In his chapter, ‘The Hyperlinked Organization,” David Weinberger calls out how technology, like email,blogs, and the web itself, are accelerating the flattening of hierarchies and promoting the connections between humans to share information with each other about how they are experiencing the organization beyond the organizational charts, press releases, and official memos. Michael Stephens states, “The hyperlinked library is human. Communication, externally and internally, is in a human voice. The librarians speak to users via open, transparent conversation.” Bringing these two concepts together, I have a vision that the hyperlinked library can also mediate, with the help of technology, conversations and exchanges between the community members of the library, and even facilitate and provide the infrastructure of a mutual aid structure called a “Time Bank.” A time bank proposes the question: what if people were hyperlinks who were connected to each other in a network of service?
I first learned about timebanking in 2018 while I was visiting a college friend in New Zealand who lives near Christchurch in a small town called Lyttleton. I was exploring the town by foot and noticed a flier that promoted the Lyttleton Time Bank, inviting people to share their skills and time in the network. Basically, in a time bank, one hour of service is one credit, and everyone is seen as having something to contribute, whether it is helping with yard work, teaching someone a language, or cooking a meal. When we consider the tool lending, literacy tutoring or tax help that one might find in the local library, timebanking is a short leap that can strengthen communities by pooling and sharing talents and resources among a network.
Alternatively, if a community is not interested or able to form a formal time bank, the library can still serve as a site of mutual aid, which is a social model based on reciprocity and direct support through cooperation between individuals. Mutual aid can move us beyond charity and volunteerism and builds lasting relationships of reciprocity among community members. Mutual aid has been around a long time, and mutual aid groups experienced a growth during the COVID19 pandemic, as folks banded together to deliver groceries to their neighbors, make and distribute face masks or simply just check on people who might be isolated in their homes. What’s left of these community efforts today? I can walk into my local public library today and pick up a free COVID test, thanks to the local public health department, but much of the mutual aid organization and activity has waned as the pandemic receded.
One example of mutual aid in libraries today is the Bay Area Mutual Aid Network: a group of libraries that have organized to be prepared with supplies in the event of a disaster. But do we need to wait for a disaster to activate a mutual aid network? I think we can start today by using the library as a shared, common place to offer our talents and skills with each other. Librarian and technologist Jessamyn West ties together the history of libraries and mutual aid in her talk, “Libraries as longstanding mutual aid anchors.” West states that the “person” makes the thing a library not the building and that some of the biggest examples of mutual aid in libraries are InterLibrary Loan (ILL), technology access and the community space of the library. I believe that anchoring mutual aid in libraries will strengthen communities by increasing a sense of belonging among its members by bridging differences through cooperation.
References
https://belonging.berkeley.edu/bridging-belonging
https://www.librarian.net/talks/mutualaid/mutualaid/index.html
https://www.mutualaid.coop/what-is-mutual-aid/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/time-banking-is-catching-on-in-digital-world-180969437/
https://cool.culturalheritage.org/byorg/baman/
https://www.librarian.net/talks/mutualaid/mutualaid/index.html