Role of Libraries in Shaping Urban Life.
NYU Libraries will host a conversation in partnership with digital magazine Public Books about the role of libraries in shaping urban life. The event will be held October 16 at NYU’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, 8th floor, 70 Washington Square South.
Louise Bernard, Director of the Obama Presidential Center Museum, and Eric Klinenberg, Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge, the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences at NYU, and author of Palaces for the People, will be in conversation about the issues that arise around civic life and social infrastructure when libraries and cities intersect.
This event is the first in a new series called “Think in Public: Libraries in the Life of Cities and Communities,” which will explore the different roles that libraries can play in the lives of cities, individuals, and culture at large. Nicholas Dames, Theodore Kahan Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and Section Editor at Public Books will introduce the series and the event.
“Libraries have long played a crucial role in cultivating the intellectual life of communities. They serve as a refuge for revolutionary ideas and all forms of creative expression. They document the evolution of society and culture to help us better understand the world around us. And they spark our creativity, enabling us to imagine better futures,” said H. Austin Booth, Dean of NYU’s Division of Libraries.
“Turning Outward to Lead Change in Your Community”
Communities have challenges.
Libraries can help.
The Harwood Public Innovators Lab is built to help you and your organization learn what it means to Turn Outward – to use the community, not your conference room, as your reference point for choices and action. Join us and the American Library Association (ALA) for a 2.5-day intensive training specially designed for library professionals, trustees, community partners and supporters like you.
Tue, Oct 15, 2019, 8:00 AM –Thu, Oct 17, 2019, 12:30 PM EDT
Libraries as Community Catalysts
Libraries as Community Catalysts: Recapping OCLC’s Library Futures Conference. October 4, 2019. American Libraries.
OCLC’s Americas Regional Council 2019 Library Futures Conference rallied an energetic audience October 2–3 in Phoenix to discuss libraries’ future leadership in changing communities. The conference theme was “Community Catalysts.”
On October 2, OCLC President and CEO Skip Prichard opened the day by outlining the five Cs that libraries need to catalyze their communities. Libraries contribute, developing unique offerings that help make them indispensable. Through those contributions, they forge connections. Catalysts create, introducing big changes and little shifts. They compete, constantly pushing themselves forward. And they ultimately choose, from all the goals that they can pursue, the ones most important to their communities. The greatest catalysts maintain a positive view of the future, Prichard said.
Lead the Way: Libraries at the Heart of Community Engagement
Attend the inaugural Lead the Way: Libraries at the Heart of Community Engagement conference. Wherever your library is on its community engagement journey, you will learn how to plan new engagement efforts or view existing initiatives with fresh perspective. Keep the library at the heart of your community by leading, engaging, and adapting with the ideas and skills featured at the conference.
April 20-21, 2020 | Madison, WI
Registration will open in Fall 2019. Please see the call for proposals and sign up for the conference email list.
Community Archives-Sustainability & Safety
(from twitter feed of Tessa Wracked)
Quick PSA: a lot of ppl came to us in the past few years excited by what they saw as the success behind A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland. * Ppl wanted to use as a model or case study & seem to think that the easiest part was recording folx & putting it on the web…..
They miss that the reason the project came together as well as it did was because the activists and organizers were front and center. We offered suggestions on best practices but the site was designed with the organizers’ needs in mind….
So pls, if you’re pulling together a project that you claim is like APAPVC and the organizers’ needs aren’t front and center AND you don’t have a plan for sustainability of the project (or haven’t discussed that plan w/community members), please… keep it. Seriously.
For complete thread see twitter feed of Tessa Wracked. , Stacie Marie Williams,a writer whose work appears has appeared in Gordon Square Review, Racked, New York, Catapult, The Nation, LitHub, and The Rumpus. Her latest book is Bizarro Worlds, about gentrification and race (Fiction Advocate).
She is director of the Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Chicago and an advisory archivist for A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland.
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*A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland collects, preserves, and shares the stories, memories, and accounts of police violence as experienced or observed by Cleveland citizens. Organized in Summer 2015 by Cleveland residents and professional archivists from across the U.S., the archive hopes to provide the Cleveland community–especially survivors of police violence and the families of victims– a safe and secure space to share any testimony, documents, or accounts that narrate or reflect on encounters or effects of police violence in their lives and communities.
Poverty Safari by Darren McGarvey
In Poverty Safari Darren McGarvey includes profound observations on the role of the library in the community. He notes that the community centre is being imposed on the library to streamline the service in order to justify keeping the library open. This practice undermines the integrity of both the library and the community centre. It undermines the principle that communities should be entitled to these vital amenities independent of one another. (p. 153).
She was homeless until a Detroit library stepped in to help
Libraries have long been repositories of knowledge, mostly through archiving and lending books, and places to go when school is out for the summer. In an age of the internet and Amazon, communities are trying to do more with these institutions as Bryant — and other residents — turn to them for help.
Now libraries are helping people find housing, jobs and start new lives.
Bryant credits the Detroit library’s Parkman branch — a place she visited as a young girl with her aunt — with saving her when she was homeless
