Brooklyn Public Library – „From information to action“

What do tour guides say about Brooklyn? “New York’s most exciting borough”, “creative and trendy”, “a district in transition”, etc. Brooklyn is a New York City borough with its own history and a public library system that counts to one of the 8 largest library systems in the US.

Taking a page from the tour guide, we are led to a part of the Brooklyn Public Library that is currently under construction. It will reopen in January as an Information Commons dedicated to the borough’s many freelance creatives and internet workers. The idea is to create a co-working space in which people can come together and work. This ideal work space will include meeting rooms, a training room, and individual work stations – everything one needs to work, free of charge and with access to all the necessary resources.

Over the course of the day, we were introduced to 2 more projects that innovatively address issues of information competency in different population groups. In collaboration with the NYC Department of Education, the New York Public Library and the Queens Library, the Brooklyn Public Library is intensively expanding its offerings for schools. Not every school has a good school library and not every student has a library card - so why not bring the library into the classroom? The project encompasses multiple services, for example, creating a special online catalog for each school that integrates the school library with the holdings of the much larger public library system, or strengthening the connections between teachers and librarians. Three services are of particular importance:

- Teachers can order special book packets that have been tailored for their lesson plans and the curriculum. When they’re done with them, the packets can simply be mailed back.
- Every student at a public school in Brooklyn automatically receives a library card. The library produces cards based on name lists provided to them by the Department of Education and distributes them to the schools. To conform to data privacy laws, students must only provide a few additional, basic, personal details upon visiting the library – this helps keep barriers to using library cards low.
- Students don’t have to pay overdue fines. Overdue fines rarely lead to books being returned on time; if anything, they keep students from under-privileged families from using the library out of fear they might incur fines. Why lose patrons when the fines can’t always be collected?

The project, which Brooklyn Public Library is currently testing with 25 test schools, has been in place at the New York Public Library for 3 years already. Eventually all 500 to 600 NYC schools will participate. The Carnegie Foundation sponsored the project with $5 million and most of the funds go towards acquiring new titles for the project.

We encountered another, already active and quite successful project in the Business Library of the Brooklyn Public Library. “Power Up” is a business plan contest run by the library. It is part of a larger, more intense program of promoting financial and business literacy and also encompasses individual consulting for financial questions. Between 400 and 500 people participate in “Power Up” annually - in order to be able to submit a business plan for the contest, one has to take part in a series of workshops designed to impart the basics of business administration. Roughly 80 business plans are submitted each year. The winner receives $15,000 towards starting a small business. The goal of “Power Up” is to support the local economy and it is sponsored by the Citi Foundation; the jury is made up of independent experts from the business community. The library not only benefits from the program by being associated as a place of learning, but also through the increased use of its business holdings and databases. It is really impressive how the library engages with external partners in such an innovative and creative manner. Of course one has to look into the integrity and impartiality of external programs, but especially topics such as “financial literacy” cannot always be addressed with internal resources.

The Brooklyn Public Library has a well-developed sense for its contemporary context, that is, Brooklyn as a happening borough with a strong creative industry and lots of freelance artists; Brooklyn as a borough in which many different languages are spoken; and Brooklyn as a borough in which the effects of the financial crisis are readily apparent. All these issues are addressed creatively and innovatively, despite budget cuts. My hat off!!