About
Meg at work, Hi.
This blog is run by Meg Backus, a librarian in Upstate NY. Interventionist librarianship acknowledges that the privatization beast is on the loose and people who care about freedom of information and equity of access need to intervene to keep it from chewing on our stuff. Public libraries are a commons, they protect the commons, and they produce the commons.
Meg is also the Cat Librarian for the Art School in the Art School, a post from which she organizes The Library in The Library, an experimental workgroup in Syracuse NY comprised of people who are eager to test drive the future of libraries. The group puts local librarians together with students, artists, instructors, and anyone else who likes thinking and working on libraries, and provides them with a mechanism by which to act upon their understanding of what libraries are and might be. The Library in the Library aims to increase the interaction between the study and the practice of librarianship.
This blog is also a hub for a class taught with artist Thomas Gokey on Innovations in Public Libraries.
Hi Meg,
Came to this via your bulldog on Ravelry (don’t even ask…) Great knitting, great blog!
Hi,
I’m a blogger too, focusing on innovation in libraries. I’m half way through Douglas Rushkoff’s 2005 book “Get Back into the Box” about innovation from the inside out. He focuses on businesses but what he writes has a lot of relevance for libraries too. Anyhow, I heard you mentioned during the NPR story, so thought I would search you out. Good luck with your course!
Best wishes,
Gordon
I’m actually in library school (Drexel) where I have to create a grant proposal. I’m interested in creating an open source grant application that people could use to apply for funding to incorporate hacker spaces into libraries? I’m looking for a real library that wants to actually incorporate a fab lab/hacker space in their library as that is a requirement for the grant. I would then make it available as open source, so others could use it.
Thanks,
Pam
Thanks for the comment Pam. Our student Lauren Britton Smedley is now creating a hackerspace in the Fayetteville Free Library as the director of transliteracy something something something. Not sure what you mean by open source grant app, but if it means you can help fan money their way, it’s worth pursuing.