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Director’s Brief: The Rural Library as Economic Development Center
When the local economy fails, libraries fail. When libraries facilitate conversations about economic development, everyone in the community has an opportunity to speak up, to learn, and to create an economically sustainable community based upon local, shared, values.
Libraries provide a neutral space for fostering community-wide conversations about shared values, local resources and knowledge bases, to create a strong vision of what our most sustainable economic future should be. Libraries provide space and resources to support people as they master 21st century skills, create and collaborate on projects, initiate business enterprises, and build their knowledge base and confidence.
Such community-building conversations satisfy the participatory and user-centric goals of Library 2.0 evolution, and dovetail perfectly with our stated mission of building community and fostering a love of learning.
For the full briefing, please click on the photo.
Comments
One response to “Director’s Brief: The Rural Library as Economic Development Center”
Hi Faith,
I think that this was a very thoughtful and vital topic. Your brief was very professional and to-the-point. I liked the graphics you created, it kept it interesting and enjoyable to read.
It is funny how libraries in urban environments are beginning to have these services when rural environments are the organizations that likely need them the most. My brief was on the Dokk1 library in Denmark. Not only were their spaces to support two of the points you brought up: lifelong learning and entreprenuers, but it also contained citizens’ services so that people could go there for their passports, driver’s licenses, and other municipal paperwork. However, Dokk1 was a huge multi-million dollar project. Rural libraries should recieve more funding to reform their organization.