The Hyperlinked Docket

When we study international libraries, we tend to look up: at Dokk1 in Aarhus, at Oodi in Helsinki, and the buildings that win IFLA’s Public Library of the Year award. They certainly deserve the attention. But global librarianship is not made only of landmark architecture and large grants. It is also made of small rural libraries run by a single staff member.

This post is about one of them. In Todorovo, a village of about 400 in the Pleven municipality of northern Bulgaria, the library occupies two rooms and an auditorium. It was founded in 1927 and named Бъдеще (Budeshte), which means “Future.”  Like much of rural Bulgaria, Todorovo’s year-round population is mostly elderly. In summer and over the winter holidays, it grows to around 600, as school-aged children arrive from the big cities and from abroad to stay with their grandparents. I’m not a neutral observer here: my child is one of those visitors, and I too spend summers in Todorovo. The library serves both groups: the elderly who stay year-round, and the children who come and go.

Budeshte Chitalishte, Todorovo, 2024. Photo: Galya Ninova

To understand “Budeshte,” you need another Bulgarian word: “chitalishte,” literally a “reading place.” Since the mid-1800s, Bulgarian towns and villages have built these community houses, which combine a library with a stage, folk-dance and choir groups, and classes. In 2017, UNESCO recognized the “chitalishte” as a good practice for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage. “Budeshte” then is not a library that happens to host community events. It is a community center that happens to lend books too.

The Todorovo “chitalishte” is run by Galya Ninova. 

Galya Ninova, director of Budeshte chitalishte, 2024. Photo: Latinka Svetozarova for Bulgarian National Radio (BNR)

Galya is the director, the bookkeeper, the marketing manager, the collections librarian, and the only staff member. She does not hold a library degree. What she has is a stubborn commitment to her community. The library has no website, only a Facebook page, which she updates relentlessly with photos of every event, every visitor, and every child holding a paintbrush. Most of the photos in this post come from that page, which serves as the library’s digital archive as well as its publicity.

Michael Stephens describes this kind of library as one “woven with experience, involvement and empowerment” (Stephens, 2019, p. 60).  “Woven” suggests something made by hand over time, and that is what Galya has built. “Budeshte” does have a collection: the classics of Bulgarian literature, chapter books and picture books, and a small but meaningful shelf of children’s books in English, Spanish, and German, the languages of the children who visit from abroad. But Galya will be the first to tell you that people come for the community, not the books. Here is a small sampling of her community work, using Stephen’s three categories.

Experience

“Koledari” on the chitalishte steps, Todorovo, December 2022. Photo: Galya Ninova

Before Christmas, boys dressed as “koledari” gather on the chitalishte steps in embroidered vests, fur hats, and wool cloaks, carrying decorated staffs and a drum. They go from house to house singing blessings for health and a good year. The library is where they rehearse, dress, and set out from.

Chitalishte steps, Todorovo, April 2023. Photo: Galya Ninova

In the spring, the girls take their turn. Wearing flower crowns and embroidered aprons, each carrying a basket, they go from house to house to announce the coming of spring. Neighbors fill the baskets with eggs and coins.

Involvement

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Arts and Crafts club, “Budeshte” auditorium, Todorovo, April 2026. Photo: Galya Ninova. 

During school breaks, the auditorium becomes an arts and crafts studio. In the photo above about a dozen children of all ages crowd a long table covered with paints and colored pencils. My nephew is second from left, hand in the air in excitement. Their paintings, from a bright red mushroom to a swirling orange octopus, are then displayed together in the reading room. See the image below.

Empowerment

In early summer, Galya recruits the older children to help her clean up the village green. It is a small job but it asks visiting children to treat Todorovo as theirs to care for.

Village green clean-up, Todorovo, summer 2023. Photos: Galya Ninova

Galya tries to reach well beyond the village. When the building’s roof needed replacing, she went on national radio and television with the goal of raising 15,000 euros. 

Stephens also argues that libraries should be designed “for people, not books” (p. 61). In much of library thinking, this is a reform, something libraries move toward by opening up floor space and adding makerspaces. The “chitalishte” was built as a place for people from the start; it was meant to be a stage and a meeting hall with a library inside, and Bulgarian rural libraries have run that model since the 1850s. 

Not every initiative is a success and not every event works. In 2024, Galya invited Nidal Algafari, a well-known Bulgarian political commentator and journalist, to speak in Todorovo. When we talked this summer, she told me only three people came. (G. Ninova, personal communication, August 2026). You won’t see that poster on the Facebook page. A library that experiments will sometimes miss; and Galya was not discouraged. But her miss shows what designing “for people” demands, which is knowing who your people are at any given moment.

“Budeshte” will never appear on an IFLA shortlist. It’s roof depends on a radio appeal and its website is a Facebook page. Yet it does what Dokk1 and Oodi set out to do, and that is, give its community a place and a reason to gather. If we want to understand global librarianship, we have to look across as well as up.

 

References:

International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. (n.d.). IFLA/Baker & Taylor Public Library of the Year Award. https://ifla.org/?p=106685

Mladzhova, B. (2024, March 19). Chitalishte v plevensko selo se nuzhdae speshno ot 30 000 lv. za remont [A village chitalishte in the Pleven region urgently needs 30,000 leva for repairs]. Bulgaria ON AIR. https://www.bgonair.bg/a/36-sutreshen-blok/338822-chitalishte-v-plevensko-selo-se-nuzhdae-speshno-ot-30-000-lv-za-remont 

Narodno chitalishte “Badeshte – 1927.” (n.d.). Home [Facebook page]. Facebook. Retrieved October 19, 2026, from [URL]

Stephens, M. (2019). Wholehearted librarianship: Finding hope, inspiration, and balance. ALA Editions.

Svetozarova, L. (2023, December 24). V plevenskoto s. Todorovo ochakvat koledarskata druzhina [In the village of Todorovo, Pleven region, the koledari are expected]. Bulgarian National Radio, Programa Horizont. https://bnrnews.bg/horizont/post/270518/v-plevenskoto-s-todorovo-ochakvat-koledarskata-drujina

UNESCO. (2017). Bulgarian chitalishte (community cultural centre): Practical experience in safeguarding the vitality of the intangible cultural heritage. Intangible Cultural Heritage. https://ich.unesco.org/en/BSP/bulgarian-chitalishte-community-cultural-centre-practical-experience-in-safeguarding-the-vitality-of-the-intangible-cultural-heritage-00969

 

 

 

My library’s strategic plan includes the word “community.” We debated it at length and tried to replace it, finding it too vague, but nothing better emerged, and so it stayed. Perhaps that is why “Beyond Buzzwords: Ten Invitations to Build Library Connection and Community” resonated with me, even where I disagree. The first invitation points to Discord as a new model for intentional gathering, and the fourth encourages “authentic dialogue” on platforms such as TikTok. These platforms certainly facilitate conversation, but whether that conversation is authentic remains an open question, as the debate around The Anxious Generation, a flawed book in its own right, suggests. For me, the most fitting invitation is the sixth: “Honor Small Moments.”

This spring, my library partnered with two neighbors, a local civic association and a seminary, to offer architectural walking tours. Our campus, which serves about 500 students, now occupies the seminary’s former buildings. The library itself is a 1996 building designed to match the Gothic Revival style of the 1924 originals. It suits a law school: imposing, steeped in tradition, yet meant to belong to its community, as the seminary once did. The civic association brought its knowledge of the town’s architecture, and the seminary’s library director and one of its professors brought the history of the place. Coordinating, printing brochures, and doing walk-throughs took weeks. Along the way, I came to know our wonderful guides, Kathy, Daniel, and Jack (pseudonyms), and the campus where I work, down to the 1924 tiles I step on every day.

At the start of the school year, while covering the desk, I noticed two people pause just inside the door, unsure where to go and hesitant to approach the large wooden desk. I was taught (by someone who is a firm believer in hyperlinked libraries) to make eye contact and ask the question before it reaches me, so I greeted them and asked how I could help. They were seminary students hoping to use our study space. I told them they were welcome, and asked them to say hello to Kathy and Daniel when they returned. A conversation began.

It was a small moment. It may grow, or it may not, but I believe it changed how those two students see our library. Such moments rarely come from nowhere; they rest on months, sometimes years, of work and relationship-building. To me, they are what authentic conversation looks like. These are also the moments when words like “community” become really precise. 

 

Edmondson, A. (2022). The Fearless Organization [graphic].

In The Heart of Librarianship, Michael Stephens writes that “the library is everywhere–it is not just the building or the virtual spaces (2016, p.2). Of the principles of the hyperlinked library model, this one stands out because it changes the library from a place into a relationship. The library exists wherever people encounter its staff, services, values, and networks. In my experience, this concept often gets misunderstood as “library staff need to be everywhere.” For example, staffing the reference desk at 10PM on a Sunday before a federal holiday, right after teaching advanced legal research to a class of 25 evening students. (Shannon Mattern gestures toward this very real challenge in her 2014 “Library as Infrastructure” by asking “how much more can this social infrastructure support? See p. 6).  

This expansive vision of “the library is everywhere” also requires substantial internal change. Stephens connects it to organizational structures that are flatter, with services that reach beyond those who enter the building. “Everywhere” then does not simply mean making library resources and library staff available in more locations. It means giving both library workers and library users more agency in shaping what the library becomes. As The Cluetrain Manifesto puts it with striking economy, “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy” (Levine et al./Weinberger, 2000, p.89). A genuinely hyperlinked library therefore changes both where services are delivered and how authority and knowledge circulate within the organization. Org charts are “built on sand anyways” (p.90) because influence and knowledge move through informal networks that a chart can’t fully contain.

That too is what Wendy Schultz means when she writes that the “library is everywhere, barrier-free and participatory” (Schultz, 2006, p.11). In 2006, she describes a library that lives in global catalogs and digital downloads. She imagines the library evolving through several stages, from commodity, to product, to service, and then finally, experience. Her future library combines all these forms: “a knowledge spa, . . . a luxury of ideas and thought” (p.11), which evokes an image of the library as a retreat from information overload, a space for meditation. 

Shannon Mattern’s “Library as Infrastructure,” pushes the idea further into the physical world. She points to libraries like BiblioTech, where the collection itself is off-site (other libraries have followed suit), no books on the shelf, just servers, licenses, and access points (2014, p.15). The library becomes infrastructure. She asks us to think about “server stacks” (p.15) the way we used to think about book stacks, a reframing of where a library actually is. If libraries are “ubiquitous” (p.3), she argues, it is because interconnected spatial, technological, intellectual, and social systems support them. Thinking of the library as infrastructure draws attention to the often invisible structures underneath its services. It also raises a question: What happens when an organization’s internal culture doesn’t support its outward facing ideals?

The question matters to me because I have seen attempts to introduce flatter structures, radical trust, and user-focused practices meet swift backlash. Practices intended to give employees and patrons greater agency will expose how deeply some organizations depend on predictability and authority. Amy Edmondson’s image of the fearless organization offers one explanation why. Safety is not the same thing as lowering standards, but they are easily confused, and an organization can sometimes mistake candor for insubordination. 

The idea that the library is everywhere is both inspiring and demanding. It asks libraries to cross physical and institutional boundaries, but it also asks them to loosen their hold on who may decide, create, speak, and even lead. An organization can hardly embrace the language of innovation without accepting the uncertainty that accompanies it. For the library to be everywhere, trust has to be everywhere too. And so to me the real question is: how do we build hyperlinked practices, like flatter structures and user focus, so that they are durable?

 

References:

Levine, R., Locke, C., Searls, D., & Weinberger, D. (2000). The Cluetrain manifesto: The end of business as usual. Perseus Books Group.

Mattern, S. (2014, June). Library as infrastructure. Places. https://doi.org/10.22269/140609 

Schultz, W. (2006). Infinite futures: On the way to the library experience of the future. NextSpace, (2), 10–11. OCLC.

Stephens, M. (2016). The heart of librarianship: Attentive, positive, and purposeful change. ALA Editions.

Greetings everyone!

I work in a public academic law library. If you’ve ever tried to trace a bill, or a public policy, from introduction through hearing transcripts and committee reports, to enacted code, you know it’s its own kind of hyperlink trail. Tracing legislation sometimes requires a kind of navigational thinking that has some parallels to the networked approach this course examines.

Law libraries tend to operate conservatively, given their grounding in formal procedure. The profession, however, is undergoing a shift toward more self-service and digital research tools, as well as a broader redefinition of what user-centered service entails. A recent post on the RIPS Law Librarian Blog, for instance, discusses how academic law libraries are expanding their role to support student well-being alongside traditional research services. I selected this course because I wanted a structured opportunity to examine what concepts such as “participatory” and “user-centered” mean within a legal research context.

My professional focus is legal information services. I’m especially interested in how libraries can demystify legal research for self-represented individuals and the public, and how emerging tools (AI-assisted search, better citation tools) might lower that barrier further.

Glad to be here.