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Jane Kinney Meyers
Chief Executive Officer, Lubuto Library Project

You have to be able to show that you’re serving people and changing things and doing things in the world. And, if you’re doing that, you’re being a good librarian. It’s a good thing.

Briefly, how do you describe what you do as a librarian to your family or to people at a party?
Well, right now, I have to say I’m the president of a nonprofit organization that builds libraries for street kids. I’m sorry I can’t say it as an elevator speech. I will say that many people, when they hear what I do, say, “Oh, so you were a librarian.” And I say, “No, I am a librarian. This is what librarians do ‘cause this is what I do, and my training informs it.”

To my family, my family has all been pulled into the Lubuto Project anyway, so they know. They are very, very proud of me. My husband I met when I was at the World Bank. He actually got himself on the library committee; he was working at the World Bank, too. So, he has always believed that libraries are the most important places in the world.

Can I just tell you one thing that’s a little bit of other background related to libraries? My mother, who was born in 1912 in a poor family in Philadelphia-Irish immigrant family, had no opportunity to go to college after she finished high school. And, in the early 1930s or so, after she finished high school, what she did have in Philadelphia was the first public library ever, founded by Benjamin Franklin-the great Philadelphia Free Library. So, she used to spend all of her free time there ‘cause she really, really wanted to learn and she didn’t have a chance.

One day, a woman physician in the early 1930s came in to the Philadelphia Free Library. This was a woman who as at the end of her career, which must have been extremely rare-a woman at that time. And she told the librarian she wanted to spend another woman to college and medical school and did the librarian have any idea. And the librarian said, “Oh, Mary Seaman here is very bright.” My mother got a scholarship to college and medical school through the Philadelphia Free Library. And she met my father in medical school, and all five kids in our family just grew up thinking of libraries as the most magical place in the world and that we wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for the Philadelphia Free Library.

So, my family was always very involved with giving to the local public library. My hometown had a great library. And I just kinda knew in the back of my mind always that I was gonna-that this and what I’m doing now is sort of payback. Now, we wanna make libraries available to other people who lack opportunities but who are bright. So, anyway, sorry that needed to be thrown in as it’s important.

Are you or have you been involved in library or other associations?
Really, Special Libraries Association is kind of my home base. And I’m a member of ALA. And I should mention, SLA gave me an award last year, and the local DC chapter has also given us awards and donations and support in various ways. I was a member of the Malawi Library Association and, as I mentioned, sorta taught part of the certificate course. I actually taught the special libraries part of their certificate course. And I am now an honorary and lifetime member of the Zambian Library Association, and I very proudly display that [pointing to the certificate on the wall], along with the letter from President Kawunda. ‘Cause I do feel very honored, and it’s a great group.

There’ve been other groups that I belonged to through time. The International Association of Agricultural Librarians and Documentalists, I was very involved in when I worked in the agricultural sector but I no longer am. There’s also an informal group in Washington, DC. It’s actually a working group of the Society of International Development, and it’s the Development Information Workgroup. And that group originally started out not being part of SID. But we had met for brownbag lunches here every month since 1980-81-that’s when I first joined them. And it’s totally driven by-it’s librarians who are interested in international development. Anyone could come. They have a listserv announcing their meetings. At the end of each year, we decide what we want to have programs on in the following year, and then different people will volunteer to put together a program. I’ve done a couple on our project. And when I was first-actually I’ve forgotten about this-when I first came from Zambia with this idea, I showed up at these meetings. I said, “Okay, Jane, what are you gonna do now?” And I said, “Well, we need to keep doing libraries.” And so, I developed a concept paper, and I circulated it among the members of this group. So, that group was really, and continues to be really an important support group. Even when I was back in Zambia, I would send emails back to the listserv saying, “Here’s what I’m finding in Africa ten years later. This is issues we need to be concerned and stuff.” So, that’s an important group.

So you’re involved in that working group. Are there any other committees that you’re specifically involved in now?
The DC/SLA chapter very kindly asked me if I would stand for office there, and I just, I cannot. This is the fullest-time job one could imagine. I mean, my bedroom is just five steps from here. And I’m, usually before I’m even dressed in the morning, here checking my email, especially because of the time differences in Zambia. I have four children. I feel bad about it because I feel we’ve gained so much from the association, but most of them say, “Don’t worry. We understand.”

When you were first starting out, how did you first get involved in associations?
I had most of my career worked independently as a consultant. But, unlike our First Lady, who calls herself a former librarian, even when I wasn’t working at all and my children were young, I never ever considered myself a former librarian. I am a librarian period. No matter what I do, I am a librarian. A doctor doesn’t say they’re a former doctor. So, I think that’s a funny thing that sometimes people in our field do, and it’s wrong.

I joined ALA when I worked for Costable Associates because that was the milieu in which that consulting firm worked more, the kinds of libraries they worked with. But when I went to the World Bank, I joined SLA. When I was in library school, what I thought I was gonna do was-back then, from 76-78-what’s really interesting was this new idea of being an information broker. And if you have a kind of entrepreneurial bent-I never really envisioned my career as something where I slowly and steadily worked myself up the ladder to bigger and bigger jobs in bigger and bigger libraries, that’s just not me. So, being an information broker seemed great. But I ended up, for various personal reasons and other things, not doing that and going to work for a consulting firm. So, working in unconventional situations, and sometimes places where you’re a solo librarian, people who work like that really recognize the value and importance of professional associations because you do need to be working with colleagues. So, I’ve always been a member of SLA since then. And rejoined ALA now that we’re doing something that a lot of the children’s librarians, who’re ALA people more.

But that entrepreneurial thing, I do wanna say, when I first went to the job that I went to in Malawi, I created. When I worked at the World Bank, again there is this big organization doing development, funding agricultural research all over the world, doing nothing with libraries at all. I mean, very little. I understand I was the first librarian that ever got to go on mission for the World Bank. I convinced my department to send me to Kenya to go to a conference to the international group, but also work with their offices in Nairobi and Ivory Coast. At that time, we were introducing database searching. I do want to say this because a lot of people ask, “How do you get involved with international things?” And I don’t think you could just go to the job bank and say, “Geez, there’s an international job. I’ll just apply there.” I think you have to be entrepreneurial about it because it’s like the Wild West; I think there are many opportunities that we sort of need to aggressively say, “This is what we can provide.”

So, for example, I used to visit the person who was the top person, the Chief Agricultural Research Advisor for the World Bank. Lovely gentleman who was a real expert in agriculture research. And he used to travel around the countries and help put together these projects. So, I would go visit him and say, “Well, how can you have a research program without a good library supporting it?” And I was starting this library there, so they recognized [it]. As I was marketing services to these people, I was also saying, “Also your project, this is how libraries can help.” And he understood that completely. And so he came back from a mission to Malawi once, and he said, “Jane, they need someone like you in Malawi.” And I said, “Where’s Malawi?” [laughs]. And he said, “You know we’re giving all these people PhDs and Master’s degrees in agricultural sciences, but there’s really no library to support them to do their research.” And he got it. And so he said, “Go talk to this person, who is the Project Officer putting this together. Maybe you could advise them how to do this.”

So, I went and met this person, who was also very receptive. “Okay, how much should we put in? Should we put in money for computers?” “Yes.” “What about personnel, da da da, and books? And how do we do this?” And I realized, as we talked, I was interested in this job. So, I said, “Can I give you somebody else from the joint World Bank/IMF Library to advise you because I’d actually like to apply for this technical assistance job?” So, that’s what I did. And I applied, and they actually flew me to Malawi and interviewed me and selected me for that job. So, that job wouldn’t have existed, none of that whole component of that project would have existed without just going out of the way to do it.

They also said, when I went to Malawi in January of ’86, I took the first CD-ROM to Africa. Which seems like unbelievably [ancient?]. It’s hard to believe that could even be the same lifetime, with what we have now. But, at that time, it was incredible-there were still agencies-the FAO and World ?, saying, “No, no, you shouldn’t do that because you’ll do searches.” There weren’t even any agricultural databases available on CD-ROM yet. So, I went around to the Commonwealth Agriculture Bureau in England and to the National Agriculture Library and the FAO-they were the three big agricultural databases-and said, “You gotta make this available on CD-ROM. This is really useful, and I couldn’t imagine being a librarian without my databases.” So, the CAB actually flew me over, and they’re the ones who said in their annual report that I took the first CD-ROM to Africa. I’m sure it’s true. We had workshops-librarians came from Europe, from FID, and saw the first CD-ROM in our agricultural research station in Malawi.

Anyway, again, it just made sense. Here’s this people who need this and, finally, is a technology-it’s useful; there’s no recurrent cost or anything. But we proved them wrong. We did searches; we found that 60% of the things cited, we actually were able to provide we had there. They were looking for information on, say, the cassava mealy bug. Well, that’s not published in things, that’s published in things that are from agricultural research centers that send their publications for free for places like that anyway. So, we actually proved it right. And actually Science Magazine even wrote about that in an editorial in the front of their magazine. I presented papers in India and different places like that. It’s hard to believe that that’s such a big deal; it now seems like such a no-brainer. But at the time, people just thought, “Well..” They didn’t know what we were talking about. Anyway, so it’s just always worth having an open mind of what’s possible out there.

Tell us from your own experience one leadership lesson that you have learned.
Well, I guess, listening. I think in terms of forming a vision and in terms of bringing people and their talents to help not only carry out that vision, but to further form the vision, it’s extremely important to be able to know how to listen-to both what is needed and what people have to offer and people’s ideas. And, maybe, also courage. That’s two ideas. But I do think you have to be willing to take a risk.

How do you recognize contributions of others-people that you work with?
Well, I do tell people-this should be the elevator speech for what my job is-I spend most of my days saying, “Please” and “Thank you.” We certainly try to give people opportunities to get involved directly because I think that’s more satisfying. So, 3 other people went with me to Zambia for the opening of the library. We don’t have lots of money, but…

When I speak about the organization, when I speak about it at ALA, we’re gonna put together a session and have me talk about Lubuto. Well, instead I’ve asked Professor Bonicci from the University of Alabama to come and talk about what she’s doing with her students and the website usability. Professor Augusto from Drexel, who’s written an article about us. Tatum Preston for the Birmingham Museum of Art who founded Lubuto Alabama, she’s gonna present there, too. And these are things that these people would like to do and are happy to do.

There are people who started the student chapter at the University of South Carolina-who, just before you came in, I sent a big valentine to, an email valentine-they asked me to send a letter of endorsement for their student chapter as student chapter of the year for ALA. And I was very happy-actually what I realized in writing this is that this was something that I should have written to them already, so I decided to turn it into a valentine to them.

I mean, a lot of it really is just personal. People’s involvement as volunteers is a personal commitment. So, you just can’t avoid it just being something that needs to be expressed personally. I do-when people donate, of course, we have letters that we use to thank them, and we do put things in our annual report. When we had our opening event for our first library, in our program for the event, I listed the name of every single person-every single student here at this school who got involved with classifying the books, and other schools and other volunteers, and people who donated books, and book drives carried out by these organizations and these different individuals. I couldn’t list every single monetary donor, just those $500 and over, but every single one is listed in our annual report and will soon be on our website, as well. And to people in Zambia as well, and every member of our Board, and blah blah blah. So, we just spend a lot of time saying, “Thank you.”
What advice would you give to up and coming librarians?
I think just-that it’s really important to just understand how powerful our profession is and can be, how valuable what we have is, and never let it be reduced to whether or not some municipality feels that they want to cut back money or some organization wants to close down its library. Just stay very confident and very clear and always looking for ways to express to people what a library is and what it can do for them, how it can usually save them a lot of money. Don’t look at this organization and say, “Well, they hire a whole lot of research assistants.” Go in and show them how they can save money in personnel by having maybe one or two information people or a virtual library or whatever library services. And focus on the service and recognizing how cost-effective it is in many environments, or how valuable. In this case, I looked at the world of people offering services to these orphans and vulnerable children and, hey, a library fits in here. Just have that confidence and approach what you learn-yes, you have to learn a lot of skills, but also just learn it theoretically. Keep the universe very wide. I studied systems analysis, among other things for my MLS, and I thought that was one of the most valuable courses I took because it really just broadened my view of how you think about what we do.

What do you think are the top three issues facing librarianship (positive or negative) that could change the course of things? If we should try and change that course, how should we go about it?
I think we need, first, to deal with-to face the fact that communication from this point on, from early here on, has been focused on ever-evolving technologies, or has been done through ever-evolving technologies. And always understand those technologies simply as a means, but that what we do is much, much broader than technology. I think that’s a really important challenge. I believe it’s a challenge even for my beloved alma mater and in library education, in helping young librarians know that knowing how to build websites and concerns about man-machine interfaces, which are very important, the underlying, much broader issue is service to humanity from our professional perspective. Actually, I’m talking about that in my speech, my 1-minute speech I give for accepting the Alumnus of the Year award. Going back to what Kenneth Calhoun just said, in a library full of books, in a very simple environment, and he thought that this is how we’re holding on to humanity. That’s so much more powerful than the most advanced information technology.

I think I’ve seen it in different places, touring the-when they built the new, great, big public library in San Francisco, I walked around, and they were featuring technology that was gonna be, certainly by now way obsolete. But they put a lot of money into it and had to cut back on unique collections. The librarians were not very happy to be working in that building. It was a problem of getting too enamored and allowing the funders to think technology was the most important thing, when that was something that was never gonna be able to be sustained at the cutting edge. Unfortunately, in some ways, throwing out the baby with the bath water. So, I think how we understand technology is really important to our identity, and never let that be driven by people from other fields that think the technology stuff we do is the most important thing. I mean, it has to come from us because other people will always think or will say to me, “The Internet must be making librarians obsolete.” “No, we started the Internet.” [laughs]. We didn’t actually, no. We just understand that this is another tool, or that these are the tools that we have now.

I guess, I think it’s forever a struggle and a challenge, but I think this is really a positive thing in a way-that we will always have to probably try to help the world understand why what we do is needed and important and is a good use of resources. But I think that it’s positive that we have to do that. If you see librarians that are not so great, it’s usually something that’s come about because they haven’t been appreciated and properly funded, but whose job is that? It really is a librarian’s. If you have to justify your existence, you have to do a really good job, period. And so, it keeps you honest always. You have to be able to show that you’re serving people and changing things and doing things in the world. And, if you’re doing that, you’re being a good librarian. It’s a good thing.

And, I guess, then also communicating that to society, a broader society, so that we attract good people to the profession who will be leaders and who will continue-I mean, I hope we’re getting away from stereotypes, but I know they exist out there still. And we just have to attract people who understand that this is an incredibly exciting profession. It is. I will say that I use to just be aware-when I lived in Malawi, working on that project. In Malawi, not in Zambia-I used to have about a half-hour drive to the research station everyday under this big old African sky, and I just used to just sit there and be filled with such a sense of well-being. I remember being very consciously thinking there is absolutely nothing on earth I’d rather be doing. If someone said you could be a movie star, you could be this or that, I would not, I would not want to do that because I absolutely love this. And this was where I wanted to be. And I tell that to people, and they’re surprised. “Librarian?” “Well, yeah!” And we need to have people not be surprised. We need for people to feel that way about what they’re doing and to let other people know that. And that will help attract people, I hope, to the field.