Libraries as social hubs

(http://libguides.ucd.ie/newstudents/howto)

Libraries do not become the hub of the community without a lot of work from the ground up by library staff.  Most libraries look for ways to get community members involved through surveys or focus groups, but many times that limits the perspective to current library users.  If a library is going to be the hub of the community it must reflect all of the people in the community. 

In order to encourage more library participation, Shana Hinze, a librarian in Florida looked for other ways to reach out.  She first got involved at a local school in the PTA and realized the importance on first hand communication with parents and schools and the areas that the library could support.  Shana then took it further by getting involved with the local Kiwanis club, attending meetings and eventually gaining, volunteers and even funding for a literacy program at the library, not to mention a large number of new libraries users.  She realized that creating a space for community members meant becoming active in her community. The best thing we can do as librarians to create a local hub is:

“Get Involved. You can do it too! Join groups, attend meetings, drop in at intergovernmental meetings, service clubs, parent teacher meetings, reach out to the social services office, WIC office, state job placement office, schools, after school programs. The idea is to go where people in the community go to get help, ask for things, or get things done. Becoming part of these groups will allow you to see and hear first hand the needs of the community.”

Hinze, S. (2016). Librarians as Community Ambassadors. Young Adult Library Services, 15(1), 27-30.

Libraries as Social Hubs

Libraries as Social Hubs

by Jennifer Ellis

I have lived in the San Diego area for just over 16 years.  My longest friendship while living here is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. What happened ten years ago to cultivate this friendship? I started taking my daughter to the Book Babies program at the Carlsbad City Library. I had work acquaintances beforehand, but none of those people ever wanted to do anything outside of work. Going to the library was the first time since I had moved to California where I met like-minded individuals with similar goals and lifestyles. 

Libraries have long been a place to do homework or trace your family tree, but the library of the new millennium provides programming for families, teens, the homeless, immigrants and many other groups of citizens. Serving the public with this programming naturally brings with it a social element; friendships will bloom out of these new encounters. According to Senville (2009), libraries have become the hubs of communities, often drawing in new users. Stephen Coronella, a librarian in a small town in Vermont states that "...a good library works a lot like a harbor. It provides a place where people can dock themselves for a while, socialize with others, and feel some comfort and security." Once I made that first friend at the library, I did feel more comfortable living here in California. I had already been here for six years, with nary a friend to my name. All of a sudden, I had a new group of friends, who all had the same struggles as I did, being a new mother. On the surface, we were talking about sleeping issues, the finer points of strained peas, and who has read Goodnight Moon for the eighty-first time, but really we were building the bonds and framework of a decade-long friendship. I could not have done that without the safe, welcoming, and comfortable space of the library.

Photo courtesy of 92009 magazine

References

Senville, W. (2009). PUBLIC LIBRARIES: THE HUB OF OUR COMMUNITIES. Aplis, 22(3), 97-103. 

Libraries as Social Hubs

Libraries as Social Hubs

by Karen Nicholson

https://pixabay.com/en/board-game-board-game-gaming-2237460/

I am the librarian at San Marcos Middle School.  I want my school library to be thought of as a fun and safe place in the school.  I want it to be a place to read a book, play a video game, socialize with friends, do some homework, or play a tabletop game.  I want it to be a refuge for the kids that need a place to just be themselves.  This library is not the shushing and be quiet type, unless it is reading time during class library visits or homework time after school.  The most popular games in our library are UNO, chess and checkers.  I love it when a student asks me to play a game of UNO with them.  It gives me a chance get to know the students better, have some fun, and make new connections with the students that inevitably join our game.  

I’m almost at the end of my first year as the library media technician at San Marcos Middle School.  I am absolutely loving my job and I am looking forward towards what I would like to add to the library in the next few years.  The first is to start a book club.  I know of several teachers that are also interested in this, and I would happily host it in the library.  We could read a book every few weeks and meetup to talk about it.  I would want the students to have input on what books we read, and maybe have them each take a turn suggesting a book.  I would also like at least one period of time to have each student to read different books they are interested in and let the other students know why they picked it and what they thought about it.  

The other activity I would like to start up in the library would be a tabletop gaming group.  I am a gamer, I LOVE to play video games and to play analog tabletop games with my friends and family.  I find video games to be a solo adventure for me, but tabletop games are very social and a great way to build relationships with friends.  Almost every weekend I get together with some friends and we play a tabletop game.  We often re-play our favorites and enjoy trying out new games.  There are so many great games out there that would be fantastic to play in a middle school library.  So many students are playing games on their phones, or on the computers in the library.  I would like them to get more involved in playing games with each other.  According to Alvarez, “modern tabletop games have been proven more engaging than many of the older games, but they also have been proven to leave fewer feelings of resentment or discouragement if gaming outcomes are not favorable.  In fact, students leave the table strategizing better outcomes and looking forward to the next challenge” (42).  These games go beyond the luck factor of popular older games like Monopoly or Risk.  There are many modern games that use more cooperation, include more variety in decisions needed to be made to be successful, and have less waiting between player turns (Alvarez, 45).  Using a cooperative game like Forbidden Island can be a way for students to feel successful, but not the pressure to having a goal of defeating their opponent (Alvarez, 45).  They can work on their teamwork skills, while having a lot of fun.  Every student that is playing can give important input on the best way to win the game.  When I start up this group I plan on starting with Ticket to Ride and trying other games after that.  Based on the games I have played with my friends over the last several years I would recommend the following to try with students in a library setting:  Carcassonne, Descent, Dominion, Fluxx, Bang!, Forbidden Island, Legendary, Machi Koro, Mysterium, Pandemic, Qwirkle, Sushi Go!, Settlers of Catan, Takenoko, Ticket to Ride, Tokaido

BoardGameGeek is a fantastic website for more information on tabletop games.

Sources:

Alvarez, Vivian. "Engaging Students in the Library through Tabletop Gaming." Knowledge Quest, vol. 45, no. 4, Mar/Apr2017, pp. 40-48. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.palomar.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lxh&AN=121512460&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

BoardGameGeek. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Apr. 2017.

LIBRARIES as Social Hubs

Darla Mulder

LIT 130

April, 2017

An old school, last century library comes to my mind.    What used to constitute a library?  I would see  sterile, neat rows of books, hear the whispering, shushing older woman with thick glasses. She is the one there who scrutinizes movements,  

"Go outside to talk!" 

Things have CHANGED.

The change of the physical appearance or form of books meant that libraries met the digital world. 

 Some have downsized their need for "as many" hard-bound books and have taken a liking to the new available floor space and the ease of storing many more digital works.   Emerging is a perpetual desire to reorganize, rethink, remission the role and embrace patron's social activity.

Even though the nature of computers at one time threatened people, thinking that de-socialization would occur, libraries in the community embraced the challenges and saved two problems.  There is more library activity engaging people to be together and share, exchange, talk to each other. 

Now they are in the form of new community programs, chat rooms, art rooms, museum rooms, task force rooms, study halls, lecture halls, movies, even sharing lunch and coffee.

Community information delivery needs have shifted slowly. The mainstream library's role seems to be changing. It is argued by some people that digitization is the force.    Others see how a library is an affordable meeting place and not everyone has a computer. The optional computer headsets patrons wear block unwanted sounds, and a more inviting arena for ideas has slowly emerged. Rooms are welcoming it.

The articles listed below discuss Smartphones and tablets which offer digital technologies such as geo-location, audio, video, photo and web technologies. They feature much vocabulary that users engage in with established social networks and photo-sharing sites: All are able to share so much more content than ever before with more people both inside and outside the walls and the geographical boundary lines. (Hopkins)

  

As the libraries stress to serve beyond their county or city line boundaries, they are offering more activities and programs to gather the local neighborhood and community inside its walls.  They want to become a cultural and learning hub of their communities.  With the smartphones and tablets and their associated apps, more sharing activities exist between individual patrons both outside and inside the boundary of the library walls. (Carlson) 

Crossing Borders with the library is a great video from a library in Denmark

The articles listed below talk about how users in  libraries are enjoying the social hub technologies using devices in the participatory culture context – tapping into new communities, engaging with their stakeholders in meaningful ways, enhancing their social impact and transforming their essential roles in today's knowledge society.

Finding partners for social events and accessing information between them is a new techno-social set skill that libraries are administering.  They continue to plan a seasonal program which invites  and triggers the public interest. In order to maintain the information hub, the social hub, and the sharing hub, they invite the learning curve of an ever changing social need to "hub together".  (Harris)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carlson, Scott. "The Library of the Future." Chronicle of Higher Education 52.16 (2005): B23. Academic Search                             Premier. Web. 24 Apr. 2017. Accession Number: 19190222

Harris, R., Mayo, A., Prince, J. D., & Joan, M. (2013, October). Creating shared campus experiences: The library                 as culture club. Journal of the Medical Library Association, 101(4), 254-256. doi:10.3163/1536                           -5050.101.4.005  Accession Number: 91555530

Hopkins, P., Hare, J., Donaghey, J., & Abbott, W. (2015, February). Geo, audio, video, photo: How digital                    convergence in mobile devices facilitates participatory culture in libraries. Australian Library Journal,                   64(1), 11-22. doi:10.1080/00049670.2014.984379 

Senville, W. (2009, September). Public libraries: The hub of our communities. Aplis, 22(3), 97-103. Retrieved April       24, 2017, from Academic Search Premier.

         Accession Number: 44266947; Senville, Wayne; Source Info: Sep2009, Vol. 22 Issue 3, p97

Libraries as Social Hubs
By Lori Schafer

For central library events at the San Diego Public Library:
https://www.sandiego.gov/public-library/news-events

In the Internet age the Library is transforming itself completely and is adapting with the advancement of technology and how information is delivered. In the beginning I thought the library would become obsolete because information is becoming so easily available to the public and e-books are becoming more familiar and easier to use on a variety of electronic devices. But the library is adapting and redefining their “physical spaces” as community centers and offering a variety of additional services. As mentioned in the article Public Libraries:  The Hub of our Communities, “The 21st century library has arrived, "Its mission goes far beyond loaning out books and providing reference materials. In fact, in a growing number of cities and towns, the library has become the hub of the community, drawing large numbers of new users. This is happening because libraries are providing programs, meeting space, computer access, and resources that are responding to a broader array of community needs” (Senville, 2009, p. 102). A few weeks back during National Library Week a local news station introduced a library segment with the following statement “libraries are no longer a place to get information but are quickly becoming community centers”. It seemed so strange to me that our community is already advertising our libraries as something more then a place to get books or information. I think there are few cultural reasons as well, other then the advancement of technology, that are contributing to the shift of libraries evolving into community social hubs.

With the continued growth of populations in many cities and towns, people are starting to choose to live in places that have quick access to local services such as schools, churches and libraries. As noted in the article How to Become a Great Public Space, “The most desirable neighborhoods are lively spaces that provide shops, restaurants, civic uses, and gathering places in an environment conducive to walking" ("How to", 2003, p. 72). If libraries are becoming “physical spaces” that are centrally located in neighborhoods that offer a variety of services, then it makes sense, as Phil Myrick notes in an interview with American Libraries, that they will become “desirable destinations for citizens looking to mingle, meander, and meditate, as well as to access information” (“How to,” 2003, p. 72).

Coffee shops are emerging everywhere in our communities. Super bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Nobles are well known for their in-house cafes while shopping for books and this concept is influencing libraries decisions to incorporate coffee shops within their physical spaces as well. Libraries are even locating their physical spaces in shopping centers to be closer to food courts, stores and coffee shops where it’s easier for patrons to access their services while shopping.  I was actually shocked when I saw our local Chula

Vista Public Library open a branch in our local Otay Ranch Mall (photo on right) but it started to make sense after hanging out at the mall after a few years because it was convenient. In the article Libraries with Lattes:  The Third New Place, Kate Meyrick of the Australian Horney Institute “suggests that a key component of a third place is a availability

Chula Vista Library – Otay Ranch Branch.

of food and drink, especially good coffee” and as the author points out if Meyrick is correct “then coffee shops will play a vital role in helping libraries to build communities and create a new third place away from work and home” (Harris, 2007, p. 145). If public libraries increasingly become community centers with comfortable and welcoming spaces, then integrating cafes would only contribute to making libraries a friendly environment where people would gather and linger more frequently.

Libraries are key components to strong communities and are an incredible, invaluable social hub of bringing people together. They are far from obsolete in the technology age and in fact seem to be evolving and thriving with all of the changes. As noted by Wayne Senville, “when libraries are located in downtown, village, or neighborhood centers, there is also a special synergy at work. Libraries generate increased business for local merchants, while those shopping or working downtown visit the library as part of their day.  Libraries and community. They really are inseparable” (Senville, 2009, p. 102).

References:
Harris, C. (2007). LIBRARIES WITH LATTES: THE NEW THIRD PLACE. Aplis, 20(4), 145-152.
How to Become a Great Public Space. (2003). American Libraries, 34(4), 72.
Senville, W. (2009). PUBLIC LIBRARIES: THE HUB OF OUR COMMUNITIES. Aplis, 22(3), 97-103.

Libraries as social hubs

Libraries as Social Hubs

by Sara Rodriguez

In the past libraries have been a place where research through books and journals was the norm. People  went to a library strictly to find information and to use certain technologies. The Science mag states that  "In many countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, the public is losing interest in traditional public libraries of information, but pilot experiences with the new format of libraries are emerging and succeeding". libraries are transforming from a place of silence to a place where members of a community can come together to meet, socialize and have a good time. The San Antonio Library for instance was designed with the goal to add spaces where people of all ages could come together and participate in group activities, projects , and social events. (Velazquez). I myself witnessed my community library take on the same transformation. Years ago the Fallbrook library environment was completely different. It was a place where you would go only to check out books and to work in complete silence. The design of the library seemed unattractive for any type of interaction. The new library built in 2011 created a brand new ambience, the moment you stepped foot you realized that this was more than a place to check out books. The new design created many spaces that were intended for patrons to work together. These physical spaces are becoming community centers, where patrons are able to socialize, network, and for activities for people of all ages.


Libraries are still being valued for its books and its endless resources, but this new change has created a new reputation for libraries. According to the ACE report Envisioning the Library of the Future "recognized public libraries as trusted spaces, free and open to all, and as a safe, free, creative community space that is enjoyable and easy to use, both physically and virtually.” This creates a feeling that libraries are merging into community centers while keeping the mission of a library. This in my opinion is a good thing as it makes the library a unique place and attracts more people. It makes it a more useful tool for many, because if they dont need to check out books or find information, they can make use of the library for other reasons. For instance they can use the physical spaces play board games, discuss current events, drink coffee, and just socialize with others.

 Many libraries  also have begun hosting a wide range of events such as summer concerts, cultural celebrations, chess clubs, literacy activities and workshops. Chess clubs are one of the many events libraries host, this creates a way for people of all ages to interact with each other. Chess also is beneficial when it comes to creativity and problem solving. This type of club is a great way for these students to interact with on another, socialize , and gain some knowledge. It has become clear that libraries are no longer a quiet only place, they have become a place where one can participate in group work, cultural events and create a safe place for everyone.

Bibliography:

VELÁSQUEZ, J. (2016). Lessons Learned From a New Teen Space. Young Adult Library Services, 15(1), 31-33.

Sillis, Jennifer. "Libraries’ Social Role in the Information Age." Science Mag 22 Mar. 2013: 1382-383. Print.

            www.sdcl.org/signature-series.html
http      Ramsey, Debbie. "Official Grand Opening of new library Saturday." Village News. N.p., 04 Feb. 2015. Web. 26 Apr. 2017.

A Home for the Community: Libraries as Social Hubs

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Image 1: Carlsbad Library, Children's Storytime

A Home for the Community: Libraries as Social Hubs
By Jessica Sparks

I've been asked many times why I want to become a librarian. I must like to read, right? Yes...but working in a library is more than just about the books, it's about the people. And most people that don't use the library often just don't understand the importance of libraries to the community. The library is at the center of our community; in his article "Public Libraries: The Hub of Our Communities" Wayne Senville describes the library as a "home for all of the community" (Senville, p. 101).

According to a 2013 Pew survey, almost two-thirds of adult Americans say that closing their local library would have a major impact on their community (Zickuhr, Rainie, Purcell, and Duggan, 2013). Libraries are the center of knowledge for the entire community; the library supports the advancement of every community member. Students meet with tutors, parents relax while their children read books, teenagers chill, job-seekers use the computers to apply for jobs, students work on class projects, and the meeting rooms are used for study groups, book clubs, and businesses. One of the ways in which libraries are a hub for the community is through programming.

Programs encourage a sense of community, a coming together in a public place. Programs educate by offering opportunities for the community to learn new skills and apply them to crafts, music, and even coding. Programs also entertain and uplift. Libraries located around local businesses, like the Downtown San Diego Public Library, help business by providing resources and also facilitating partnerships (Senville, p. 98).

The San Diego Public Libraries have a wonderful variety of programs available to the community, for children's, teens, and adults. These programs range from read aloud's to lectures and discussions. One particularly fun one is a teen event at the Rancho Bernardo Public Library "Science of Fairy Tales" where they will discuss the "engineering dilemmas" of the Three Little Pigs! Read more about the SDPL Spring Programs here: http://online.flipbuilder.com/tyny/txbz/mobile/index.html#p=3

Here are some websites with library program ideas:

1. http://www.programminglibrarian.org/ideas/library_type?library_type=2
2. http://www.ala.org/advocacy/advleg/publicawareness/campaign%40yourlibrary/prtools/sampleprogramming
3. http://publiclibrariesonline.org/tag/adult-programming/

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References

[Carlsbad Library Children's Storytime]. (n.d.). Retrieved April 26, 2017, from http://www.familyfunincarlsbadca.com/carlsbad-library-childrens-storytime/

Senville, W. (2009). Public libraries: the hub of our communities. APLIS, 22(3), 97-103.

Zickuhr, K., Rainie, L., Purcell, K., & Duggan, M. (2013, December 11). How Americans Value Public Libraries in Their Communities. Retrieved April 26, 2017, from http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2013/12/11/libraries-in-communities