SLJ Talks to Peter Milbury, Cofounder of LM_NET, about Retiring

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Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 11/6/2007 2:15:00 PM

Among school librarians, Peter Milbury is a household name. But you’ll be seeing a lot less of him now. That’s because Milbury, 65, retired as the media specialist at California’s Chico High School last June. And he was having such a blast with more free time that he decided to hand over the reins of LM_NET, the popular school librarian discussion group that he cofounded 15 years ago with less than 100 members. Now, it boasts more than 10,000 members.

SLJ spoke to Milbury about how LM_NET came about, why media specialists love it so much—and what he plans to do now that he’s not officially working.

Was it difficult for you to hand over your baby, LM_NET, to a new crew?

I started enjoying retirement from school. And about three months ago, I started thinking, “Oh, I could use some more time. And there are other things I want to do.” I have a part-time consulting job with the California Learning Resource Network—they review and post their reviews of electronic learning resources and electronic learning assessment resources—and that’s about as much energy I have for work now. I’ve got all these retirement kinds of things I want to do and I’m doing some volunteer work at my church, so I thought it was just time to turn it over to somebody else.

LM_NET is such a brilliant tool for school librarians. How did the idea come about way back in 1992?

I was on other listservs and discussion groups for college librarians and K–12 teachers and just reading what they had to say. If I’d see a librarian had posted from another school, I’d just capture their address. Pretty soon, if I found new resources, I would share them with those folks. Eventually, I had 40 or 50 people.

At the same time, I started doing presentations at conferences about the Internet. And we got a group of people together. We started joking around and calling ourselves the Leading Edge Librarians.

Mike Eisenberg, who was at Syracuse University at that time, had a similar group of email addresses from people he knew from various connections from ALA [American Library Association] and other places. His university had the capability of setting up a listserv, and he had heard about my list of people from a librarian in the Northeast.

Did you know Mike Eisenberg?

I had never even heard of him before. I was just sitting around on a Monday after school let out, checking my email and thinking, “What am I going to do this summer?” I really had a wide-open summer—and then I got this email from this guy I’d never heard of from Syracuse University introducing himself and asking, “Why don’t we merge our lists?” So we did.

Who came up with the name?

Mike came up with the name. It stands for Library and Media Network.

Were you surprised by how successful it became?

We didn’t have any idea. We just went with the flow. Our initial merge list had about 60 people from all over the world. Six months later, we had 424 [members]. A year later we had 1,000. By June 1994, we had 1,800; by June 1998, we had 9,000. And by 2000 we had almost 12,000 members.

Do you think its success is related to how isolated school librarians are from others in school?

That’s the key. Every so often we’d do a little survey, and we’d find out that isolation was a huge, huge issue because, as you know, oftentimes we’re the only one of our type in a school setting. Oftentimes—like people in California—we’re the only one in our whole school district. And there are a lot of states like that, and it’s hard to get to conferences.

You also won an award.

LM_NET is probably the most successful electronic educational network in the history of the Internet. In 2004, we won an award called the Listserv Choice Award given by LSoft Technologies, an international company that makes the software that drives listservers. I thought it was pretty impressive that a group of librarians with this type of list could get this type of award.

So what are some of the hottest topics that LM_NET has generated?

The controversy over the use of the word "scrotum" in The Higher Power of Lucky [(Scholastic, 2006) by Susan Patron] last year was a huge topic. LM_NET made it into the pages of the New York Times. The current controversy is on the censorship related to [Philip Pullman’s] The Golden Compass (Knopf, 1996).

We get quite a discussion about the banning of certain books that comes up over and over again. When someone has a book that’s challenged locally, they’ll ask the list group if anyone has had it banned and how they responded to it. There are also lots of questions about new technology that come up—how people are doing certain things in their schools, sharing, those sorts of things.

Surely budget cuts are a huge topic, too.

People get riled up when programs are cut by large districts, or librarians are cut back. Like San Diego, for example, one year in the Nineties was going to wipe out all its librarians, and a lot of people on LM_NET wrote letters to the school board in San Diego chiding them and probably saying some pretty strong things to them. And they decided to keep the librarians for one reason or another.

What’s one of the most difficult things you’ve had to deal with overseeing LM_NET?

One of the most difficult subjects I’ve had to deal with is the failure of networks to properly serve the people—the librarians, the educators—who use them. A huge issue that is facing us right now is the building-level librarian losing control to ninnies who are running the technology side and who will not give us access to the Internet as we freely need it. The way it affects LM_NET is that people join, and they cannot receive our messages because of the filters. My recommendation is to complain, complain, complain to your district administrators and be an active participant in, as much as possible, the technology decision-making processes in your schools and districts.

Should we expect any changes to LM_NET after your departure?

Watch the Web site. The three new moderators who are taking over will be adding things to it and enhancing it and finding new ways to extend the discussions onto the Web. LM_NET is a text-oriented experience, mainly comprised of emails without images, so we’re going to make more use of our Web page. The new moderators are going to add in things like blogging, possibly prescheduled chats with different librarians as moderators. LM_NET already has a wiki; so all this will be more dynamically integrated through the Web site.

So you’ll no longer have any daily responsibilities?

I’ll still be a member and advising, but nothing day-to-day.

Are you sad to leave LM_NET?

I’m elated. My wife and I have seven children between us—we’re a blended family—and six grandchildren. We want to spend a little more time with them.