Living Stories, Living Libraries

Stories live in libraries, but how to share them?

District Dispatch: 7.15.2014 by Margaret Kavaras

   As a child I struggled with learning how to read. I was diagnosed with Dyslexia at an early age, and it showed. I couldn’t achieve the same reading speed as my classmates. This drove me crazy. It frustrated me to the point where I didn’t even want to touch a book anymore. It discouraged me from wanting to learn . . . . . Now this is where libraries came into the equation.

A lot has happened in my first month as a Google Policy Fellow at the American Library Association (ALA), where today I am formally launching a digital storytelling project called Living Stories, Living Libraries. The blog relies on photo documentary-style submissions to capture the diverse stories of people using libraries. It gives individuals a place to share how libraries have impacted their lives, hear from others, connect ideas, and provides a space for you to tell your own story.

Social media, and the ubiquity of mobile internet access and mobile photography allows for the unprecedented ease of online storytelling. At present, library information shared through social media is largely conducted in editorial format. Living Stories, Living Libraries is based on the belief that libraries could benefit in advocacy and visibility-raising through the more personal approach of letting individual librarians and users document and promote their unique experiences with the library. Currently, the twitter handle #futureoflibraries allows library patrons and librarians to tweet what they would like to see in libraries of the future. One telling example includes “Libraries could be doing more to tell the story of how much they’ve changed- eg. adapting to the digital ecology.”  READ MORE !

Tell us your stories, and include the hashtag #librariesinthewild to illustrate all the creative things your public library is doing.