Keynote Address by David Carr (October 7, 2006)

A Celebration of Library and Community
David Carr
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

When a library opens its doors to a community, an important thing has happened.  When the library opens, the community also opens to itself and says it believes in its future.  Every time a person enters here (maybe for the first time) in the next few days, they confirm that belief.

When they open a library, the people who live in the community have contributed to their common wealth, and changed their futures.  Libraries are about the aspirations of a community: a community builds and sustains a library to educate itself, to do its jobs better, to exalt knowledge over emptiness, and learning over failure.  It's a community that knows how to restore itself, and to come together over reading and thinking. 

Like the firehouse, the hospital and the police, the library in the community provides a place of safety and survival from accidents.  It puts its citizens in touch with the tools and the craftspeople and the architects and the information resources that allow every person here to envision a bridge, and then to construct it, and then, tentatively, to cross it in order to build something more. 

The library means that the stories of this community -- lived every day on its streets and in its schools and businesses and homes can have a progressive meaning and a useful purpose.  When a community opens a library, it has done a brave and essential thing.

These are my themes:  community, memory, trust, knowledge, help and fearlessness.   We would not live in a place where none of these things is present because we will find them to be essential to our American culture.  Libraries are evidence that fear is not an American way.

Nor would we live where there is ignorance, or an overlaying climate of hesitation, or cynicism, or arrogance, or the smothering fabric of falsehood and deception.   When we find these things fear, cynicism and falsehood especially -- in our world, we turn toward the authentic, for strength and energy.  We look for the nearby lived lives and experiences we understand, for the evidence of humanity; and we turn toward each other for models of how to live, how to be calm and unafraid of change.   We will look toward a place like this one.

If we did not have these things in our lives, we would want them, and we would do our best to create them.   We would strive to find human qualities of thought and kindness, a combination of intelligence and fearlessness, to lead us in finding our way toward truths each of us needs to craft for ourselves.   We would want a vision of what is possible for us. 

Sometimes that is hard for us to see, because we are so small in a world so large.   We need to find a sense of order and structure, because a progressive, constructive life requires us to weave together many goals and many hopes -- and for the strength of this fabric, we will need to weave knowledge in our communities, and so we will turn to each other and help each other for the sake of knowing more.
 
And when we turn to each other, that is when stories appear.  I think that each of us needs to keep mindful of where we began and how our evolution is going, so far.   We need to know the lessons we have learned, the signs we have interpreted along the way, the events in our lives that made us feel strong, or ashamed, or powerless, or misunderstood; we need to know the ways we have to shape the future as more than a series of accidents and heartbreaks.
 
And those many events that we still cannot understand?  Those mysteries represent to us the dearest knowledge we still need to pursue in order to live, and the lessons we will tell as we continue to make a community's safe place out of emptiness.   We would not live without these things or the processes of thinking that surround them.   We would not live without mystery, we would not live without unknowns, and we would not live without a library.

As a young man I was drawn to the library because I could neither trust nor ethically participate in schools as a teacher.  Thirty years before No Child Left Behind, I saw that schools were narrow and constraining, and not good places to learn.  They make successes out of smart people; but they also make failures out of other smart people too.
 
Among all the constraints and damage I saw in schools, the reading and the thinking that led me forward allowed me to envision a different circumstance for learning.  I envisioned an infinite conversation, in progress every day I worked with people and knowledge.  Knowledge has always been a process and not a thing to me:  it resists management and reduction, it wants to be connected to other knowledge, it needs to be lived as an experience of difference and change. 

My work in libraries informed my life and helped it to be transformed; gradually I was able to express what I saw the library to be.   It is not a place to keep things but to hold them until they can be given away; not a place but a process, a making of something new for a common life and a common good.   It is a place not a place.  It does not keep books safe, it keeps us safe.

I came to see that knowledge makes a person's life exactly as it makes the life of a community:  knowledge assists both the person and the community to emerge from crisis or to challenge and to discover continuity and possibility.  Knowledge is what we need and use when we need to rescue ourselves and each other.  Knowledge is what was lost, and will never be recovered, when Hurricane Katrina swept through our neighbors in the south.

A library like this is a fair and open place.  In everyday exchanges and civilities in a fair and open place, we acknowledge that we are equal occupants within it.   What we know about ourselves and what we feel within the library makes it our place.   What we do in it, what we may build or provide here, makes it into an engine of connection to others in a larger world.
 
Knowledge, not an economy or a government, makes a community; even if it is inevitably the story of flaws and errors mixed with success, or even if its sum is a record of change and impermanence.   Knowledge is an evolutionary force:  the more we know, the more we evolve.  What we must love most about our libraries and our communities, in my view, is neither their outcomes nor their achievements, but the ways they have of making people smarter, more connected to each other, and therefore, safer.   When institutions and communities do not do this for their people and themselves, they will always fail.

Communities are foremost deep mines of knowing.   Knowledge constructs a community by moving from person to person and from generation to generation.   We transmit our ways of doing things, and our ways of seeing things from here.  We remind ourselves of great changes in time, and the gradual, forest-like evolution of our culture.   When knowledge allows our community to become broader, more inclusive and more open, our way of speaking and understanding also grows more capable of expressing shared integrity and mutual respect.   We learn the acts, words and values of inclusion; and we might even come to see ourselves differently:  more inclusive, less judgmental; more mindful, less thoughtless.

Every life teaches, every life is a lesson, but every life needs a voice and a place.   We become stronger when we speak about our lives; we tell our stories to each other, and our thoughts become more connected and more resonant simultaneously.   Our strengths come slowly over time, but our discoveries and insights can strike us like lightning, each one giving us a surge and a promise.
  
Most people will also find courage, trust and empathy in themselves as they find knowledge, and as they think among others.   We may feel powerless under the condition of the world as it is, but every learning also has an implication for what it might become, and what we might know next about it.  Every bit, every byte, every piece or page, each one is an aspect of the infinite, and something for us to look at in the largest frame of life.

If we are a community, information and complexity will nourish and awaken us.   Challenges will define our ethics and character.   If we are learners, our conflicts require us to become stronger and more resilient; differences among us engage both our conscience and our spine.   If we are a community, we engage in civic discourse, conversations about how we expect the world to be, and how we can wrestle with it toward the better.  We need libraries.
 
We are given this task by our lives, if we can bear it:  to live up to the challenges of knowing everything we can know, but then -- to go further, beyond it, to make something greater of it, and to make something more of ourselves through it.   Our task is to know, and to express, as much as we can, and to listen with care.  

I think that these things are true:  Every opportunity people have to gather information and establish a fair point of view (as they can in libraries) will nourish their consideration, ethics and conscience.    The weaving together of our many-stranded experiences into a community narrative (as occurs in libraries) strengthens our responsibility to others.   As information and complexity increase (in accord with the purposes of libraries), the likelihood of understanding entire patterns of life increases through librarianship as well.

The library (and the museum) are the only institutions in our culture capable of continuously opening the closed doors of memory and indifference.   These institutions compose a form of mind for our culture that is always fluid, expanding to contain the emerging flow of thought and possibility.   They are capable as well of returning us constantly to the unfinished issues we carry with us as a culture.
 
As I think of unfinished issues, I mean our failure, or our inability, or our fear, to engage in essential conversations about the unspoken themes of human lives, and the need for respect and generosity in our assumptions about each other.   Among our unfinished issues, I would include our great cultural losses:  I think of the world that is shy of poetry, the missing lessons of history and memory, the lost knowledge of human differences and human experiences, and the disappearance of conversations that last into the night.
  
I would include as well the endangered conscience, always at risk.    When we have reduced everything that requires reflection and conversation to nothing, not even whispered conversations, how shall we become ourselves?  How shall we become our own persons under constraints of narrow entertainment and anti-intellectualism?  People need to be able to see themselves woven into the tapestry of their times, not viewing their lives on screens, or standing outside them as visitors, audiences, or victims.   That tapestry is woven here.

As we encounter surrogates for reality or imagination or pleasure or thought, how do we live a life we can trust to be our own?  It has taken me years to begin this trusted life for myself, and it is why I stand up for libraries.

Libraries remind us that knowledge is a living process that moves us forward.    But the library we enter here today also embodies a backbone in our civic lives, an essential place that will always resist the simplification, reduction and insipid superficiality that frequently characterizes contemporary information.   Schooling and media do not help us to do this; their task is to mask authenticity, to measure or entertain us, to sell us things, and to weaken our attention.   They do not help our depths.  Books and information alone cannot be that backbone, because a cultural narrative comes out of a living place; it can appear only when living people, their voices and their memories are present together, not off somewhere reading privately.
We have libraries because libraries collect lives and the traces of lives.   Libraries document connections between lives, and the gathering of lives in great causes, in times of challenge and civic duty -- or in wars, disasters, or economic despair.
 
Libraries keep track of the rising and falling of wealth and power in lives.   They gather the evidences of genius, invention and failure; they record the lives of artists and apprentices.   Like naturalists, librarians keep their eyes on the living system of the community:  on its geography and intellectual climate, its systems of balance and relationship, on the order of its living contexts, on all living things here in our small sphere.   Libraries capture the migrations of knowledge and the changes left behind in traces and dust.

When we look at the records we have made, we can know certain lessons.   Our experiences today are infinite, because they resonate and mirror the experiences of the past.  

When we look backward, we may find that all heroes have a bit of tarnish, and that all greatness has a stripe of venality.   We may find that in history it is often the smallest players whose stories tell us the most.   We may find that knowledge nurtures unexpected possibilities in a life.   To know more, therefore, means that our possibilities grow.

Every day, librarians live their lives in a shared, complex, and unfinished world.    Every day they live with the evolving stories, issues and lives of other human beings, and with the acts of giving that compose a life of service.
 
Librarians practice the critical acts of giving -- in the words they say to people who live amid change and need, and in the ways they live up to their instincts for generosity.   Hardware may do the work, but software, helping words and generous attention -- lasts a longer time.   There is nothing that can replace the question librarians ask of every library user:  What is the bridge you need to build with my help?

I believe that we become who we are meant to be through thinking, reading and writing, speaking with others, and giving our attention to what we believe in.   We work in a fluid information environment that surrounds us every day, where our engagements with processes (and not things) are about as certain as we can be.
  
Neither professional mastery nor professional identity is ever fixed.   It is a fluid and inviting world.  This is a good condition of life:  in the face of new unknowns every day, we have the opportunity to learn anew who we are and what we are capable of doing.  It never ends.   

How differently would we have to live without our trust and experience in this place?

We want to move forward to embrace our own lives, but safely and fearlessly; we want to shape our own becoming among people in a place we can trust.
We are given tasks and crises by our lives and our work; we learn to assume responsibility for knowledge, and we create our strength in response.
We build a human world that has never been built before, and never will be finished.
We find that the steady tensions of one life, and each life's compelling issues, keep us in a state of inquiry and hope, and lead us on.
We believe that the experience of living and discovering knowledge for ourselves permits us to possess something that does not disappear.
We are all held together in a fabric of stories; we are enriched by the possibilities of interpretation; and we are made strong by acts of helping each other to listen.   
We want a life that has the qualities of wholeness and integrity; and at its center, we want there to be a fire.
 
What we find in the library is the fire inside ourselves.

Congratulations on your commitment to a great new library in this community.  Congratulations on coming together today to observe and celebrate its importance.  You have done the most important thing a community can do to enlarge its capacity and keep its promise to the future. 

Now it is time to fill it with human voices, with conversations about reading, with explorations of this community's edges, and with records and recollections that help to keep its center a vibrant and vibrating place.  And in case you are wondering where that center is, you are in it right now.

Thank you for the opportunity to say these things to you today.

The text of this talk is offered for personal use only. The
author can be contacted at carr@ils.unc.edu, or 919/962-8364.