Showing posts with label Placemaking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Placemaking. Show all posts

Saturday, February 6, 2021

David Byrne: ‘I’m able to talk in a social group now – not retreat into a corner’

David Lynsky,  "David Byrne: ‘I’m able to talk in a social group now – not retreat into a corner’ Guardian March 4, 2018 [online] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/mar/04/david-byrne-i-am-able-to-talk-in-a-social-group-now-american-utopia


4. Knock-on effects of culture
We in the arts and humanities often complain that our work is undervalued, at least in terms of being beneficial to society compared to the Stem disciplines. Finally we have some proof, and the effects are somewhat unexpected. A recent study by the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania showed that when libraries and other cultural institutions are placed in the boroughs around New York, there are surprising knock-on effects:

a. The kids’ test scores go up
b. Spousal abuse goes down
c. Obesity goes down
d. The crime rate goes down

Things that might seem to be unrelated are actually connected. To lower crime, maybe we don’t need more prisons or stiffer sentencing; part of the solution might be to build a library.


COMMENT

Musician David Byrne thinks that five reasons to be cheerful are renewable energy, prison reform, bicycles, libraries, and de-criminalization of drugs.   The "knock off effect" of having a library in the community has been noted in other articles. 

Sunday, January 24, 2021

America Needs its Girls

 Samantha Hunt, "America Needs it's Girls".  New York Times.  24, 20201, p. SR8.


In our flag I will look fo the national parks, the public libraries, the artists and innovaters, the land where my dead beloveds are buried, the tiny but tremendous mutual aid society my town put together in the pandemic, my daughers' underpaid teachers and coaches, the trees and rivers and children.  I will not forget the genocide greed, hatred, and tremendous inequality in our flag.  I won't be blind to my nation's faults.


 COMMENT

     The public library makes the list of good things promised by the American Flag, along with public lands, and opportunities for education.  The opposite of these public goods is inequlity,  self-interest and prejudice.  The article describes a new  appreciation for American values that the flag represents after the expulsion of Trump from office. This vision is contrasted with the flag waving fake "patriotism" of the political right, specifically associated in the article with belligerant young men in pickup trucks who deliberately tailgate and intimidate other drivers.  After Biden won the election, the daughter declares "Mom, we can hang the flag again!"











Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Inequality was Never so Visible as in 2020

Emily Badger. Inequality was Never so Visible as in 2020.  What did we Learn? New York Times, December 29, 2020. B3.

Americans also stopped broadly sharing libraries, movie theaters, train stations and public school classrooms, the spaces that sill created common experience in increasingly unequal communities. Even the D.M.S., with its cross-section of life in a single room, wasn't that any more. 

 COMMENT

     Libraries are a place where people from different socio-economic classes can mingle on an equal basis. The article describes how COVID has shut down such interactions so that some people are in a privileged bubble while others are doing low-paid, insecure work to deliver goods and services to the privileged.

Friday, November 20, 2020

The Anti-Coup

 Andrew Morantz. The Anti-Coup. New Yorker, November 23, 2020, pp. 36-45.

     In 2011, at the Occupy Wall Street encampment, in New York, activists set up a community kitchen, a library, and a media hub to disseminate live steams generated by the movement-- all examples of what Sharp called "alternative social institutions."  If protests are expressions of what a movement is against,  then alternative institutions can be manifestations of what a movement is for, a glimpse of how the world might look one it has been transformed.


COMMENT

 A library is  part of a utopian community,  as is a functioning media system.  



Saturday, November 7, 2020

Wisconsin Suburb Misjudged Housing Complex

 John Eligon. Wisconsin Suburb Misjudged Housing Complex: Affordable Unites Challenge Basis of Trump Pitch. New York Times, November 5, 2020, p. A13.


     The story of the fight over affordable housing in New Berlin, a deeply conservative suburb about 15 miles southwest of Milwaukee, challenges a key pitch made by President Trump to voters in the suburbs -- that "low-income" housing invites crime and hurts property values.

     The reality in New Berlin is that the mixed-income development, surrounded by a pond, a farmers' market and a library, is "really rather attractive" said Mayor Dave Ament, who is white and staunchly opposed the project as a alderman a decade ago. 

COMMENT

   Trump voters in a white suburb were terrified that "those people" would move into their neighborhood.  They believed that they had  "worked hard" to live in a segregated neighborhood and didn't want to offer a "handout" to Black people.  In reality, the new housing development was affordable for low-income working people, and it offered new amenities that improved the neighborhood including a library.  In fact, libraries contribute to education and economic opportunity for people who grow up near them.  Whether they know it or not, the proximity of a new library almost certainly improved future earnings for the children of the people who didn't want it built.


Sunday, August 2, 2020

In the Archives

Tess Taylor. "In the Archives: Susan Howe's New Poems Paste Together Collages from Old Letters, Manuscripts and Concordances." New York Times Book Review, August 2, 2020, p. 18

When do we risk happiness? When do we risk encounter? How can reading offer those things now?  Howe's books may accompany you in these questions.  They may also make you long for the smell of libraries, for the humming quiet of reading rooms, the gentle rustle of others turning pages, too.  Howe writes against a world that disappears too far away online, in which we lose the bodily perception of space, the tenderness of touch.  In this era of social distancing, I felt the prick of these poems: They urged me towards aliveness.

 COMMENT

Howe's collage poems evoke a sensory experience of the library as place.  "We need to see and touch objects and documents," Howe writes, and the reviewer agrees.

Sunday, May 31, 2020

Greeting the Future, Gingerly, With Mortarboards and Masks

John Branch and Campbell Robertson, "Greeting the Future, Gingerly, With Mortarboards and Masks." New York Times, May 31, 2020, p. 1

     Charlie Forster was at the library one afternoon in March when he ran into a friend from Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh
     "I was like, 'Do you want to come over to my house?'" he said, "So we took the bus home and made grilled cheeses and watched that movie 'Her'" which explores isolation and relationships nurtured via electronic devices.
     Little did he know that the coronavirus that was spreading accross the country would give him and his friends their own lesson in being along. 
COMMENT

In this library tale we don't know why Charlie went to the library, but we do know that it turned into a social encounter with a friend he might not have though to contact via social media.  The library functions as a physical community space where people can run into each other.

Saturday, February 15, 2020

Downriver






Heather Hansman, Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West, 2019. 
Life in Vernal ticks by hot and slow.  I eat gas-station burritos, drink weak Utah beer, and run the mountain-bike trails outside of town at dusk, when it gets cool enough to move in the desert.  I camp on chalky flats of BLM land alongside the river and spend a lot of time in the air-conditioned public library and recreation center, which both seem unnecessarily big and glossy for a town this scratchy. [p.104]

COMMENT

   The author is writing a book about the Green River, but she says she goes to the library for the air conditioning.   Though she is camping recreationally, her need for a cool-shelter is essentially the same as is experienced by homeless people.  The library is a benefit of boom-and-bust oil and gas money, but this was written during a bust. 



Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Tax Credit for Children Leaves Neediest Behind

Jason DeParle, “Tax Credit for Children Leaves Neediest Behind,” New York Times, December 17, 2019 p. A1-

     Money helps children in part because of what it can buy— more goods (cheesy chicken spaghetti) and services (gymnastics classes or tutors).  Ms. Bradford, the teachers’s aide, is so eager to invest in her sons that she has used tax refunds to send them on Boy Scout trips to 42 states— even when a flood left them living in her car “I’m trying to instill in them that it’s education that gives you knowledge and power, not cars or clothes,” she said. Before traveling to Washington and visiting the Vietnam Memorial the boys — Tony 17, and Micah 13— wrote a report on a Monroe man killed in the war, which the public library added to its collection.  Finding the soldier’s name on the wall, Micah said, “felt like touching history.”

COMMENT

     The article is about people who are too poor to get the full amount of a child tax credit.  In this example, the extra money helps buy educational experiences that aren’t available at public school.  The library is part of an education plan that includes schools, extra-curricular clubs, field trips and independent research. 

     The student work was added to the local history collection.  This kind of hyperlocal collecting is important for community identity.  What’s more, the library collection is a way to validate the importance of student research.  Academic libraries typically require graduate students to deposit dissertations and theses, but many also allow professors to submit selected undergraduate work for the collection.  In public libraries, display space is available for K-12 students to show off artwork and projects to the larger community. Since people without kids seldom have reason to go into a school building, the library becomes a link between students and community 

Friday, December 13, 2019

How To Do Nothing

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, 2019

     I feel the same way about libraries, another place where you go with the intention of finding information. In the process of writing this book, I realized that the experience of research is exactly the opposite to the way I usually often encounter information online.  When you research a subject, you make a series of important decisions, not least what it is you want to research, and you make a commitment to spend time finding information that doesn't immediately present itself.  You seek out different sources that you understand may be biased for various reasons.  The very structure of the library, which I used in Chapter 2 as an example of a non-commercial and non"productive" space so often under threat of closure, allows for growing and close attention. Nothing could be more different from the news feed, where these aspects of information-- provenance, trustworthiness, or what the hell it's even about-- are neither internally coherent nor subject to my judgment.  Instead this information throws itself at me in no particular order, auto-playing videos and grabbing me with headlines. And behind the scenes, it's me who's being researched.  [p.175]

COMMENT

    This is a beautiful description of library research as a practice of close attention--  the opposite of the endlessly distracting information deluge online.  By "non-productive" Odell doesn't mean that library time is worthless, but that library time is not economically optimized for money-making.  The book argues that such economically unproductive time is not  just a good thing but essential for a good life.

   

Thursday, June 13, 2019

Book Publishers, Unbound at Last

Jane Margolies, "Book Publishers, Unbound at Last," New York Times, June 12, 2019, p. B6.

When Abrams Books recently moved to new offices in Lower Manhattan from its longtime home in Chelsea, it hired the consultants that companies typically calling for their expertise in audiovisual, m lighting temperature and ventilation needs,     It also hired a library consultant, who identified the first and latest editions of almost every title the 70-year-old publisher had ever printed, which were then line up on towering oak shelves.  The 10,000-volume library is the first thing visitors see when they enter the new workplace.     That may sound musty, but Abrams was striving for a modern workplace.  Designed by the architecture firm Spacesmith, the 41,0000-square-foot office has an open plan, m a spacious cafe and state-of-the-art technology.

COMMENT

     In a redesigned publisher's headquarters, the first thing visitors see is an impressive library of all the books Abrams Books has published.  The books serve as a kind of architectural decor that communicates the 70-year history of the company in a concrete way.  The author of the article feels obliged to take a dig at a company "committed to print in a world going digital," and yet the publishing industry has stabilized and is even beginning to grow again.  Maybe the world of reading has become as digital as it's going to get.  When ebooks started to gain a foothold, librarians who never studied calculus believe that the trendline of digital publishing would keep going up until nobody read print any more.  But in fact, not all curves are straight lines, and not all readers want ebooks.

     Librarians may sneer at the decorative use of books, but a photo with the article shows just how effective this design strategy is.  The library stacks are enticing-- they make you want to go in and browse.  If Abrams were going to publish your book, they help you envision it on the shelves of a bookstore or library.  It doesn't look musty at all.  It looks kind of magical, like a place I'd be happy to work. 

     


Friday, May 31, 2019

Public Pushback

Tay Wiles. Public Pushback: Arivaca, Arizona, Became a Magnet for Anti-Anti-Immigrant Activists Locals Wouldn’t Have It. High Country News, May 27, 2019, p. 12-17.

This time, the townspeople called in outside support: They invited Jess Campbell to the meeting. Campbell works for the nonprofit Rural Organizing Project in Oregon, which helps communities organize around issues ranging from defunded libraries to hate crimes and far right extremism.

COMMENT


     The border town of Arivaca is dealing with the nuisance of out-of-town, self-appointed anti-immigrant militias. The non-profit that is helping with the situation has a mission of advancing democracy, including preventing the loss of rural libraries.  

     Librarians themselves have not always understood that reductionist access to information is not the sole function of a library.  Sociologists have identified  libraries as part of a social infrastructure that creates strong, resilient communities. The activists know this and recognize libraries as community centers. They suggest that members can "partner with local schools, libraries or historical museums to reach your entire community."  This suggestion also suggests that there may not be another source of community information, possibly when small, rural communities may exist in a news desert. 

Friday, May 10, 2019

To Walk is Human

Antonia Makchik, "To Walk is Human: to Reflect, Divine," High Country News, May 13, 2019 p.42.

     What walking has given me can never be distilled onto a Fitbit or calorie counting app. Rather, I am far more aware now of how my senses help my brain filter and interpret the vast sea of information constantly shifting around me, allowing me too not just move through the world, but to understand my own place within it.  I've seen the same transformation in my son: At 10, he started walking to and from school by himself, and realized that he could also walk to after-school karate or wander to the library or a friend's house and then home again without his parents.  Many of his friends who were driven everywhere didn't know how to get from one side of town to the other; a 15- to 20- minute walk.

 COMMENT

    When children find freedom at that library it is often because they have the freedom to choose what to read. The books don't cost money to borrow so kids can try things they might not like. A kind of coming-of-age happens in the transition from the juvenile collection to the regular stacks.

   This neighborhood library offers another kind of freedom since a 10-year old can get there  himself on foot or bicycle.  Adults think of driving as a kind of coming-of-age because the driver's license frees children from being driven, but the library card coming-of-age can happen much earlier in life.  It will be six years before this kid can drive, but he's already gaining a sense of independence and self-determination.  I agree with his mom, that's a wonderful thing.

   The article specifies that the family moved from an exurban home to a walkable town. Adults forget (or maybe never knew) that car-dependent infrastructure is a serious obstacle for people who can't drive or can't afford to drive, and that means all children.  Libraries are especially accommodating to children with juvenile collections and children's librarians, but it's also an important aspect of libraries that, in the right kind of walkable environment,  kids can go there even if they don't go with their parents.

Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Why Your Neighborhood Can Determine Whether Your Child Thrives as an Adult

Matthew Brown, "Why Your Neighborhood can Determine Whether Your Child Thrives as an Adult," Deseret News, May 1, 2019, Online.
     Libraries, community centers, parks, houses of worship and other neighborhood gathering places can unlock opportunities for children to achieve the American Dream. That's what experts told a joint congressional committee Tuesday in Washington, asserting that rebuilding declining communities to foster social connections is key to closing the widening gap of economic inequality in America today. [1]
...

     Dr. Patrick Sharkey, a sociology professor at New York University, said government policies offering incentives to reversing a 50-year trend of families, businesses and social institutions fleeing economically hard-hit communities could address the disparities that Hendren's research revealed.
     "The most effective way to build stronger communities is to invest in core public institutions like schools and libraries, and public amenities like parks and playgrounds, that bring people together in shared spaces," he said.

COMMENT

      In his testimony, Dr. Sharkey cites a poll from the American Enterprise Institute that identifies schools and libraries as the top to elements that make communities successful. [2]   He goes on to say that there are three ways to build successful neighborhoods, 1) scale back policies that create geographic inequality 2) help families move to better neighborhoods and 3) community investment.  

     It's hard to say where the cause and effect lies. Future success  seems to depend largely on how much help kids get from their parents. And of course, rich people generally live in nicer neighborhoods. However, the U.S. Census Bureau says that children who grow up just a few miles apart in families with comparable incomes can have very different life outcomes. [3]  In fact, I do earn far less than my parents and I do live in a neighborhood with less social capital. It's not my preference. I would have loved to buy a house in the neighborhood where I grew up, but it's out of my price range.  I suppose my kids are doomed. At least we have a nice public library, although the neighborhood branch is currently closed for repairs due to flooding that was probably a result of climate change.
  


[1] U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Expanding Opportunity by Strengthening Families, Communities, and Civil Society [hearing] (April 29, 2019). 

[2] AEI Survey on Community and Society (February 2019).  

[3] The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Social Roots of Social Mobility (U.S. Census Bureau, October 2018).

Monday, April 22, 2019

What Life After Coal Looks Like in Romania

Kevin Faingnaert (photographs) and Keven Granville (text), “What Life After Coal Looks Like in Romania,”New York Times, April 18, 2019, B6-7.

     The mines, and the cities and the jobs, have faded.         Thriving communities were build around the mines during coal’s heyday.  Residents recall that the theater in Lupeni was packed during Romania’s Communist era. Many mine companies had their own libraries and clubs. 

COMMENT

     The lack of a library indicates how far the boom-and-bust fortunes of the Jiu Valley have fallen. In the age of climate change, using coal for fuel has become an existential threat. Coal made some communities prosperous for a while. The theater was supported by the former Communist government, but the article specifically says that the library was part of a company town. It is  inevitable that a single-industry extractive economy will eventually bust. With neither coal nor government to fund it, it seems there is no longer a library in the Jiu Valley at all. 


     The photos of the abandoned town are reminiscent of  the ravaged coal towns in Appalachia. In  Carbon Ideologies  William Vollman describes using small-town libraries in dying coal towns to  seek local history, do online research and find office space for writing while he was on the road.    Appalachian coal towns may not  be faring much better than the ones in Romania, but at least they still have libraries. 

Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Sustainability: A Love Story

Book Cover 
Nicole Walker, Sustainability: A Love Story, Ohio State University Press, 2018.

     Jill and her husband, Chuck, were Flagstaff icons.  Jill delivered half of the people's babies.  Chuck played music for those babies when they grew up and attended sing-alongs at the library.  He played guitar at the Hullaballoo and guitar at the Concert in the Park. He hosted sing-alongs and bonfires and they both were featured at the Viola Awards in 2013.  I saw them there. They told me they were moving to Portland.
...
 
They moved to Portland because Jill would have whole days off. Whole lives without on-call shifts. Chuck could move beyond the local festivals and libraries, play big shows in the bit city.  [131-132].

COMMENT

     This is both a library success and a library failure told in practically the same breath. Sing-alongs at the library are  part of building a resilient community, but Chuck, the musician, can't make a living doing it. His ambition to have a musical career is incompatible with volunteering time at local festivals and libraries. When he decides to move away, the community resiliency of Flagstaff is eroded in order to fortify an already vibrant musical scene in Portlandia.

    Several other library stories view the library similarly as a second-rate stop-gap for things like Internet access, [1] government assistance, [2] or a social support network. [3]   It's a downside to the the library's model of sharing-- things seem to be free that are not really free. Deserving artists don't always get paid. Compromises and inconveniences necessitated by sharing space and resources come to seem like deal-breakers.

     One lesson from this story is that librarians should be mindful to support local artists and performers by hosting readings and performances that give them a chance to sell books and recordings. The Salt Lake Public Library, which has long had a local music collection,. has set up a website called Hear Utah Music (HUM) that streams a curated collection of  songs by Utah artists in order to help support the local music scene.  Maybe this collection will help draw bigger audiences which the bands play a gig so the musicians don't have to move to Portland to live their dream.

 

Sunday, January 13, 2019

Time to Snuggle Up with a Good Book and a Candle

Danielle Braff, "Time to Snuggle Up with a Good Book and a Candle: Scents From the Old-Fashioned Reading Aid Can Help Transport You to Another Place and Time, New York Times,  Jan.13, 2019, p.ST3.

Candles are also now a common impulse purchase at independent bookstores.  There are shelves upon shelves of literary-themed ones at the Strand in New York.
     If you like to read on a rainy day but it's sunny outside there's Rainy Days Reads ($32.95).  Or if you want to pretend you're in a library, complete with that musty scent of the books and the waxed, creaky floors. there's Enchanted Library ($24.95).
     "We've learned one thing from our customers: Nothing goes together quite like candles and reading, " said Leigh Altshuler, a spokeswoman for the Strand. "Except candles and coffee and reading, and maybe candles and coffee and cats and reading."  
 


COMMENT

     The author declares with no small amount of snark, "It's not enough just to read anymore. It's not even enough to post your reading on Instagram anymore.  Today, you have to create an atmosphere to show just how analog and sensual you're being."

    In this evaluation, "analog and sensual" are just for show and kind of pretentious to boot. But what if they're not? What if people actually experience online reading as a form of sensory deprivation?  After Amazon.com nearly destroyed the business of bookselling, independent bookstores and small presses are making a comeback.  The reason seems to be that people genuinely crave an analog, sensual experience to enjoy along with their data acquisition.

     Digital reading only focuses on one narrow part of the reading experience -- the part where someone locates some useful bit of data.  This concept of reading encourages perverse behavior where people collect digital files on a computer and imagine they have learned something without ever reading at all. When librarians embraced ebooks as more convenient and cost-effective than print they failed to acknowledge that convenience and price are not the most important reasons why people chose what to read.

     Actually reading a book is  a big time commitment that can take days or weeks to complete.  There is a whole  process of selecting what to read through reviews, recommendations, browsing and following the threads of shifting interests.  Once a book is selected it's followed by experiental immersion in reading.  There is often a post-reading communal experience of book clubs or conversations about books.  If the process were not enjoyable, it's unlikely that anyone would  put in the kind of time it takes to do it right.

     Nonetheless, overzealous digital futurism made many librarians feel ashamed to promote the old-fashioned pleasure of reading.  Reading is touted for qualities of  information, data, convenience and access.  In the article, the scents that conjure "library" are described as woody, musty, waxy, and leathery with a hint of cinnamon. it was up the the candlemakers to realize that people associate the library with pleasures such as  "Bibliothéque," "Old Books," and "Lost in the Stacks," Once the reading experience is understood as sensory,  it's natural to make the association with candles, coffee and cats. I would buy a candle that smells like coffee and dusty sun-warmed cat fur.

Thursday, January 3, 2019

Shale Play



Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Steven Rubin, Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.

     I grew up in Westmoreland County during the 1970s, when steel mills started closing along the rivers of Pittsburgh. Surface mining operations and slag heaps, abandoned coke ovens, and coal patch towns were just familiar parts of the industrialized, rural landscape I called home.
     With this project, I returned to those places with purpose, opened my laptop in the Pennsylvania Rooms of public libraries and in the Coal and Coke Heritage Center on Penn State’s Fayette campus. I talked to people in diners, attended public meetings and scribbled a lot in my notebooks. Jim Rosenberg and the Fayette Marcellus Watch group welcomed me to their monthly meetings at chain restaurants on the strip outside Uniontown, and I visited the homes of some of the group’s members. Typically, I told people I wanted to write about fracking and asked if I could transcribe their experience in their own words.  [pxxiii]

COMMENT

     You wouldn’t guess it from the research methods, but this writer was working on a book of poetry. 

     The Environmental Humanities have created a new clientele for special collections and archives that focus on local history. Writers and  artists are making use of place-based collections to inform work about the relationships between people and places. Library collections like the Pennsylvania Rooms and academic special collections hold a key to interpreting place-based identity that in turn informs community resilience and the possibility of sustainable change.

      Not that fracking is sustainable. The stories in Shale Play are unbearably sad ones about people trading their forests, farms, rivers, animals, good health, dignity and sense of community for a pocketful of money. Even so, the poems attest that the wounded land and damaged communities are still there despite the overlay of colonial industrialization. Perhaps in some form they will manage to outlast the bastards. 

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Six Kinds of Rain




Kathleen Dean Moore and Erin E. Moore, “Six Kinds of Rain: Searching for a Place in the Academy,” in Placing the Academy: Essays on Landscape, Work and Identity, ed. By Jenifer Sinor and Rona Kaufamn, Utah State University Press, 2007, pp. 27-38.

“In this folded space, it’s hard to know where a university is. Maybe the university has become a paradox, a place with no particular place —  in a familiar geography of classrooms, restrooms, computer networks, and labs where uncomfortable table-chairs and library shelves are an iconography recognizable around the world. This global University has a common language, shared ethical codes, standardized measures of status, and ingrained methodologies, economic systems and taboos. What the University doesn’t have is a meaningful relationship to a particular place— its absence the final achievement of the goal implicit in the word university. [pp.31-32]
COMMENT

Let's sing along with Malvina Reynolds’ classic song!

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they got put in boxes
And they came out all the same
There are doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

     In Becoming Native to this Place (1993) Wes Jackson asks, what if universities had a homecoming major? I would add, if they did have one, what would need to change in Academic libraries? 

     In the name of efficiency, academic collecting has been largely outsourced to approval plans and digital aggregators. That means libraries are spending a lot of money to buy very similar digital collections no matter where the institution is located. This in turn has led to proposals to replace academic libraries with huge regional book warehouses in order to “share” shelf space. [1] The book-warehouse idea presupposes that all campuses are interchangeable. All of this only makes sense if  you don’t truly think of your  university campus as a “community”

     Interestingly, even the people who most strongly advocate replacing libraries with book warehouses have realized that diversity (a.k.a. "unique print book manifestations") in academic library collections derives from collecting that reflects geography. Place is still important, no mater how much universities have been trying to ignore it.  If academic libraries start to pay attention to place it suggests a better way forward than replacing libraries with remote warehouses. 

     What if academic libraries decided to adopt a core mission of  fostering  resilient community? That would trigger a shift in library collection priorities away from globalized, generic knowledge towards specific local and hyperlocal knowledge.It would make regional Special Collections more prominent. But more importantly, it could help with the sustainability agenda to make the world a better place.