Well-Read Life™

When government and business get it really right—together

In a downtown office building in Phoenix last month, five librarians answering questions from two visiting CEOs admitted to stealing from businesses. They confessed to violating basic tenets of their profession. And under questioning, they confirmed that other librarians around the country were emulating them, particularly after their alleged misdeeds in Maricopa County, Arizona, won them an Innovations in Reading Prize from the National Book Foundation.

The librarians were led by the avuncular Harry R. Courtright, Maricopa County Library District (MCLD) director and county librarian. It was in his office, around a conference table with its 7^th-story view of downtown Phoenix that we met.

I was one of the CEOs, representing the board of the National Book Foundation, there to check in with past winners of the Innovations prize. The other CEO was Laura Roberts, whose company makes eco-friendly chemical products for other companies worldwide and is a leader in Conscious Capitalism—or capitalism with a conscience.

Our mission was to find out how the librarians had managed to pull off their Innovation.

Much ado about Dewey

“We began by listening to our customers,” said Courtright.

Customers? Already I was doing a double-take.

“Yes,” Courtright smiled, “that’s how we refer to the people we serve. We receive a portion of their tax money, so they are our customers.”

What they heard their customers tell them, in physical suggestion boxes in the library branches and virtual ones on the Library District’s website, was that 85 percent of customers arrive at the library with no particular title in mind. They want to browse.

Trouble is, the century-old Dewey Decimal System doesn’t make browsing that easy.

“We decided the library world had a problem,” said Courtright. “Librarians get hung up on the Dewey system, but the general public doesn’t understand or care about it.”

The Dewey Decimal System doesn’t have a number, for example, for books on weddings. So a customer coming in to get help planning a wedding has to look under flowers 745.926, and wedding cakes 641.8653, and maybe etiquette 395.22.

But customers planning a wedding just want to go to a wedding section.

So the librarian leadership in MCLD thought the unthinkable. What if they threw out Dewey? This professional blasphemy ruffled feathers. Some librarians accused leadership of dumbing down libraries.

“It’s a matter of professional pride,” explained Courtright. “We librarians can sometimes develop an almost dare-you-to-find-it attitude toward a hapless public.”

Doing more with Dewey-less

But the librarian leadership was fired with derring-do, and they decided to go ahead with their plan to do away with Dewey. Gently.

“When we had the chance to fit out the new Perry Branch Library in Gilbert, we decided to try to do it without Dewey, and we wanted to see how far we could rethink the whole library experience,” said Courtright.

The building in Gilbert, a suburb of Phoenix, had been designed for a traditional library. Courtright and his cohorts were undeterred.

“We studied retail stores and adopted the way bookstores organize books according to subject areas. And just as retailers know that eye-level merchandise is what customers see and buy most, we put our focus there,” said Courtright.

“We are thieves,” explained Jim Govern, branch development administrator. “From Barnes & Noble we stole the idea of comfortable seating. From Nordstrom we stole their wide-open aisles. From Costco we stole the idea of fewer SKUs but higher turns.”

I knew that librarians keep careful track of their inventory and circulation. But as a merchant, I was impressed to hear the Maricopa outliers talk about book lending in terms of stock-keeping units (SKUs) and how frequently you turn over your inventory.

 “It’s not about how many books you have, but how desirable they are to customers,” said Courtright. “The new design of the library and the freshness of our collection allowed us to deliver better service with fewer items.”

The Perry Branch was slated to hold 75,000 books. By the time the library thieves got through putting into action the ideas they stole from retail, the branch housed a mere 45,000 books.

Shush gets shushed

That was just the beginning.

The old library model had separate desks—Circulation, Reference, Children’s. The Dewey-less Perry Library has one big desk in the center called Customer Service.

While some of the librarians sit behind the desk, others engage in even more derring-do. They roam.

“We have roving librarians who walk around looking for customers who seem confused and ask, ‘May I help you with something?’ It’s a completely different attitude from the shushing librarian of the past,” said Courtright.

And here’s the math that every beleaguered budget officer longs to hear:

“We find that we can serve more people with a smaller staff, keeping our costs lower.”

Technology helps, too. With new self-check-out and check-in machines, customers can perform these clerical functions themselves, saving librarians for more meaningful interactions with customers.

Lower shelves, higher customer satisfaction

When Courtright’s group outfitted their Dewey-less library, they bought fixtures not from library-supply companies but from retail-supply companies. They made the shelves lower and put more of the books facing out, optimized for browsing, rather than spine out, typical for high-density libraries.

“When we opened we didn’t know how customers would react, so we sent extra staff over there on opening day just in case. By lunchtime, we sent them home,” said Courtright.

Turns out that customers were quickly comfortable, even if librarians were not.

After their initial success, the MCLD librarians began rolling out the redesign to other branches.

“We were nervous about our Robson Branch, which mainly serves seniors,” said Courtright. “We thought they wouldn’t like change. When we re-opened, the high shelves were gone, along with about half the books. We set out comfortable chairs and better signage and more books face out, at eye level. One customer said, ‘Where did all the extra room come from?’”

Once again, circulation and customer satisfaction went up.

The Innovations in Reading Prize helped them gain legitimacy for breaking the rules, said Cindy Kolaczynski, the Library District’s deputy director. “It helped convince some of our own librarians who were unsure that the re-designs were the right thing. And the publicity attracted other librarians from around the country to visit Arizona to figure out how to change their own libraries.”

Innovating from the ground up

The first Dewey-less libraries were converted conventional libraries, but soon the librarians had a chance to design a building from scratch in the far reaches of their district, out at the edge of the Sonoran Desert and the White Tank Mountains.

The librarians teamed up with the Maricopa Parks and Recreation Department to locate a nature center inside—and outside, along walking paths. They brought in the local firm of DWL Architects+Planners to help further rethink what a library could be.

The result is known as the White Tank Library & Nature Center. The design embraces green technology and received the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

Going green in the burning desert is something of a hat trick, given normal air-conditioning requirements. The library’s roof is blanketed with solar panels. Deep roof overhangs and structural fins in the architecture deliver both panoramic views and protection from the savage heat and blinding sunlight.

Fully 27 percent of the library’s energy is supplied on site. When facility energy demand is low, this place for quiet contemplation supplies energy back to the grid.

An oasis of wisdom

CEO Laura Roberts, who uses the principles of Conscious Capitalism to help business leaders think more broadly, praised the librarians.

“I love that our librarians stole some ideas from businesses,” she said. “Businesses can steal some ideas from good government, too. Business leaders might think of service the way it’s taken to heart by our best emergency-response and military outfits—service to our country, service to the world.”

For myself, I wish I could sit for a while in the White Tank Library and contemplate the refreshing oasis of wisdom it represents. Far from the Washington din over government waste and corporate malfeasance, I’d like to sit, appreciating the view, and relish for a moment this example of things going very right in a small but beautiful piece of the Arizona desert.

How about you, dear reader—do you know of a library that’s changing the look of libraries? I’d love to hear. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Re-Living Your First Literary Love Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell

The twelve-year-olds were hot and boisterous funneling back into their classroom after lunch recess. They had been dodging balls and swinging on bars out on the playground of crushed granite. Standing at the door, shooing them inside, was a gray-haired woman with a kindly smile. She had little trouble because the kids knew it was time to hear her read the next chapter of the book that had captured their imagination over the previous weeks.

The woman’s name was Mrs. Geissler and she taught the sixth grade at San Miguel Elementary School in Lemon Grove, California. The book she was reading was Island of the Blue Dolphins, and one of those students eager to hear the next chapter was me. (That's me in the second row from the bottom, second from the right with the blue shirt.)

 

When I started in Mrs. Geissler’s class I hadn’t been doing well in school, nor was I much of a reader. I spent more time watching Batman and the space program on TV, listening to my transistor radio, and annoying our unfortunate neighbors with my new trumpet. But Mrs. Geissler’s reading of Island of the Blue Dolphins caught me. For the first time, I was in book love—I couldn’t wait to hear what happened next.

What led me to recollect this long-ago time was Facebook. Through Facebook, I reconnected with former classmates from my San Miguel Elementary Class of 1966. We got to reminiscing and lit upon the subject of Mrs. Geissler’s after-lunch readings.

I remembered only a few details of the book—that an island girl and her brother had become stranded on an island, that he had died, and something about dogs. Mostly I remember the feeling of the story. There was beauty and desolation, and the girl had to do everything herself or die.

One of my classmates from San Miguel is Paula Novell Straus, who is now a teacher herself. She remembered Mrs. Geissler’s reading this way:

She used to read after lunch, usually a chapter, but we occasionally got her to read more because we were so engrossed in the plot. She fell for it when we begged her. If a chapter was really long, we didn't get to hear the whole thing, and were impatient for the next day. It took us a good month to get through the book it seems. We didn't have to stop and discuss it like I now have to do as a teacher. We just got to lay our heads down on our desks and be carried away to another time. She didn't ask us the author's purpose, have us look for similes or metaphors, find supporting details, or figure out the resolution of the conflicts. We just got to be.....

Four decades later, still in love

It occurred to me during these Facebook exchanges that I should read the book again—42 years later—and see what I thought of it today. Because I’m such an audiobook fan, and because originally we heard the book, I downloaded Island of the Blue Dolphins from Audible. Also, I ordered two copies of the printed book—an original 1960s-era version with its familiar dust jacket, and a modern hardcover, beautifully illustrated by Ted Lewin.

After I hit play on my iPod, it took only moments to be taken in again. A few bars of music set the stage and then the magical voice of Tantoo Cardinal carried me back to the island that had captured my imagination as a lad.  Cardinal is a Canadian film and television actress, with Dances with Wolves and Legends of the Fall to her credit. Her first-person reading of the young Karana is perfectly cast.

As for the writing, it has a spare, simple, E. B. White style that is well-suited to a story as it might actually have been told by a young Native American. As an adult, I can see why the book has lasted. It deals with enduring themes of wilderness versus civilization, peacetime and war, lives balanced with nature versus nature’s exploitation, gender prejudice and smashed stereotypes.

When he penned this tale, the author Scott O’Dell was in his 60s. He was a career newspaperman and local historian. He had sailed the waters off the California coastline and heard a story of a young girl who had been stranded on her island. The Island of the Blue Dolphins was his first children’s book and it won the Newbery award in 1961. He wrote plenty of children’s books afterwards, but this remains his most well known. I see from the old dust jacket that O’Dell had lived in Julian, California, a few miles inland from our school. He could have driven over after breakfast and visited when Mrs. Geissler was reading.

How do you thank a teacher?

It was in Mrs. Geissler’s class that I started, for the first time, doing well in school. We had to write a paper on a country. I chose Mexico and got an A. Another student accused me of being “a brain.” It was the first time anyone had cast such an aspersion my way, and it shocked me.

Mrs. Geissler gave me my first drink of literature and it was salty and wild tasting. It came with the sound of waves crashing and the iridescence of clothes made of cormorant feathers. My classmate Paula looked up Mrs. Geissler in school records and found she passed away in 1978, long before I thought to thank her.

Now I’m buying Island of the Blue Dolphins for some parents I know. Perhaps if they read it to their children, they too will be transported.

Have you re-lived your first book love? I’d like to hear your story. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

Going to the Library on the Day Obama Became President

For the inauguration ceremony, our staff at Levenger headquarters here in Delray Beach, Florida, gathered in a conference room. The live coverage was projected onto a screen we normally use for business presentations. Lori and Janet, our executive assistant, brought in two trays of cookies with dozens of little American flags, and were met with lighthearted laughter and applause. People snapped up the flags to wave or just hold. We sat or stood, mostly in silence, watching the ceremony and listening to Obama’s inaugural address. As in so many other conference rooms and family rooms across the country, our staff clapped and sighed and wiped their eyes. Someone handed me a tissue.

I felt proud of our country for its peaceful transition of power, and proud of the powerful symbolism that Obama represents for America and the world.

After work, I went to my regular weekly tutoring session at the Village Academy, not far from our headquarters. The Academy is a public school whose mission is to support its surrounding community of mainly lower-income families. The Academy offers classes for both youngsters and their parents, many of whom have recently immigrated to America with their children.

In the evening, while their children attend after-school programs, those parents who can spare the hours from their jobs come in to work on their English in free classes and one-on-one tutoring. On this night, a group of nine parents—all recent immigrants—traveled by bus the few miles to Delray’s downtown public library for a tour. They were escorted by staff members of the Palm Beach Literacy Coalition and Americorps.

The new immigrants, men and women, were from four countries: five from Haiti, two from Nicaragua, one from Mexico and one from El Salvador. They sat on a beautiful long wooden bench with stainless steel appointments, in the lofty lobby with bamboo trees, slate walls and a waterfall nearby, while Norma Kane, the library’s community relations assistant, gave a bit of history.

She explained that the library began in 1913 and was established by the Ladies Auxiliary on the second floor of the old town hall. She didn’t mention that for its first decades, blacks would not have been welcome. Nor was this the only library that had such a policy; it was prevalent in parts of our country as recently as the 1960s.

As one former mayor of Delray told me, any blacks who ventured at night from West Atlantic Avenue to East Atlantic Avenue (the demarcation street between black and white Delray) would have been escorted back by city police. The new library, which was built in 2004, now presides majestically at 100 West Atlantic Avenue in, as Norma says, “the center of things.” 

Norma explained to her guests that all the books, audiobooks, DVDs and CDs were free to check out, and that all they needed to do to get their own library card was to show some sort of photo ID—or even a bill with their name and address. The library is proudly unconcerned with anyone’s antecedents or status—east or west address.

After Norma’s talk, library volunteers divided the visitors into two smaller groups to tour the library. They went to the quiet study rooms, saw the dozens of free Internet terminals (all busy, as usual), greeted the reference librarians, saw the foreign-language sections and explored the children’s library, where they could bring their children for story hours.

Afterwards, the new immigrants lined up to receive their library cards before boarding the bus to return to their children.

The following morning, as I sat at the kitchen table and read the transcription of President Obama’s Inaugural Address in my newspaper, I took my pen and underlined this sentence:

The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart—not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

Because of our country’s belief in a common good, our lovely Delray Beach Library is able to extend the opportunities that literacy brings to every willing heart.

It has been a good week. I am proud of this small community and this big country called America. 

How about you, dear reader? I’d like to hear your thoughts about our new chapter. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you’ll connect to Comments).

New Year’s Resolution: More Time to Read More Books

Dear Reader,

In case you’re resolving to get more books into your life this coming year, I list below nine ways to do so in 2009. Many are rather new, made possible by technology. Two are old, although powerful in ways most of us fail to truly understand.

No. 1: Read at least one book electronically

Buy or borrow an Amazon Kindle, a Sony eBook or similar device (there will be some new models out this year) and read at least one book this way in 2009. Most early adopters like the devices and many have reported that they read more books because of the ease of carrying a little magic book that can be almost any book. See if it liberates you, too.

No. 2: Make your personal library of favorite books virtual by uploading your titles into one of the social networking sites for booklovers

Perhaps even more important than the virtual book is the virtual library. This has changed my reading life, as I described last year with my use of Shelfari. Don’t underestimate how transformative this can be. It’s not just the reviewing of your books as you go, or the chance to rate them, but the tagging of them. These clouds help you discover patterns arising from groups of books in a way that was nearly impossible without this software. And I haven’t even touched on the social benefits. Vacation is a good time to upload your library, title by title, which is fun and revealing. (By the way, this is free.)

No. 3: Interact with readers online

So much of reading is sharing your thoughts with others. It’s never been easier to find people you want to talk to and books you want to talk about. Shelfari, Good Reads, Library Thing, Visual Bookshelf in Facebook—all are dedicated to communing with books, and hence, with ideas. There are other ways as well. Email an author on his or her website. Google a book title and you’ll find blog posts you can respond to.

No. 4: Make at least one an audiobook

Audiobooks are only a generation old yet are one of the gifts of our age and getting better every year. See what’s happening at Audiofile magazine, lovingly edited by Robin Whitten. Sign up with iTunes-enabled Audible, founded by the farseeing Donald Katz. Check out Recorded Books,  where studio director Claudia Howard works her casting magic with some of the world’s best narrators. I’ve been proselytizing for years now and can report success even with some quite stubborn visual readers. Here are some quick tips:

1.    Try great stories, mostly fiction or narrative nonfiction, like David McCullough.
2.     Listen when washing dishes, folding laundry, washing cars, anything mindless but handful.
3.    Don’t think driving is the only time; it’s not even necessarily the best time for audiobooks.
4.    If you don’t love your first listen, try two more before giving up. Even if you think audiobooks aren’t for you, even if you know you prefer reading with your eyes rather than your ears, please give audio a chance. Homer would approve, and Shakespeare, too.

No. 5: Relish the reverse boovie

Watch the movie first, and then read the book. Why do it backwards? Because it can be better this way. Ideal reverse boovie candidates are highly rated movies adapted from big novels. The more you like the movie, the more you’re likely to love the depth and dimension waiting for you in the original book. I know watching the movie first sounds strange, but don’t reject it just because it seems wrong. Lots of things seemed wrong in the beginning, like heavier-than-air flying machines.

No. 6: Visit a library and take prisoners

Especially if you haven’t been in a while, browse around and select five books that look interesting. Your public library is a special social institution, not at all pervasive in the world, and paid for by your United States of America tax dollars. Librarians have been building it expecting you to come. Seize the day, and here’s how:

Get yourself a library card, check out those five promising books, take them home with the expectation that you’ll taste all five…but finish only one. At home, begin each book and try to make it to page 50 or so. If you can put it down, do so. If you can’t put it down, don’t. Finishing one of the five is your benchmark for success. You will have not only enjoyed a brand new book in its entirety—a book you’ll likely be raving about to others—but you’ll have practiced two important lessons for those leading their well-read lives: using a library well and giving up on books you don’t love. Therein lies a path for finding those books that will change your life utterly.

No. 7: Visit a bookstore and take note of a changing landscape

We’ve passed the peak of the golden age of a bookstore on every corner. But many of those still with us have become the village wells of their non-virtual communities. Go enjoy them. Browse, chat with the booksellers, get the physical feel for books that’s still hard to achieve online. It’s as much about the experience as it is about the books.

No. 8: Read a book with a friend

Have one of your best friends choose a book for the two of you to read. Then get together in person and have something else to talk about, and grow your friendship yet more. Do the same with a special teenager you know—only this time, you choose. I’m recommending our Levenger Press book, A Boy at the Hogarth Press, a charming coming-of-age memoir from an earlier age.

No. 9: Read a book aloud to a loved one, or have them read to you

This is as old as human language—storytelling, that is. It’s at the very heart of what it means to be human, and it’s why so many older people cherish it. It’s not because they have trouble reading, which they may, but because they realize in their bones that hearing another human tell them a tale is one of the rooms of heaven.

Any one of these suggestions could be the key that unlocks the magic door for you to take your life to a higher plane—not only in 2009, but in every year following.

No. 10: Now it’s your turn

Let me know what sparks for you. Just click on the Comments link. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

A Cycling Tour of Libraries of Spain

With both our sons occupied in their own summer programs, Lori and I were looking forward to a rare getaway—a wedding-anniversary trip, just the two of us, to Spain. I was relishing the idea of a cycling tour through the Rioja wine region and touring the libraries, big and small, we could find along the way. (And shopping, since we’re always on the lookout for new product ideas for Levenger.)

I was intrigued to see what Spain’s libraries offered its citizens since, according to the most recent comparative study of library funding (Libecon Data by David Fuegi and Martin Jennings), Spain is grouped among the Very Low Spenders. This group also includes Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania.

These nations spend between 1 and 5 euros per capita on their libraries. In comparison, the United States, at the equivalent of 22.8 euros per capita, is a High Spender, albeit at the bottom of the bracket. (Above this resides a rarified reading room of nations deemed Top Spenders. More on them later.)

A capital diversion and an uplifting prison

Our first library was Spain’s most prestigious—its national library in Madrid, which shares space with a museum. Outside it is majestic, with tall iron gates and soaring statues of Cervantes and other Spanish luminaries. Inside, we could get only so far. Unlike America’s Library of Congress, the Biblioteca Nacional does not allow just any turista to walk in and have a seat in the reading room. Instead, we were directed downstairs to a museum open to all. It held a fabulous exhibition on the history of language. We could absorb only so much since there were no English translations, but still, it was worth the visit.

Next we visited Segovia and discovered that the public library had taken up quarters in the city’s old prison. Located on a busy shopping street, the edifice was under repair. Inside, the rooms are a bit chopped up— perhaps not surprising, given the building’s original purpose. No spaces could be called inspiring, but there were uplifting quantities of books, computers, music and movies, and colorful reading areas for children.

Afterthoughts and appendages

Traveling next through the wine region, we saw few libraries. Finally, at one town hall I spotted a sign up on the second story in delicate script that read “Biblioteca Ciberteca.” Up a darkened staircase, we discovered a windowless room lined with bookcases and half a dozen computers. Like libraries I’ve visited the world over, the people inside were busy at the computers, hardly taking the time to look up at unlikely visitors in cycling gear.

Our final library visit was in the chic seaside city of San Sebastian. Here the public library is housed in an impressive civic building. Less impressive is the library’s actual space, which is half underground and reminiscent of a corridor connecting two airport terminals. It has the feeling of someone finally removing the boxes of old accounting files so those pesky librarians could have their space. When I asked if the darkened computer terminals were available for public Internet access, the kind librarian responded, “Yes, but the woman who must give you the password is out teaching a computer class now.”

While you can find public libraries in Spain if you look for them, what I didn’t see in our random wanderings were actual buildings devoted to libraries. Such single-purpose buildings have been common in the United States for a century and also in Egypt and Chile.

The running of the books

What we did find were book fairs. On the same week that bulls were chasing people in the streets of Pamplona, people were chasing books in the streets of San Sebastian and Segovia. The Segovia fair seemed especially popular with children, and many booths had steps to allow little people to peruse books alongside their elders. The Spanish bookstalls that Hemingway so lovingly described in For Whom the Bell Tolls seem to have survived into our present century.

The World Factbook reports the literacy rate of Spain at 98%, just a point below that of the United States. Libraries, admittedly, are only part of a nation’s learning and reading infrastructure. And the Spanish were reading.

When they weren’t cheering their soccer team on to win the Euro Cup, or their Rafael Nadal to take Wimbledon, many were turning pages of books—in parks and cafes and on the beach. The bookstores in Spanish cities reminded me of those in the U.S. a generation ago, small and un-chained.

Scandinavia’s higher latitudes

As for those nations in the Top Spenders group for libraries, they spend more than 39 euros per capita, or about twice what the U.S. spends. Who are they?

Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden.

I haven’t seen what libraries look and feel like in those countries. Have you? I’d love to hear your experiences in libraries in Scandinavia, and everywhere around our learning planet. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

The Golden Age of Books: Leapfrog to Literacy – Part 2 of 2

Leapfrog to Literacy – Part 2 of 2

Our discussion is on Room to Read, the nonprofit organization that former Microsoft executive John Wood founded to combat global illiteracy by building schools and libraries in the developing countries most in need. There’s more on Room to Read’s founding principles in Part 1 of this post.

Real-life reading

To assuage potential concerns about Western religious or political motivations, Room to Read emphasizes its nondenominational and nongovernmental status. In addition,
Room to Read staffers maintain a close connection to the children, parents and teachers the program reaches out to. Rather than imposing its ideas from afar, the organization develops its ideas “on the ground,” framing them within the cultural context of the communities it’s reaching out to.

As an example, Wood and his staff recognized that for economic and cultural reasons, girls are often held back from school, whereas boys—or at least older boys—can attend. Yet an educated girl can often deliver a higher return on investment, in that she is more likely to stay in the community and teach others.

“The agriculture sectors in most countries have become nearly entirely feminized because the men tend to migrate either to big cities or abroad in search of better opportunities,” says Nadereh Chamlou, Senior Advisor in the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa Region. “Entire communities have to depend on the decision-making, knowledge and ingenuity of the women. The welfare of the households depends directly on the level of education of the women who head them.”   

Happily, the cost for an average annual scholarship for a girl is quite affordable by American standards. For $250, a donor can pay for tuition, books and even a uniform. In return, a young girl who may someday be teaching her own children to read can become an educated woman.

Another example: while Web-connected computers can indeed offer great gains, so can old-fashioned printed books, which at present are easier to scale. In Cambodia, for example, Room to Read libraries combine computers in labs with books in laps.

The unprecedented volume of new books published in English is an opportunity for driving costs down and availability up. The Scholastic corporation has been a particularly generous supporter of Room to Read, donating hundreds of thousands of books. Of even greater importance, though, is that students learn from books in their native languages, so Room to Read has developed a local language publishing program. In less than six years, the program has published 2 million books.

The business of giving wisely

John Wood and Room to Read demonstrate what can be done, both quickly and effectively, to improve global literacy. Its success has required an understanding of history, including the proven power of enabling change versus just providing cash. It has also taken an understanding of sound business principles, and more specifically, of entrepreneurial techniques.

Recent business books such as Chris Zook’s Profit from the Core and Jim Collins’s Good to Great demonstrate that focus on a relatively narrow set of competencies leads to long-term success. Room to Read follows this wisdom by being clear about what it does—and does not do.

For example, Room to Read does not help coordinate volunteering in local countries; rather, its website suggests a few organizations that specialize in that worthy work. Nor does Room to Read handle book donations, despite Wood’s first experience doing just that. Instead it defers to Better World Books, which specializes in the logistics of collecting and transporting used books around the planet.

The magnitude of global illiteracy is daunting, and even Room to Read’s impressive accomplishments are still small. Yet its success shows how quickly improvements can be made when well-educated, highly motivated people get to work.

I’ll be reporting on other promising forces aiding global literacy and would like to hear from you. What do you see?

Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

The Golden Age of Books: Leapfrog to Literacy – Part 1 of 2

Leapfrog to Literacy – Part 1 of 2

Globally, 115 million school-age children do not attend school. An estimated 770 million people, roughly one-seventh of the world’s population, lack basic literacy. Two-thirds of these are women, which sets up a vicious cycle, since it is mainly women who teach young children.

These statistics could be reason enough for despair. Yet there are also new reasons for hope. Well-educated, highly motivated people are using the tools and capital of the developed world to help children in the developing world leapfrog to literacy. These people collaborate with equally talented and passionate people in the developing countries to create effective co-investment projects, linking the richest countries with the poorest.

One such person is former Microsoft marketing executive John Wood.

‘Come back with books’

Back in 1998, he took a vacation from his high-powered job to trek in Nepal. A product of an American upbringing, Wood was aghast at the lack of schools and scarcity of books in Nepal. Voicing his feelings to a local headmaster, Wood heard in reply a sentence that would change his life. “Perhaps, sir, you will someday come back with books.”

In his highly readable account, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur’s Odyssey to Educate the World’s Children, Wood tells the story of his transformation from globe-trotting software executive to charity founder. His nonprofit organization, Room to Read, is one of the most effective organizations for educating children in the developing world. And it is growing at the speed of a Wall Street darling.

Putting an education to work

Like many fortunate Americans, Wood had the advantages of growing up in a family that valued education. Positive school experiences were reinforced with trips to his local public library in Athens, Pennsylvania. His bookish cradle left a lasting impression. “This love of reading, learning, and exploring new worlds so predominates my memory of youth that I simply could not imagine a childhood without books,” Wood writes in his book.

His formal education included an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School, but by his account, Wood may have learned even more about business during his years at Microsoft—including the habit of focusing on business models that can be scaled up. Wood learned firsthand how a team of people with focused concentration, and quantitative measures ever in front of them, could achieve impressive growth.

He also read history and learned how business growth principles have been applied in charitable work. There was Andrew Carnegie, whom Wood describes as “my own personal hero,” because of the many libraries he built a century ago.

Closer to present times, Wood was inspired by former President Jimmy Carter’s campaign against guinea worm disease, which resulted in a decline from 900,000 cases worldwide in 1989, to fewer than 30,000 in 1995.

Further reading and interviews gave Wood an understanding of the magnitude of global illiteracy, and also of the pitfalls of some conventional charitable organizations. It wasn’t uncommon for a large portion of donations to be absorbed in administrative overhead, nor for tangible results to be at worst illusory, and at best hard to quantify.

Drawing on all these experiences—childhood memories, higher education, work, field observation and self-education—Wood started putting together a new model for getting results in literacy programs. The principles include:

• Simple to understand: Room to Read donations build schools, libraries and computer labs in countries that need them most, including Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka, India and, most recently, South Africa and Zambia.
• Co-investment model: Like Andrew Carnegie’s library model, funds are approved only when local communities contribute land, labor and the means for ongoing support.
• Inexpensive: Despite the current economy, U.S. dollars still go a long way in the developing world. For a few thousand dollars, individual donors can fund a whole library or school.
• Focus on quantifiable results: Room to Read has built more than 5,100 libraries since the organization began in 2000.
• Low overhead: Administrative overhead is limited to 10%.
• Accountability: You can read Room to Read annual reports and its Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) reports on the organization’s website: www.roomtoread.org.
• Clarity of goals—Room to Read defines not only what it does but what it does not do. (More on this in Part 2 of this posting.)

Building upon this solid business foundation, Room to Read makes effective use of Microsoft-era marketing techniques, including email networking and online donations.
Wood has rightly received much attention, as journalists and foundations recognize that Room to Read’s represents something good going on in the world.

In Part 2 of this post, we’ll look at how Room to Read applies some best business practices to doing good in a sustainable way. But first, I want to hear from you.

Do you agree that as a highly literate, developed nation, Americans should support global literacy? How about here in the U.S., and in your community—are there literacy programs you know of that are particularly effective?

Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Why We Are Entering the Golden Age of Books - Seventh in a Series

The Legacy of Carnegie Libraries

Walk into just about any public library in America and you can find the names of local citizens who contributed to the library. Yet one name appears more than all others. It is not the name of a local citizen at all, but of a small, bearded, nineteenth-century immigrant who became America’s iconic steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie.

Beginning in 1883 and continuing for some 40 years, Carnegie’s foundation helped to construct over 1,600 libraries in American cities and towns. In 1919, the year of his death, Carnegie’s money had built nearly half of the libraries then open in America. He built another 700 or so in other countries. His unprecedented donations earned him the sobriquet “Patron Saint of Libraries.”

Carnegie’s foundation required that local communities come up with the land, the books and the operating budgets, but they could build the libraries in whatever style the local community approved.

The offer was irresistible to most municipalities in a country still rushing to settle itself, and nary a town that applied for a library was turned away. They used Carnegie funds to build fine, lasting buildings that have sheltered generations. Most Carnegie libraries, old enough to celebrate their century marks, are still in use today.

Why Carnegie wrote the checks

Carnegie was the quintessential American success story. As a boy, working long hours at his job, he was overwhelmed by the generosity of a retired merchant named Colonel Anderson, who lent his personal collection of some 400 books on Saturday afternoons to local boys. This was how Carnegie educated himself.

It was from this life-altering experience that Carnegie would conclude decades later that there was no better use of his money than to build libraries so that others could benefit in similar fashion.

He began in his native Scotland, where he provided the funds for a new library in the town of Dunfermline. The opening of the beautiful stone library, on 25 August 1883, so pleased Carnegie that he set out to repeat the process—again and again, and with a passion.

The Scottish historian Gerry Blaikie explains something of Carnegie’s complex motivations. “Carnegie and his family were totally indifferent to organized religion so there was no religious purpose in his philanthropy. Much more likely was a political agenda to help the underprivileged gain access to knowledge, something which the ruling classes on both side of the Atlantic would not have fully approved of.”

Photos of the original interiors of the Dunfermline library from Blaikie’s website show some scenes still familiar to today’s library patrons—racks for periodicals, reading tables and children’s rooms. Other aspects seem curiously quaint—such as separate reading rooms for women.

“Whether or not Andrew Carnegie is remembered as a Gilded Age robber baron or the father of business philanthropy probably depends upon which side of the economic tracks you hail from,” observes Les Standiford, the author of Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick & The Bitter Partnership That Transformed America. “But such debate aside, it is undeniable that Carnegie is as responsible as any modern individual for the very concept of the free public library.

“While he imposed no stipulations as to size or style of architecture, the Carnegie Library was often the most imposing structure in a given community,” Les adds. One structure in particular stays in Les’s memory.

“I remember haunting the stacks of the Cambridge, Ohio, Carnegie Library as a youth—the grandeur of the building seemed a testament to the treasure trove of volumes that it housed. The thought of writing a book that would take a place on those shelves seemed as monumental an ambition as seizing the Grail itself.” 

Carnegie spread most of his largess in his adopted America, but he funded libraries in all the English-speaking countries of his day, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

Keystones and key ideas

It’s not only his buildings that endure into our present century. Carnegie’s idea of co-investment with local communities is also being carried on in a significant way around the world today by the Room to Read Foundation. In less than ten years, this foundation has helped build some 5,000 libraries in developing countries. (Room to Read is the subject of my next Golden Age post.)

It’s ironic that cacophonous steel mills produced so many quiet reading rooms. How many millions of readers and writers over the years have enlightened themselves in those quiet sanctuaries? How many even today tap quietly at computer keyboards inside those same spaces?

Do you have an experience to share involving a Carnegie library? Please let me hear from you. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Being a Reader in Chile

A note to my readers—

When I mentioned to a  fellow book group member, Lawrence Steinberg, that I was going to Chile over spring break with my son Cal to do some cycling—and visit libraries—he said we simply must visit his daughter, Ashley, who was living in Santiago. A few years ahead of Cal, Ashley had just graduated from Penn and had taken it on herself to move to Chile to try her hand as a journalist and English teacher before going on to Stanford Law School. (Thus far, her work has appeared in The Nation, Newsweek.com and the Santiago Times.)

We couldn't have asked for a better guide to take us to the Biblioteca Nacional, as well as to give us an idea of what reading was like in Chile. As Ashley began to describe the many differences, including the subtle ones (in her experience, people rarely ask one another what they are reading), I realized that Levenger Well-Read Life readers would benefit from hearing directly from this talented young writer. I asked her to post a guest essay on the reading life in Chile from an American's perspective. Here is her report.

- Steve

Chileans call their country pais de poetas (“country of poets”). The South American nation has produced two Nobel Prize for Literature winners, Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, and an array of talented writers. To be a Chilean reader is to be immersed in literature inspired by a landscape of mountains, lakes, volcanoes, glaciers and deserts; to be entranced by a place where Isabel Allende’s magical realism mixes with Roberto Bolaño’s sense of adventure, where Alberto Fuguet’s passion meets Ariel Dorfman’s politics.

Any tourist arriving in Chile is made aware of the nation’s deep literary tradition. Taxi drivers point tourists to Neruda’s kooky houses in Santiago, Valparaíso and Isla Negra. Tourist maps highlight statues and museums devoted to other literary greats. This unusually shaped country of almost 17 million people considers its literary contributions to be an important part of its heritage.

When I first came to Chile in 2006 to write for the English-language newspaper the Santiago Times, I was unaware of the country’s literary legacy. But I soon learned how important it was to the Chilean people, and I began to familiarize myself with the country’s poets and writers.

What I began to notice, however, was that for a country whose literature is so spirited, books are exorbitantly, often prohibitively, expensive. A book that might cost $10 in the United States can cost the equivalent of $25 in Chile. Considering the lower median salary in Chile, the high prices are all the more shocking. 

The high price tag is a result of a tax placed on books as well as Chilean publishers’ desire for high profit margins on limited volume. The high price of books is especially peculiar considering Chile’s quest to become a developed commercial and financial world center. Literacy is one of the most effective tools governments can use to bring up their least privileged citizens out of poverty, but the book tax threatens to price literacy out of the reach of the very ones aspiring to it.

Luckily, efforts are being made to address the incongruity between the justifiable pride the Chileans have for their literature and the inflated price of new books. Governments at the national, regional and municipal levels have intensified their efforts to open new libraries and modernize old ones, and ensure that all neighborhoods have at least one public library. Libraries currently serve as especially important resources for university students, for whom paying 50,000 Chilean pesos (over $100) for a textbook is unthinkable. Unofficial estimates suggest that almost half of municipal library users are students.   

Residents of Santiago, Chile’s capital city, are treated to the BiblioMetro program, a series of small booths or storefronts in key metro stations that allow passengers to check out books for the small annual fee of 3000 Chilean pesos (just over $6). They can return the books to the giant book drops that are scattered throughout the metro system.

Additionally, a new national government program, Maletin Literario (“Literary Briefcase”), was created to give books by both Chilean and foreign authors to 400,000 families living in poverty. The government received criticism from right-wing politicians who believed that “delivering Kafka to families on welfare” was an inefficient use of funds, but program supporters fought back, arguing that the poor, just as much as the rich, had a right to literature.

Nonprofits have also stepped in to improve the situation. The Gates Foundation funded a program called BiblioRedes, a multi-million dollar initiative that installed free public Internet access in 378 libraries across the country, bringing hundreds of thousands of Chileans through the doors.

And there are other ways around the expense. A pedestrian walking down any street in downtown Santiago will undoubtedly encounter vendors hawking pirated books from sidewalk tables, flagrantly defying intellectual-property laws alongside their DVD- and CD-selling counterparts.

Less illicitly, Chileans can also take advantage of frequent ferias del libro, or book fairs, that offer some discounted books. Not every title is bound to be available, and finding exactly what you seek is not a quick or easy process, but for the book enthusiast, browsing at the ferias is a good option. There are also second-hand bookshops that carry old books for lower prices, though the latest bestselling hardcover would be difficult to find.

Yet despite the lack of ubiquitous Barnes & Noble stores and Amazon.com, Chileans have something in common with citizens of more developed countries. They, too, face information and media overload. With television, Internet, video games and movies competing for readers’ attention, the price of books creates an easy excuse to spend leisure time doing something that is instantly accessible.

“What is happening here is similar to the trend in the U.S.,” says Viviana Garcia, the Coordinator of the Municipal Library in Providencia. “Chileans don’t read as much as we should.”

Unlike in America, however, reading is not quite a social institution. Alma Rates, a film student in Santiago, says that “book clubs are not very common here, and I don’t usually hear people asking each other if they’ve read any good books lately.”

It is unclear whether this has anything to do with book prices. And ultimately, as Garcia from the Providencia library explains, “people who want to read will always find a way.”

As one friend tells me, the difficulty of acquiring books makes one appreciate reading more. A book cannot be an impulse buy. “It is something you save up for, something you think about, something you look forward to,” he says.

“And something you are grateful for when your fingers finally turn the first page.”

As always, I’d like to hear your thoughts. Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Why We Are Entering the Golden Age of Books—Sixth in a Series

How some libraries around the world are leaping into the 21st century

It was the first time any guests had asked to be shown the local library. But my son and I were interested not only in cycling this famed region of Chile during his spring break, but also in seeing all the bibliotecas we could along the way. As we walked the few blocks from our hotel in Temuco to the municipal building, our three guides, who lived in the area and were proud to show us its ample charms, tried to manage our expectations. “No muy bueno,” said one. “Not very good.”

Our progress was slowed by scattered groups of teenagers in school uniforms chatting and laughing. Schools had begun their fall sessions a week earlier in this city of a quarter million, located as far south of the equator as Washington, D.C., is north of it.

Arriving at the somewhat worn municipal complex at a busy intersection, we entered the darkened foyer and obtained permission to pass through a windowed hallway. Sunbleached glass cases exhibited the books of the city’s two Nobel-winning poets, Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda. We entered a room about the size of a grade-school classroom. This constituted the public space of the Temuco Municipal Library.

To our left, eight computer terminal seats where full with attentive patrons—mostly young people—while two other people waited their turns. Our chief guide, Alejandro Levy—whose English was nearly as poor as my Spanish—motioned for me to follow him to the counter across the room, where he asked the librarian for a Spanish-English dictionary. She retrieved a well-worn tome with a cracked plastic cover over its yellowed spine. Alejandro turned to a Spanish word and put his finger under it so I could read the translation.

The word was vergüenza. The translation is shame.

Connecting in Chile

I shook my head no. While the library was humble by American standards for a city this size, the free Internet access and avid patrons gave the room a vitality. Outside the door to the room was a painting of Neruda next to the Biblio Redes sign, the Gates Foundation initiative to spread free Internet access around the world.  The words on the sign translate to:

“BookNet: Open your world: Free Internet here in your public library.”

We were to come across this welcoming blue sign outside many libraries on our tour of the Lakes and Volcanoes region of Chile. Some of the libraries were architecturally beautiful, as in the town of Pucon, not to mention the stately Biblioteca  Nacional in Santiago.

Where public-access computers were absent, however, the difference was stark. In this photo set of the Orsono Municipal Library, perhaps you can feel the dull atmosphere that enveloped us despite the brilliant blue morning outside.  Empty seats before empty tables, a lonely counter where one submits one’s requests, after having looked up books in card catalogs. Quaint is perhaps the kindest term one might use to describe Orsono’s library.

But this will change when public-access terminals arrive in Orsono, as they surely will in this country that enjoys the highest Gross Domestic Product, per capita in Latin America.

Aspiring in Egypt

Facing a more daunting challenge is Egypt. Its population of 82 million, compared with Chile’s 16 million, is younger, with a median age of 24 versus 31. Moreover, Egypt’s literacy rates are lopsided and low, with only 83% of males and 59% of females over the age of 15 deemed to be literate, compared with Chile’s 96% literacy rate for both genders.

On our trip to Egypt this past winter, there were encouraging signs on the library front, not only in the stunning world-class facility at Alexandria, but in the spreading Mubarak Libraries, which for the last dozen years have sprinkled modern facilities with Internet access around the country.

In the Mubarak Library in Luxor we visited one weekday evening, after paying a nominal entrance fee we found inviting stacks open for browsing, and were gratified to see young women surfing the Net. Computer terminals can be far less expensive than thousands of books, to say nothing of the large buildings customarily used in the developed world to house such books.

Can new models for libraries open the world to hundreds of millions of people in the developing world?

If so, one country in need is Cambodia.

Hoping for Cambodia

In 2004 our family had the good fortune to be able to visit Siem Reap, Cambodia. We went, as so many tourists do, to see the temples of Ankor Wat. I asked our tour guide, who spoke remarkably good English, if there were a library in town. He didn’t know the word library so I tried bibliotheca, which he did know.

“No, we have no bibliotheca in Siem Reap,” he said. “I think there is one in Phnom Penh…”

“Is there a bookstore in Siem Reap?” I asked.

“Yes, we have that,” he replied.

He took us to a busy thoroughfare with open markets and brought us to something akin to an American convenience store. Crammed between shelves of snacks and soft drinks were a few shelves of books—mostly in English about the temples, and a few in Khmer. This would have to suffice as book inspiration for the 750,000 citizens of Siem Reap, about the same number of people who reside in San Francisco.

Cambodia is a country in need of almost everything. Fortunately, people from many nations are building hospitals and hotels and preserving its priceless temples. Cambodia faces daunting literacy statistics akin to Egypt, with estimated literacy rates of 85% for men and 64% for women, and a median age of a mere 21.

There was actually one old biblioteca in Siem Reap—or what might have been one—among Ankor Wat’s temple ruins, which date back to the 12th century. Yet I can imagine a new structure alongside the road, perhaps next to the one-room school shown in this photo, modest but clean and networked to the world so that a fifteen-year-old Cambodian girl in Siem Reap can look up international literacy rates as easily as I have done here in my comfortable seat in Delray Beach, Florida.

In future posts, we’ll look into some of the technological efforts under way to open the world to the young millions worldwide who are growing up far from the sheltering libraries of the developed world.

Until then, please send me your experiences with libraries in the United States and around the world. What have you seen?

Just click on the Comments link below. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).