Since 2000, American public libraries have been undergoing a huge makeover—the most ambitious change since urban public libraries were founded from the 1880s to the 1920s. In this course we’ll examine three dimensions of the new public library world: (a) the integration of books with digital technologies; (b) the strong new “community” focus as public libraries become active hubs for community-building; (c) the reading spaces enabled by architectural design, from the classic models used by the Carnegie libraries to innovative space-and-light configurations at newly-built libraries. We will first explore the Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh as a baseline to understand these transformations, with guest speakers from the CLP and an in-person, behind-the-scenes tour of the Oakland main library. Then we’ll turn to library transformations in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Cleveland, which all benefited from the Carnegie model yet have been transformed in unforeseen ways.
((Jon Klancher - Tuesday - In Person))
