With civic engagement appearing in a number of University strategies, I thought I would give you time to reflect on whether your library could contribute to this. Last year, the University of Portsmouth Library, working with a senior lecturer in our Illustration department, acquired a prestigious collection of children’s books translated into English: Outside in World.
Situated in the library cafe, it offers potential, not only for learning, teaching and research, but for community engagement too. For example, Portsmouth City of Sanctuary supports refugee families arriving in the UK, University of Portsmouth Academy Trust supports local schools where pupils speak many different languages and so, with a volunteer team to help connect the books with the community, our journey towards civic engagement has begun.
With a nod to former ARCLIB conference presenters, Julia Reeve and Kaye Towlson, I thought you might enjoy channelling your thoughts into a Doodle Box – recording aspects of your local community on the outside of the box and any “special” collections, resources, services or spaces in your library on the inside of the box. To help you think, I started some doodles around the edges that you could work on. Your final task was to share how you might connect a community group with something special in your library.
What did I learn from the workshop? Well, it’s hard to facilitate, discuss, record and photograph at the same time, so I’d be really grateful if you could add your thoughts to the comments section below! From what I remember, I was surprised at how hard some of you found the task and it was clear that many of us, myself included, don’t live in the area where we work and, consequently, know very little about the community on our institution’s doorsteps. Some of you couldn’t see how any more people could fit comfortably within your libraries and weren’t sure how it could work in practice. Other institutions, were trying to do some things, for example, offering a booking system to members of the community who want to visit and, at the other extreme, some institutions have dedicated teams for community engagement. Those of us who work in city centre libraries have physical barriers to access, too, whilst those on more remote campuses have no barriers, just tricky bus routes to get there. So, at the very least, I think it gave us some food for thought.
And finally, I learnt that librarians don’t seem to be doodlers!
Greta Friggens | University of Portsmouth
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