NextGen: Adventures in Pop Culture

All my life, I have been an information sponge. Tell me an obscure fact once, and it's sealed in my brain for all time, or at least until I need it to win a cutthroat round of Trivial Pursuit. I have a particular affinity for information about pop culture—I consider Entertainment Weekly a major food group—but I always thought it would be unprofessional to combine a passion for providing the highest-quality library service with my lust for popular culture.

After I read Erin Helmrich's article “What Teens Want: What Libraries Can Learn from MTV” (Young Adult Library Services, Spring 2004), though, I started a blog, Pop Goes the Library, about how librarians can use popular culture to make their public services better: more current, more interesting, more appealing, more visible—more popular. And here's the thing: I've never been happier or more effective in my job. I connect more personally with my patrons; organize better, more audience-appropriate programs; and develop a more popular and current collection for teens.

Thinking and writing daily about Pop Culture Librarianship has helped me develop some basic rules.

Being culture snobs earns us no points in the eyes of our public. Don't flinch when someone asks for a book about NASCAR, the latest 50 Cent CD, or a Left Behind film. You don't know what else that patron likes to read, or why he's asking for that item. My sister's housemate loves NASCAR like he loves oxygen. He's also got a Ph.D. in paleontology. Lesson: if we ignore popular trends in publishing, music, movies, and TV, we risk making libraries and librarianship superfluous, and we alienate potential library champions.

This is pretty easy: take a look at your highest circulating items in the category of your choice, and improve the collection where you can. Love the movies? Focus on your library's DVD collection. If you're a music geek, look at what CDs you can't keep on the shelves. Popular nonfiction specialists, keep an eye on hot subject areas like technology, self-help, religion, and U.S. history.

Make yourself an expert on what's hot and what's not in your subject area of choice. Magazines are now your new best friend. Make sure you're reading at least three periodicals monthly that focus on your chosen area of interest. For movies, this might include Premiere, Variety, and movie reviews in your local major newspaper. For music, you have innumerable niche periodicals: Hip-Hop and R&B are covered by VIBE, The Source, and XXL; indie rock by CMJ New Music Monthly, Puncture, and Magnet; and mainstream music is the staple of Rolling Stone, SPIN, and Blender. If you just can't fit three more magazines into your monthly reading diet, go online for the New Release Newsletter from All Music Guide, an RSS feed of the Top 10 most popular weekly downloads from iTunes, or one of many lists of top theatrical and DVD releases from the Internet Movie Database.

Libraries are not cool institutions. We are here to be of use. We are too focused on others—the public!—and their needs to be cool. This is a good thing, so let's embrace it.

There are lots of ways to be indispensable. Look at Ann Arbor District Library, MI, where IT manager Eli Neiburger uses a new feature of Innovative's Millenium software to provide RSS feeds of newly ordered and newly arrived items. Look at Chicago Public Library, which recently held its first annual Windy City Hip-Hop and R&B Music Industry Seminar. Look at Ocean County Library, NJ, where savvy librarians are cross-marketing TV shows on DVD with the CD and paperback tie-ins related to the series. Look at my library, where a Grab & Go program makes extra copies of the most popular DVDs and best sellers available to patrons on a walk-in basis and where we offer audiobooks as downloadable MP3 files.

Look at your library the way your users and would-be users might look at it. Does your library say something relevant to your community members about their lives? Is the library on their list of places to go to when they develop a new interest, have a new baby, buy a new house, lose a parent, are diagnosed with a serious illness, send their first kid off to college, or retire? If it's not, it's up to us to find out why and to make the changes necessary to ensure the library is essential.