I found the material in this week’s module especially motivating and inspirational. In a world where AI is all the rage and even professors are outsourcing their lectures to ChatGPT, reading an article about the necessity of humans to make a resource work the other humans want it to, rather than algorithms, is a comforting balm. I realize the article is more than seven years old now, but I think there is still a case to be made. I think that people are frustrated and left dissatisfied with most forms of social media we’ve all come to expect to take up a big chunk of our daily lives. What passes for engagement might go up, as the algorithm pushes us to click and click and click until we notice it’s no longer light outside and we haven’t fed the cats yet, but so has discontentment and irritability.

I particularly like the readings from this week because while many of the works we’ve read or viewed so far look at how to push the library boundaries beyond the traditional four walls, sometimes deep into the digital realm, many of the works this week focus on how being inside the physical spaces of libraries themselves can ground a community. Libraries are not just about services provided, they are about community and communities need meeting spaces. Spaces for learning and spaces for play, as some of the articles touch on, but it was especially inspiring to read about recent efforts to leverage them as sites to aid in the health and well-being of their community members.

I like to think that books will always be a central element of libraries, they are after all just as much a sanctuary for literature as they are for people, but I do think people are starting to envision a world where that is not the only thing people associate with libraries when asked about it and I find this an exhilarating movement to be a part of.