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Reflection Blog: Your Neighborhood’s Living Room – The Library as Third Space
Feature Image Source: The Gong at Dokk1, which is is connected the maternity ward in Aarhus. Parents can ring The Gong when their new baby is born. In 1931, S. R. Ranganathan, father of library science in India, famously theorized five laws of library science: Books are for use. Every reader his/her book. Every book its reader. Save the time of the reader. The library is a growing organism. Today I would propose a 6th law: Every person their library. The library represents an important third space in modern communities. The third space is a place that is neither work nor home, a neutral space where a person can connect…
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Reflection Blog: The Library can’t Be Everything – but it can Connect Everyone
In his article Healthy Library, Healthy Life, Cory Greenwood of State Library Victoria introduces a toolkit which helps libraries to identify the most urgent needs of their communities and their own institutional skills gaps (2023). This toolkit serves as a catalyst for building and fostering partnerships to bridge the gap and connect library users with wellbeing organizations. This is referred to as addressing the “whole person”. That is, creating a holistic, hyperlinked system of care, always with humans at the center, to address all of the factors that go into their well-being: housing, transportation, social isolation, health and mental health care, food security, and more. Libraries, first and foremost, support…
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Assignment X: Reimagining Library Space (with Heart)
Cover photo: (Los Angeles Times photo illustration; Photos by Deborah Netburn/Los Angeles Times, USC) I’ve been thinking about space. Not just the physical layout of a library, but something closer to the heart. What is space in the library and how do we define it? More importantly, who gets to define it? In his essay “Age of Participation” Michael Stephens (2016) recounts a story about a museum in India that invited community members to curate exhibits made out of their own personal items. Imagine learning about your neighbor through the artifacts of their identity; imagine knowing your neighbor as art. This is creating human-centered services: a model that not only…
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Hi, I’m Chandler
Hello, @michael and my HyberLib classmates! My name is Chandler and I am about 2 years into my MLIS. I am hoping to become a librarian at one of my many local public libraries in the next couple of years, although I am also taking courses in academic librarianship as well to explore the possibility. This seminar in particular interested me because we live in a time of such fast-paced technological advances, and technology only makes libraries stronger by connecting users to new and evolving services. I love the idea of participatory services in which users get to help identify what they need and want, re-centering the library’s purpose as…
