Audrey Barbakoff and Noah Lenstra

Steve Thomas: Audrey and Noah, welcome to the podcast.

Audrey Barbakoff: Thanks for having us, Steve.

Noah Lenstra: Yeah, thanks, Steve. Glad to be here.

Steve Thomas: Your book, The 12 Steps to a Community-Led Library, it comes out of two separate research projects that you all were working on. Could you all talk about those two separate projects and then what the inspiration was for smushing them together into this one book?

Audrey Barbakoff: I can start off by talking about the frame of the book. So the twelve steps themselves are based on my research. I was working on my doctoral dissertation, and I have always really loved and been interested in community-centered and community-led planning in libraries, and there have been some amazing resources out there for at least 10 years, 15, maybe closer to 20, that tell people how to do this kind of work. And I thought, my gosh, why aren’t we doing this? Why isn’t this the way that we do this all the time? Why aren’t we taking advantage of the brilliance and the capacity of our communities to do amazing and relevant work? We know how, and a lot of that, a quick shout out to John Pateman and Ken Willamette were really, to me at least, the pioneers of a lot of these ideas. And I thought, well, maybe because they’re out of Canada, maybe folks in the U. S. aren’t as familiar, but we’re librarians. We know how to find information.

So I thought, why aren’t we doing this, right? We know how. Why isn’t this the way? So that motivated my research project, where I talked with librarians who were doing community-led work successfully from libraries of different kinds, different sizes, all over the country. And I looked for the factors that were enhancing their capacity, that were making it easier for them, that were facilitating what they did, that helped them be successful.

And I also looked at what are the factors that were making it a little more of an uphill struggle for them. And from that we distilled out that that’s the 12 findings that libraries can do to build capacity. So, Noah, then I’ll kick it over to you to talk about your project.

Noah Lenstra: Great. Thanks, Audrey. And yeah, a lot of similarities, a lot of parallels, and with my research it was really shaped by my reading and engagement with people engaged in public health scholarship. Within public health there’s this concept of positive deviance and everyone knows what deviant behavior is, and we tend to see deviance as negative, but deviance can also be positive, so this is behavior that’s not the norm, it’s not standard, but it kind of signals what might be possible. So, similar to Audrey, I specifically went looking for examples of positive deviance and health promotion in libraries and found 18 libraries across the country that I engaged in interviews about some of their health partnerships, and then also talked with about 60 other health partners and with some financial support of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, want to want to make sure to get a quick acknowledgement.

But after the end of the research is that was wrapping up in 2022, I was thinking, gosh, I have all these amazing stories that I’ve collected and I really at the time wasn’t really sure the best way to get these out to the public. Then Audrey and I got connected through our shared engagement with American Library Association’s Editions, and through that initial connection, we started talking and thinking about how we’re really looking at similar phenomenon. So I was able to really successfully, I think, use Audrey’s amazing framework as the vehicle to share some of the stories that I collected in my research.

And I’ll say just at a meta level, I think Audrey and I are both really committed and passionate about the power of relationships, so we thought about, yeah, we don’t know each other, like at the time we had never met, but it’s like we believe in the power of relationships to make things possible, so let’s talk and see what we may be able to do together and the book is kind of a result of that.

Audrey Barbakoff: That’s such a good point, Noah, and now you’re one of my favorite people in all of library land. So I’m so thrilled that that we built that relationship.

Steve Thomas: And did ALA Editions, did they put you guys together? Noah, did you just reach out to Audrey? Or how did that happen?

Noah Lenstra: Yeah, it was initially ALA Editions that connected us, but then we were off to the races in terms of working, so ALA functioned as the initial matchmaker, but then, yeah, we just very quickly found our shared groove together.

Steve Thomas: Very cool. I know you met at this year’s PLA, but did you get to meet before that or is that the first time in person?

Noah Lenstra: That was the first time. I think for better or worse, during the COVID 19 pandemic, we’ve all learned to work extremely well at a distance.

Steve Thomas: One of the things I know that’s really important and vital to the model is that you incorporate equity, diversity, inclusion, and social justice into that. How did that come to the fore in your research, Audrey?

Audrey Barbakoff: DEI was really at the heart of the research from the beginning. So if you want to get very boring, the title of my actual dissertation was “Building Capacity for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Public Libraries Through Community-Led Programming.” So that was always the motivating idea, right? Why do we do community led work? Why do we create community led programs and engage in partnerships and develop services together? An enormously important piece of that is in order to share power with communities that have been disenfranchised. Communities that are doing amazing things, that are brilliant, that should have access to resources and power and space, and have been denied that access.

So, community-led work is a key way that we can live our DEI values. It’s not just something that we do because it’s fun and it’s cool, although it’s fun and it’s cool, and it’s not just something we do because it makes services and programs that people really want to use, although it does, right, because the end user helps to create the thing. So of course people want to use it.

We could use some of the methods of community-led programming and planning to work with the people who already have a loud voice, who already have a lot of power, and we would have things that were fun and cool and got used, but it’s when we center social justice, it’s when we center collective liberation, that this model really takes on deep meaning, and it becomes the way that we want to do our work because it matters deeply to our community.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. And we’ll get into that a little bit more later. It is nice that this is a book that’s not just theoretical, it’s very practical. You give a lot of examples and you walk how you would actually do this, and you start that by laying some foundational work that just contextualizes the theory and the ideas so that you can do the practical stuff later. Can you provide a brief overview of what community led planning is and what it means to libraries?

Audrey Barbakoff: Yeah, I can start with that one. One of the barriers sometimes that I hear librarians share about community-led planning is that it’s a little bit hard to get their heads around. If it’s not something that they’ve done before, it’s just hard to visualize what do you actually do? What does it look like? Okay, I’m interested, how do I take the next step?

A big surprise in my research was that people who were doing this work really effectively, who, as Noah said, had that positive deviance. They did not necessarily know exactly what they were doing when they started. Almost everyone I interviewed or participated in a focus group or wrote in a journal said something along the lines of, “Well, I had no idea what I was doing when I started, but I believed this was really important, so I dove in.”

So, what I found was important, was understanding those theories, was having a conceptual understanding of why this work matters and what it looks like to do at a theoretical level. Because the practical stuff changes. We’re dealing with human beings. We’re dealing with specific moments in time. So the how changes a lot, but the why is pretty constant. So if you hold those theories, like if you have that understanding, then you know the destination, so it’s easy to take a different road to get there, right? Instead of getting locked into the road, and then you hit a barrier and your project hits a roadblock.

So I really wanted to take that time up front to talk about some of these theories. The moment where I see the light bulb go on for people, most of the time, is when I talk about sharing power. That community-led work is fundamentally about sharing power with the people who are going to use or be impacted by the thing we’re making. This is the kind of “nothing about us without us is for us” idea and that slogan comes from disability justice. Community-led work means that the community or the people who are going to use or be impacted by something have real power to shape what success looks like or how it’s defined, how we measure it, what activities we take in order to get there and what resources we use to make those activities successful and how we apply them. The real decision making power lies outside the library in the hands of the community.

Steve Thomas: An early quote that I love that I think sets the tone for it all is that “the community is the heart of the library,” which is the flip of what we normally think of, which is “the library is the heart of the community,” which, both can be true, but it really contextualizes a lot of the direction you’re coming from.

Noah Lenstra: Yeah, I completely agree, Steve, and I agree with Audrey as well. One of the things that we tried to do in the book and I think we did do in the book was help provide some of those ways to think differently about librarianship. I’ll just add one thing that I’ll often use is to say okay, we’re good at talking about library services. We’re not so good about talking about community services that involve librarians. And so I think that’s just another way to think about this work.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. Can you elaborate a little bit on what the CoLaB model discussed in the book is?

Audrey Barbakoff: So I do want to preface this by saying the term CoLaB has been used by a lot of different folks in libraries and a lot of different contexts, so the way we’re using it as a shorthand acronym for a community led capacity building model. I think the easiest way to talk about it is to think about it in phases. Looking at models of organizational change is how we organize the steps to think about what are the ways that change tends to cascade through an organization effectively. That’s why they’re in the order that they’re in. Depending on where your organization is, you don’t have to necessarily move in a specific order. It’s very iterative. It’s very cyclical.

But what is in the first phase I think of as that inspirational phase, and those are some of the underlying factors that help an organization prepare to do this work. These are things like leadership buy-in, these are things like having a commitment to DEI, the things that aren’t necessarily very specific to this work, but that really help if you can have them in place before you get going.

Then the middle phase is your transformational change phase, and this is actually where the bulk of the work is. It’s six of the twelve steps. And what I think is really important to know about this is this is all culture and systems work. If people are familiar with the Water of Systems Change, that’s, I believe, Kania, Kramer and Senge, that’s a really potent model that looks at how does change happen in an organization, how do we grow capacity in an organization? At least half of it is the under the iceberg stuff. A lot of times I’ll see libraries try to jump right to operational changes: “Okay, well, we’re going to do some relationship building work. That means we need to go to some community meetings, so we need to change how we schedule.” They’ll try to jump right to those very concrete things. That feels good because you can check the box, you can see what you’ve done.

But if you try to do that without really investing in the culture first, if those things just feel tacked onto the surface rather than being connected into the culture of the organization deeply, they don’t stick, right? They don’t make sense. They feel like extra work piled on, and people don’t understand why they’re happening, and they just slide off the surface. So, it’s really important in that middle phase to do the culture work and really to spend the bulk of your time there, to be doing things like supporting ongoing conceptual education, not procedural training necessarily, but making sure that everyone in the organization has the psychological safety to contribute their ideas and to bring their whole selves, and that everyone has access to knowledge and education and is supported and participating in this kind of work and in ways that are reasonable, given what their specific jobs are. These cultural changes about how we communicate and how we feel safe and how we relate to each other, that’s really what makes the work successful.

And then the third phase is those operational changes which are still important, are things you have to do, things like time, autonomy, decision-making, resources, the concrete and visible things that the organization can change.

Noah Lenstra: Yeah, and I’ll just share from my perspective. I completely agree with Audrey. We sometimes don’t think about or don’t spend a lot of time looking at those, what Audrey said is kind of the “iceberg under the water” components, but I think that spending time really thinking about those, that’s really going to have the most transformative impact.

And I do think in libraries, it’s important to talk about that because I think right now from my vantage point, there’s a really large conversation about library outcomes. How do we know the outcomes of libraries are producing? And that’s important, but until we really understand the input we can’t understand the output, and I think what this book really does is help think about, what are the ingredients, the pieces, that lead to successful outputs. And so, really, really focusing our time and attention there so we can then get to actually being able to understand the impacts that we make through this work.

Steve Thomas: What are some of the strategies that you mentioned of doing network for like administrators that want to foster this growth mindset within their staff? What are some ways that they can do that?

Noah Lenstra: Yeah, I’ll share a really timely example from PLA, Public Library Association, conference. I went to a really great session featuring Akron-Summit County Public Library, talking about how for the past 10 years, they’ve had a system in place wherein any full time library staff, if they identify a sector of the community, that they’re not working well with, but they don’t have a relationship with, a librarian can propose, “Hey, could you allow me to go on staff time to go in and meet with this group, meet with the sector?”, having a real explicit process to not only encourage it, but to really track it.

 There are definitely concrete things that library administrators can do, but I think it really starts with setting the expectation that we’re going to do this. There’s an expectation that library staff are going to be building relationships and building connections, and thinking strategically about not only the usual suspects, but digging a little bit deeper into the community.

Audrey Barbakoff: First, I just want to put in a plug for all of your case studies. Again, the way the book was structured is I wrote the framing, but then each chapter has a case study that Noah contributed from his research, and so many of those have concrete, on the ground examples of what library staff and also library leaders are doing to make this work effective and make it happen and make it take root in their libraries. So, I highly recommend for anyone reading the book, like really spend some time with those case studies to draw out those lessons.

I’ll just add that leadership is really important. I think sometimes we, especially having been in those roles myself, you feel like, “Oh, gosh, is my opinion really making that much of a difference? I’m just one person in this organization.” but organizational change literature shows us that the role of the leader is really essential that you set the tone for the culture. So for leaders, just using this in your language, talking about the importance of this, framing what you do in terms of community-led work, asking about community partnerships, showing that you value that work, it makes a huge difference in what people in the organization choose to do and seek out. And be visible.

Noah Lenstra: Thanks, Audrey, and just following up on that, I’ll mention one of my favorite case studies in the book was really focused on, Anne Arundel County Public Library, and the work of in particular, one of their employees, Becky Hass, who is in a middle management position, the outreach and programming lead within this library system that serves about half a million people. Becky is a great example about how when libraries have systems in place that really empower staff to be visible and are staffing those roles with people that are really passionate about communities and building relationships, those people like Becky can be matchmakers connecting branch level staff to partners and doing the work to glue together the library and the community because we know not every staff member necessarily can be out and about in the community building these relationships all the time, so to have someone like a Becky Hass in your institution, helping to do that matchmaking work can be can be extremely transformative to the institution.

Steve Thomas: Well, a lot of that work can be done within the branch. People are coming into your library. As you’re talking to people, that’s one of the importance I think of having your frontline staff talking to the community as they’re there, or don’t just like “check out books, bathrooms over there, programs here,” like, you’re not an AI, just answering questions and pointing people in the right direction. You are building those relationships during your programming, during just your day to day interactions with people. Community building does not equal outreach. That’s not the same thing. Part of it, but it’s not the same thing.

Audrey Barbakoff: Steve, I’ll share my magic trick with you, which is the question, “Who else should I talk to?” This is, for me, this is how you start where you are, whether you’re seeing the folks that you are trying to reach in your community in your library or not, the way to expand who you know is to start with the people you do know, to start with where you have some relationships, talk to folks, maybe that’s in your library, and then say, “Who else should I talk to?” and then talk to that person and say, “Who else should I talk to?” And pretty soon, you’re talking to folks that you would never have connected with. You can just start with where you are.

Noah Lenstra: Yeah. And I think part of what we’re doing in this book is trying to rethink some of the vocabulary that we use. Historically, there has been this dichotomy between outreach and branch level public service, and I think it’s not so simple. Like, I think historically outreach has been taking services out into the community and delivering library services out of the community and that’s definitely not what Becky does and that’s not what the Outreach Department at Anne Arundel County does. What is important is that I think you can do a lot in the branch, but you can’t do it all at the branch. I think it’s impossible to do community led librarianship from your branch. That can be a starting point. But at the end of the day, you need to find ways to either physically or virtually be out in the community. That’s an absolutely intrinsic and essential part of the process.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and I think it’s important when we’re talking about leadership of implementing all this, the model is flexible, so don’t just throw all this at your staff at once because you’re going to just burn them out and just, “Oh, by the way, now you have to make relationships with everybody in the community by the end of next week. So let’s go.” Make sure that you keep your staff mental health in mind as well as you implement this kind of thing.

Audrey Barbakoff: Something I tell people a lot when I teach about this is, it’s not about doing more, it’s about doing what you already do differently. The idea is not to say you have this whole stream of traditional programs that are very library led that you must continue to do, and then you have to do this extra community led stuff on top of it. It’s about saying, we do programming, we offer services, we have collections and resources. How can we rethink how we build those things so that the community is co creating them.

Noah Lenstra: Audrey is a really thoughtful thinker about this. And she continues to think about this. Over the last year, she’s written a series of really amazing blog posts for OCLC about this process and the CoLaB, and in one of those recent blog posts, she talks about the Funnel of Library Capacity. And I think that’s really key, knowing what you have, knowing what your strengths are, knowing what you can contribute, but not letting that be a defeatist attitude. Like, “We have burnout. Therefore, we can’t do anything except turn the lights on and just do what we’ve always been doing.” No, I don’t think that’s true. I think you can use examples like that Funnel of Library Capacity to challenge yourself and challenge your library to reimagine how it interacts with and works with the community.

Steve Thomas: What are some of the common pitfalls that libraries fall into when they are trying to initiate these types of initiatives?

Noah Lenstra: I’ll start and, Audrey, definitely jump in. I do think one of the biggest pitfalls to me is this assumption that I sometimes hear that at the end of the day, this work is just going to be library work. And if you’re doing it right, it’s not just library work. It’s really trying to get out of the pitfall of imagining that for this work to be successful, all the work has to be done by library staff. And I think that’s just not true. It’s empirically false. So getting out of that pitfall of imagining that for things to work successfully, everything has to be, be done by the librarians is one of the biggest pitfalls.

Audrey Barbakoff: I’ll emphasize something that I shared earlier, which is, I think one of the most common problems that I see is jumping right to those operational changes without taking the time to invest in the underlying culture of the organization and the systems that are in place to support staff.

This is really about the culture of the organization, the orientation of the organization, so trying to jump right to those quick band aid fixes that, that look good or being like, “Oh, well, we had one training on community-led libraries, so check the box, we’re done.” That, to me, is one of the most common issues that I see folks run into.

Noah Lenstra: Yeah, I can’t agree more. This is not something mentioned in the book, but I had a conversation with a library director here in North Carolina and she moved from a previous library, and she said one of the reasons why she left her old library and became a library director is she felt like her old boss literally wouldn’t allow her to work with communities because the old director was of the mindset, “If we’re going to be doing any kind of engagement or developing new services in collaboration with other people, I need to be doing all of that. I need to have my hands on everything.” Just completely unwilling, unable to let go of the reins. And so when she moved libraries, she’s like, “Well, we’re not going to do that anymore.” So I completely agree. I think if you’re not ready to reimagine things, you’re not setting yourself up for success because then it just becomes another thing that you’re asking library staff to do rather than this more holistic transformation of the culture.

Steve Thomas: You did mention outcome measurement earlier, but how do you evaluate these processes to make sure they’re working right and then adapt them as you see what’s working when what’s not working?

Audrey Barbakoff: So for me, this is the one area where I would really love to see more research happening. Hint, hint, Noah, for your next, your next grant application. This is one that I think does not have necessarily an easy answer because part of sharing power with the community and giving the community a meaningful say in what success looks like means there isn’t one standard. We can’t just say “Here are the outcomes for libraries!”

I would say if there’s one thing we can actually identify it’s strengthening the relationship. When it comes to community-led work, the process is the product the relationship is the deliverable. Did we build a relationship? Did we strengthen a relationship? Is there something that will live beyond the end of this project that can carry us to the next thing and the next thing? That is pretty universal.

But beyond that, in terms of what does success look like in any given collaboration? You have to define that with the people that you’re collaborating with. You have to define that together, and it’s not necessarily going to be what we’re used to in a library. It’s not necessarily going to be about number of programs, program attendance, door counts, circ counts, the cost per click. Those are things that libraries care about. They’re not things that communities care about necessarily. So we need to have conversations up front.

I really endorse creating a theory of change or using an outcome based logic model to actually construct this with your community to say, what is the impact we’re trying to have? What is something, a change that we can observe in people who interact with whatever it is that we’re making that will help us know that change is happening. And then let’s back up in our planning. Let’s say, how are we going to get to that point?

So, to me, we have to have that conversation together with our community every time. And that does present a lot of challenges. You can’t just have a spreadsheet. Because we’re not always measuring the same thing. So I’d love to see a simple solution for that.

Noah Lenstra: Absolutely, and we could definitely have a longer conversation about some of the things that are in the works, but one thing I’ll say from evaluation science is the critical importance of what are called progress indicators. Progress indicators are signs that you’re moving in the right direction. They’re not necessarily outcomes, but progress indicators are critical things to collect to demonstrate proof of concept.

One of the core progress indicators that I think are very easy to collect if we had the right infrastructure, would be to collect the information about number of community partners, and you could calculate that at both the individual and at the organizational level. How many people have we, as a library engaged in conversation about what we want the library to look like? How many organizations are we proactively working with? Can we classify those organizations based on different metrics? I think there’s some good work starting to collect some information about those progress indicators. I know the Minnesota State Library when it was led by Jen Nelson started to, as part of their supplement to the annual public library survey, collect some information from libraries across Minnesota about the depth of their partnership with outside organizations. They’ve started to do that in the state library of North Carolina. I know some individual library systems are starting to develop better internal systems for tracking frequency of engagement with individuals and organizations around library planning and collaboration. And that’s a key progress indicator. If you’re not collecting those progress indicators, you’re not going to be able to track outcomes, so that would be an interim step towards ultimately moving towards outcome evaluation.

Audrey Barbakoff: No, you’re so right. And as you’re talking, I’m thinking about other projects that are doing this kind of work, like NILPPA, which is the, Oh gosh, I forget what it stands for, but it’s about public programs. PLA and a social science firm called Knology are working on that. RIPL, the Research Institute on Public Libraries, which I believe is backed by the Colorado State Library. So yes, there’s a lot of great work that’s happening in this area.

I also want to add, though, for anyone who might be feeling kind of intimidated by that, like, oh gosh, we need to identify these indicators and collect them and have a system, and that feels like a lot. One of the most important things you can do to evaluate is to talk to people and to take some time to reflect. I’m a big fan of having some metrics so that you have something external that you can look to and say, how are we doing? Like, let me get out of my own head and you can do an enormous amount of evaluation by sitting down and talking to your partners and saying, “How do you think we’re doing? What could we do better? What could we do differently? What’s working really well? And how can we lean into that and do more of that?” And you can have those same conversations sort of in your own head. You can reflect on how you’re showing up in a space and what you’re bringing and what you’re going to do next. So don’t overlook the importance of dialogue and reflection.

Noah Lenstra: Yeah, and NILPPA, they’re actually getting ready to launch the second iteration of their site and in that second iteration, it’s really going to be focusing almost entirely on partnerships, because what they found in round one is that the vast majority of the truly successful, truly impactful library programs are not run by librarians, at least not run by librarians working by themselves. They’re a function of community partnerships. So get ready in the next couple months to see a huge revamp of that NILPPA website, focusing on the critical role of partnerships and successful library programs.

And I think it’s a process, and it’s a process that never ends per se, because communities are constantly changing, so it’s more like being comfortable with that lack of finality. In a sense, having trust in your community and trust in the process of letting go of the reins to a certain extent.

Audrey Barbakoff: I cannot echo that strongly enough, Noah. I think you are so right on. That ambiguity is scary. It’s hard. It’s not necessarily how we’re used to working. It’s not necessarily who’s attracted to library work in the first place. It’s not how our structures are set up. It’s often not how success is measured. We all want to be successful in our work. And if we know that success is being measured by how many programs you do or how many people come or those outputs, or even if you feel internally, like that’s how you were viewing your own success, it’s really hard to give up control over that. It’s really hard to trust and leave your success in someone else’s hands. So I just want to reiterate the importance of that. It is necessary to do this work and it is so important and it is so impactful. That is when the coolest stuff happens, is when you let go.

Steve Thomas: What advice would you give to librarians who want to do this and are sort of unsure of how to get started?

Audrey Barbakoff: Well, the piece of advice I always give to people is start where you are. You might be a leader in an organization with a lot of control over things like the strategy and the mission and that’s fantastic. You can do a lot if you’re in those roles. You might be an individual contributor. You supervise no one, you barely control your own work half the time, but wherever you are. You have some measure of control over something, even if it’s just yourself in the library over library resources and start there. Think about what do I do, what’s in my purview, and how can I have community co-create that with me? How can I bring in partnerships? Who’s impacted or who’s left out? And how can I bring them in and center their voices in what I’m doing? And maybe that’s really small. Maybe it’s a really small thing to start with. But this is iterative.

I mentioned earlier that one of the barriers that people have is that they can’t visualize What this work looks like because they haven’t seen it or they haven’t done it. A small success, a small example can be incredibly inspirational to other folks in your library. They’ll see what you’re doing and that gives you a little more breathing room to do it again. And it encourages them to get on board because they see how effective and meaningful it is. So, start where you are, start with what you can control, and it matters, even if it’s really small.

Noah Lenstra: I briefly in, in one of the case studies, talked about Laurel Public Library and Laurel, Delaware and one of the people that I interviewed there was Tameca Beckett, who started working at the library as a library assistant position in youth services, did not have an MLIS, but was able to get a scholarship to go to a Public Library Association conference, when it was in Philadelphia, I think in 2012, and she went to the Free Library of Philadelphia talking about how they had this, $200,000 music studio, and she went back to Laurel, Delaware, population 5, 000 and she’s like, I don’t have $200,000. That’s probably more than a fifth of our library’s operating budget for a year, but she started where she was, and she started talking with people and scrounged up some resources, and her orienting perspective was like, my community is worth so much, and we are so valuable. There’s nothing that no one else has that we can’t have. If people in Philadelphia have access to something, why shouldn’t the people of Laurel, Delaware have access to this as well? And that is her guiding light. She was able to do truly amazing things. It may seem a little bit Pollyanna, but really think there is power in knowing why you’re doing this work, and if you’re doing this work for community, then things flow from that.

Steve Thomas: Great. That’s, that’s, that’s a good way to wrap up. Except, of course, for the new feature on the show, quick little lightning round of questions. So first question: what is the first book that you remember that you read on your own?

Audrey Barbakoff: This probably isn’t actually the first book that I read on my own, but the first one that comes to mind as an early book that I really loved was Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney.

Noah Lenstra: I’m completely blanking.

Steve Thomas: That’s fine. What are you reading now?

Noah Lenstra: Oh, that one I can tell you. So it’s a book called The Tiger, and I should know the author. I read a lot of, like, bizarre nonfiction books. So, The Tiger is about an incident that happened in far eastern Russia where a tiger basically went on a murderous rampage. So, about tigers, about Russia. I’m always a big fan of documentary fiction and documentary movies. So that’s what I’m reading at the moment.

Steve Thomas: I just googled that one. It’s The Tiger: a True Story of Vengeance and Survival and John Valent is the author.

Audrey Barbakoff: I picked up an ARC for a great middle grade, kid lit, I’m a kid lit author and a mom, so I really, these days don’t get to read too much above like a sixth grade reading level, but Benji Zeb Is a Ravenous Werewolf is a queer Jewish romance about a kid whose family is actually werewolves and his prior crush, turned bully, discovers that he is a werewolf as well. So, just lots of fun, local author near me. I’m really enjoying it.

Steve Thomas: Which librarian stereotype is true for you?

Audrey Barbakoff: I have a lot of cardigans. Like a lot.

Noah Lenstra: I am kind of an insatiable looker-upper. So when I hear something, I always want to go right to databases and be like, well, I don’t know what that is. Like, just the way that you did, just a moment ago when I mentioned The Tiger and you’re like, “Oh, I got it!” That’s what it was. So yeah, that is me. I love just looking things up and learning more about things that I hear about.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, since I did that twice during this interview, that’s possible, that’s one of mine too. And the last question hard maybe, but describe the ideal library in three words.

Noah Lenstra: So Wayne Wiegand, the foremost historian of American public librarianship, I’m really going to crib from him. So he says public libraries are all about reading, information, and place. And so I think if you’re thinking about reading, information, and place, you’re on your way to success in terms of what the library is.

Audrey Barbakoff: All right, folks, I’m going to channel Mychal Threets for the moment, and what comes to mind for me is joy. So, I will say community, play, and joy.

Steve Thomas: Very good. Thank you, Noah and Audrey, for coming on the podcast. The book again is 12 Steps to a Community-Led Library, and it obviously goes into much more depth on the topics that we talked about here today, except the number of cardigans that Audrey has. I don’t think that’s mentioned in there anywhere, but pick it up and implement this kind of thing cause this is perfect for the thing that libraries should be doing. I think that comment I mentioned earlier that the community is the heart of the library, if that if that resonates with you, this is the book you need to read. So thank you both again for coming on.

Noah Lenstra: Thank you.

Audrey Barbakoff: Thanks so much.