A Look At
The Evolving Role – And Shifting Spaces – Of Today's Public Libraries
St. Louis on the Air:
2.05.2019 by Evie Hemphill
Want
to check out a telescope – or maybe a fishing pole? To hear library director
Steve Campbell tell it, the local library’s probably got you covered.
He’s
confident there’s a library-related service or program for “any subject that
you can think of that someone could have an interest in” these days, especially
in smaller communities like the ones his Scenic
Regional Library district serves in eastern Missouri.
The
examples Campbell gives range from learning to clean fish and deer – yes, in
the library – to programming involving escape rooms for teens and quilting for
adults. But =it’s not a variety show simply for the sake of variety – there’s a
community-driven rationale to the wide-ranging activities.
In
some towns, after all, the public library is the only place to acquire a
passport, connect to Wi-Fi or use a photocopier.
He
joined Tuesday’s St. Louis on the Air for a conversation alongside Scott
Bonner, library director for the Ferguson
Public Library District, and John Mueller, founder of JEMA and a lead architect on a series of
renovated and newly constructed Scenic Regional Library spaces.
Mueller
told host Don Marsh that the design of today’s libraries aims to take their
rapidly evolving role in society into account and help people think about them
as more than depositories of books – important as those books still are.
In
the case of the handful of smaller regional libraries JEMA has been reimagining
in recent months and years, the concept of “third place” comes into play.
“A
lot of planners and sociologists like to use that term – the first place being
our home, the second place being our work and the third place being this place
in society where we go to make community,” Mueller explained. “It could be the
barber shop, it could be the coffee shop. For a lot of these small towns, the
key third place is the public library.” LISTEN
00:28:40
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment