McDonald: Learning from librarians at a Pacific Northwest conference

If you have a Timberland Regional Library card, you can obtain a card for libraries in King County, Pierce County or even Fort Vancouver Regional Library, expanding your access to even larger collections of printed and digital materials and services.

That’s just one tidbit I learned last weekend at the Pacific Northwest Association of Church Libraries conference in Olympia. I was surprised when I first learned that church librarians hold an annual conference, and I was honored to receive an invitation to speak as one of a half dozen or so authors and to teach a workshop on memoir writing.

Brenda McGuigan, a Timberland librarian who works with the Anywhere Library bookmobile services, described the reciprocity agreements as “a little hidden secret.” She shared information about trends in library service and showed slides of children’s areas, including the new Mountain View Timberland Library at Randle. She addressed bookmobiles, adapting to the digital age and sharing information about what libraries offer, especially to school-age students. Libraries can be places for families to hang out, explore collections, enjoy story times and book clubs, and participate in community events.

She focused on the five-county, 29-branch Timberland system but answered questions from librarians after her Saturday morning presentation at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Olympia.

I never realized the library has an app called TRL Go, which might make it easier to search the catalog and place books on hold using the phone or tablet. She also mentioned Libby, which is the e-book and audiobook app. She said the library has used the Libby app for more than a decade and checkouts have surpassed a million. She spoke of national newspapers and magazines available for browsing online. I know I’ve enjoyed using the library’s online resource connection to NewspaperArchive.com.

“We do have Ancestry Library Edition, so it’s not the full ancestry, and you do need to access it in our library,” McGuigan said.

Library users can stream films on the Kanopy app, she said, and access Consumer Reports reviews or learn one of 88 languages through the popular Mango app. People can enroll in video classes or search for jobs. Other items available at the library include book club kits, light therapy lamps, fishing kits as well as forest, environmental and birding backpacks, including shared Discover parks passes.

People also can sign up for electronic access cards to enter libraries after they’re closed to use the computers, access the Wi-Fi, or print or fax items. Those are just samples of the services available through Timberland.

The keynote speaker on Saturday was the Rev. Dr. Janet Waggoner, lead pastor and evangelist at St. John/San Juan Episcopal Church in Olympia, who shared her passion for helping people experience the joy of God in community. From an early age, she considered her favorite word to be “Go!” She took the word literally when she decided to go into the world and share the good news with people as an Episcopalian pastor, even though as our bodies age, our feet feel less like going, she said.

She focused on the importance of connection.

“That, I think, is what our love for books and libraries is all about — connection — where people who love books are, in my experience, looking all around for greater and deeper and richer connection,” Waggoner said.

People want connections with other people and deeper things in the world so they can be conduits for others to do the same.

“I got my love for reading from my parents,” she said, describing her father as a farm boy from a dysfunctional family who quit school in ninth grade to work the family farm and joined the military at 17. He married her mother in August 1960, on her 18th birthday, and paid for her to attend secretarial school. “They both loved to read and thought their children should know how to read and should get an education. By example, he taught me to read everything I could get my hands on.”

As children they visited the library, and her parents read to the children until they could read by themselves.

“The reason I tell you that story is I grew up in a house that was mostly populated by love and by a few books.”

Their church had a small library, so they read those books too, including stories published by the Church of the Nazarene about missionaries sharing the word of God across economic divides and cultures.

“Lest you have any doubt about the importance of the thing in which you are engaged, it’s transformational,” Waggoner said.

She noted the importance of sharing stories.

“Our community and culture is very focused around scarcity and fear,” she said. “But we have an abundance of riches in stories to share. So I have several questions for you in this presentation, and the first one is this: what story is it that you have to share?”

She noted the importance of using stories to help people connect with others and with scripture.

“We have to choose very carefully how we invest our time and energy,” she said. “I use that word investment very intentionally, because a lot of energy in our culture these days is squandered, wasted, entertained away in ways that don’t lead to deeper connection. But my sisters and brothers, as people of faith, we are called to be people of connection, people who share, who use our own stories as bridges to transform.”

She referred to Friday evening’s speaker, Corinna Luyken, an author and illustrator of children’s picture books, who spoke about sharing her art in stories.

“I have always loved to read, even as a small child and growing up, we didn’t have a ton of money, but my mom would go to thrift stores and garage sales and find books and stuffed animals,” Luyken said.

Waggoner asked how the church librarians planned to share their stories as a library team or a congregation to foster deeper connections, to become a haven of hope in a difficult time.

“So how is your community going to be a haven of hope, and how is your library team going to help stir that?”

The library, she said, is the most beautiful room in her church, and the library team features a new artist quarterly to invite people into the library to meet the writer, photographer, sculptor, boat maker or quilter. And the team pulls out a cart of books into the parish hall so people can borrow them. And the librarians publish regular book reviews, which is how she learned about the book Apeirogon by Colum McCann, about a Palestinian father and an Israeli dad who each lost a young daughter to violence in the Middle East.

She asked people, “What is your story?” And how are you sharing that story?”

“This question of purpose becomes even more challenging and must be even more carefully considered in times of division, because it’s difficult to drill down into the heart of our message. We can’t, in times that are fraught and divisive, float along, bob along the surface. Difficult times are times that demand real clarity in what we are about in order for us to accomplish much of anything. So what is your purpose? And how, together with your community, are you going to accomplish it?”

I loved meeting so many wonderful librarians from throughout Oregon and Washington at the conference, people like me who love to read and enjoy sharing stories.

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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.