Times of Wintering in Library Technology: How Community Can Help Us Through
Shrinking budgets, increasing authoritarianism, and new expectations around artificial intelligence make current times in library technology harder. In Katherine May’s concept of “wintering”, we can react to inevitable suffering with gentleness, rest, care, and community, trusting that transformation is possible. Using May’s work as a framework and bringing together research and practice in library communities, this presentation will describe practical strategies for getting ready for hard times through assessing capacity and creating infrastructure to wind up or wind down services as needed. We will look at how we can create tools and processes that make it easy to assist our colleagues, as well as how local and national communities have and can build shared capacity. Lastly, how do we determine when a new normal has arrived, and capturing possibilities for future resilience and rebuilding what has been broken.