level at which they operate decreases. And that's, that's called the law of entropy came out of physical sciences. But then people started to apply it to communication science, and therefore to societies generally, and see the same things over time. Social groupings tend to erode, to wear down to what happened to the Mayans, what happened to the Romans, et cetera. 

• 44:26 John: The main way in communication science that one combats entropy is by information. Information replaces structures that are eroding, reinforces structures that are eroding. We do information. We did, I did information, partly to combat entropy, to make the, to make the community not erode. So that's, that's, that's way deep, but think about it. 

• 45:13 Paul: Okay, yeah. Good. So finally, is there anything that we didn't ask you about today that you want to share, some probable experience that we didn't get to?

• 45:27 John: Well, I kind of saved this because it could have been part of the last answer. But one of the other things that a library can do is it can encourage innovation. Everybody prizes innovation. Well, we got to keep progressing. We got to have new ideas. To me, innovation comes when two things happen. When the innovator has a thorough understanding of how things are and have been and when an innovator synthesizes that with a new idea of how things might be. The deeper and more sophisticated a materials collection a library maintains, the more innovation it fosters. Why? Well, the thorough understanding of how things are and have been, that comes from the hump. If you think of information as a hump with a long tail. 
• 46:37 Paul: 8Okay. 
• 46:48 John: The new ideas are out there in the long tail. What they call outside the box thinking. Okay, the box has, and you got to know what's in the box before you start bringing ideas from outside the box or they don't, they don't synthesize right. A library that does what Prince George's did during the last decade of my service cuts off the long tail in its materials collection. So where do the new ideas come from? Where do the outside the box ideas come from? We used to judge books to use a shorthand for vehicles that render information whether they’re books or DVDs or websites or whatever by what information was in them and develop expertise in knowing what information is in them. We went from that to saying, oh, we want to be data driven. Okay, there's nothing wrong with being data driven. But it's not a good excuse for cutting off the long tail. So we said, we will make an algorithm. Algorithms are magic. This is where artificial intelligence isn't going to take us.
• 48:03 Paul: Yeah
• 48:04 John: We will make an algorithm that judges books not by the content of the book, but by its turnover rate. And we've used that algorithm to get rid of books. They were bought and paid for books, so it's not budget. And say, well, if it doesn't get checked out X number of times over X period of time, get rid of it. And we've seen the library collections shrink from. At one time we had 160,000 or so volumes in adult, in Hyattsville’s adult collection, I bet we don't have more than 50,000 now. So that's a significant, that's a significant amount 
• 48:51 Paul: Significant amount
• 48:52 John: of ideas that were in the long tail, where they only get looked at once in a while that we've cut. And just look at kids and George Orwell, bright kids gravitate towards reading Orwell. We provide Animal Farm*. We provide 1984*. We used to provide Road to Wigan Pier, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, everything. Some of those are where Orwell's long tail ideas were buried. We no longer have that sitting there tempting a kid. You can get it on Marina* for somebody, but that's different, especially for kids. Kids are buried now in instant gratification, but if you have this stuff there, and you got to say, oh, you know, read one more Orwell, read, read this one next. That's where they may find the long tail idea and start Jacobin Magazine.

• 50:08 Paul: Okay, yeah, yeah, it's no way to think out of the box if we don't have access to the information and the sources of the knowledge. And it's no way to try to understand the algorithm if you don't get access to that information. And the information had to be public. And that is the reason that the public libraries are here. 

• 50:32 John: Yeah, I just, I regret the downsizing of the collection. And anytime the library has ever, in my experience, asked people through surveys, what do you want from the library? There's only ever been one number one answer.

• 50:58 Paul: What was the answer? 
• 50:58 John: More books. 
• 51:00 Paul: More books, yeah.
• 51:02 John: And, you know, people have looked at that and said, well, that that answer doesn't count because that's the old way of thinking about libraries. Doesn't mean it's the wrong way of thinking about libraries. It means it's the way people think about them. Who are you to say that's the old way and therefore it doesn't count? Why did you ask? I don't want to say too much about that because I can get on a hobby horse and be more negative than I should be. There's still lots and lots that people can learn at every Prince George's County Library and lots of good staff that are ready to introduce it and lots of new stuff that you can pick up off the internet. I mean, using the library magazine databases now compared to when we had 300 and some magazines physically is night and day. I mean, we have access to way more information there. But I like books. So does the public.

• 52:12 Paul: Okay. So thank you for being with us, John. So it was a wonderful time. Thank you for share your experience. 

• 52:17 John Thank you. 
• 52 :19 Paul: Okay. Bye-bye.

Notes: 

* Maria Escobedo: Former Librarian I at the Hyattsville Library 

* Susie Misleh: Library Associate II at the Hyattsville Library

* Nicola (Nici) Ray; Librarian I at New Carrollton Library

* LATI: Library associate training institute

* Hannah Erickson Librarian II at the Hyattsville Library

* Animal Farm: Novel by George Orwell 

* 1984: Novel by George Orwell

* Marina: Maryland Interlibrary Loan Program 

Paul Moreno

John Krivak

Hyattsville Library branch