By Lauren Stara, Library Building Specialist at the MBLC
For the last few weeks I have been spending part of my time with OCLC and WebJunction, helping with a IMLS-funded course. Small Libraries Create Smart Spaces is a program that is supporting 15 small and rural public libraries from across the country as they reimagine and reconfigure their libraries into smart spaces. Most are looking at creating “active learning” spaces from underused or newly reclaimed space (from weeding collections, for example) in their existing libraries.
My particular role has been as a champion of Design Thinking – I was brought on board to help with the Ideation and Prototyping modules. These concepts are two of the components outlined in the Design Thinking for Libraries toolkit by IDEO. It’s an approach I’ve been teaching and using in my work for a couple of years.
The course is completely online, so talking about physical space and especially building prototypes was a bit of a challenge! However, with lots of help from the amazing Betha Gutsche and Brianna Hoffman of OCLC and some pretty amazing tech tools, we made it work. We even had real-time sessions for brainstorming ideas and creating personas.
One of the things I love about my job is the opportunity to share my passion about library design and new ways of thinking and working. It’s especially fun to expand the reach of the agency beyond the borders of Massachusetts and share these ideas with a larger audience. None of this would have been possible even ten years ago. Online collaboration tools are way beyond what they were, and they make it fun.
If you want to know more, take a look at this LibGuide that I wrote for the participating libraries:
