July 2014 Speaking Volumes by Ottawa Valley Librarians

To read more articles and reading suggestions by our area's librarians, return to the Speaking Volumes main page.

Elizabeth Goldman, CEO, Perth & District Union Library

Elizabeth Goldman has been the CEO of Perth & District Union Library since 2011. She has focused her efforts at the library on modernizing technology and services, building stronger community connections, and developing a culture of innovation among the staff. Her first professional library position was at Chelsea District Library in Michigan, which was named the “Best Small Library in America� in 2008 by Library Journal and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for its creative approaches to programs and service delivery. She draws inspiration from that experience as well as from her mother, who has promoted new ideas and thinking throughout a 35-year career in libraries.

Online Exclusive: Elizbeth's picks for the best books on creativity and innovation come at the bottom of this page.

Creativity & Innovation at the Library

Earlier this year, a teenager in Kansas helped a little boy, born without fingers on one hand, design and create a new, functioning prosthetic limb at the library. Yes, at the library. Using plans from a South African designer (accessible on the library’s public computers) and the library’s 3D printer, this cutting-edge technology came to rural America and changed a child’s life.

Innovations in technology and services are changing libraries and their role in the community, while continuing the long tradition of public libraries as equalizers in our society. Despite a perception of libraries as warehouses for books that are irrelevant in the digital age, the modern public library is often a hotbed of innovation and creativity in the community, acting as a portal to information, knowledge, and diverse perspectives, and providing space for people to come together and create.

Books are still libraries’ biggest business, whether physical or digital. But the modern public library contains a lot more than books. One of the biggest trends in libraries in recent years has been “makerspaces” — labs with equipment such as 3D printers, laser-cutting machines, and specialized software. The technology for 3D printing has moved from academic labs to the public sphere, but it is still not affordable for the average citizen. By bringing this technology into the community, the library plays that role of equalizer, giving access to all and letting the community discover its potential. The equipment can be used for fun or personal fulfillment, or it can help someone get a business started or solve a complex problem.

Here at Perth & District Union Public Library we don’t yet have a 3D printer, although one will be visiting for a demonstration this summer on August 19. However, in 2013, the library received a provincial grant to set up the region’s first library digital media lab, with equipment such as high-end Macs and PCs, video cameras, iPads, a green screen, a keyboard and drum pad, and all the software required to turn a creative project into reality. The Create! Digital Media Lab is part of the library’s teen section, where local youth can both express their creativity and develop skills that will help them find fulfilling careers in this digital age.

As part of that project, the library also hosts workshops that match teens with experts to develop skills in areas such as stop-motion animation, sound editing, and video game design. The lab’s three computers were used more than 1,100 times in the first six months of operation in 2013, and the project has helped form new connections and build community.

Not all library innovations are technology-based. Another project launched in Perth in 2013, also the first in Eastern Ontario, was the Lanark County Grows Seed Lending Library, where residents can get free seeds at the library in the spring, in exchange for a promise to harvest them and bring some back each fall. Although they sound very different, this project has the same goals as the Create! Lab: to make good things (technology, healthy food) accessible to all, to build knowledge and skill sets (video editing, growing vegetables), and to strengthen the sense of community among people who participate. Elsewhere in Ontario, libraries are lending everything from bicycles and bike repair tools in Petawawa, to fishing equipment in Thunder Bay.

Libraries have always been community-based organizations, but they have sometimes been too comfortable in focusing on traditional roles instead of taking a broad view of their whole community and its needs. In the last decade or so, libraries have shifted to a model of service that focuses first on what community members want and need, actively seeking out that feedback, and being responsive. It’s this philosophy that led a library in rural Colorado to take on the role of Meals on Wheels when that local service was going to end. Libraries already deliver books to people who cannot get out to their buildings, so why not nurture body and mind at the same time?

Since the earliest days of the modern public library, these free institutions have been recognized as “the people’s university” and a place with the potential to change lives. More so than ever, libraries are innovating — in both the tools and services they provide and their philosophy of responding to the community’s needs — to provide access and level the playing field. It might be as simple as getting to eat the first tomato you ever grew, or it might be as profound as getting a new hand. Either way, the public library has made a difference.

Elizabeth's Picks: Books on creativity and innovation

To pick up any of these titles, check your local library or enquire about inter library loan.

For children and teens

• The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds
• The Twenty-one Balloons by William Pène du Bois
• Makers by Cory Doctorow

For adults

• Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson
• The Boy who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba (also in a young readers edition)