LIBRARIES
COMMUNITIES THAT WORK
Kershaw invests in community with new ideas in old spaces
A train depot that’s a museum. A bank branch building that’s become a library. Another former bank that is serving as an early education center. Here is how this South Carolina town is repurposing buildings of the past to build up its future.
COMMUNITIES THAT WORK
How one small Ohio town practices democracy
Small is big in Mount Blanchard, Ohio. The town approached change in two ways, and Deborah Fallows reports on the impact she and her husband, James, saw during their travels there.
LIBRARIES
Global Effort Takes Libraries to the People
Libraries Without Borders finds innovative ways to meet community residents where they are to provide equitable access to the range of services today’s libraries offer.
CIVIC LIFE
To Both See and Tell the Country: From the Road through North Carolina to South Carolina
Why seeing more of America matters.
LIBRARIES
A Library Garden Celebrates Reading, Art, and Nature
In 2015, Dillsburg, Pennsylvania relocated the town's library to a bigger space to better serve its growing population. A year later, when tragedy struck, the community stepped up to grow the library to include a reading garden.
LIBRARIES
A Remarkable Woman Builds a Remarkable Library
This is the story of how a late-1800s free public library built by Amelia S. Givin in Mt. Holly Springs, Pennsylvania continues to bring the region together today.
COLLABORATIONS & PARTNERSHIPS
Story Maps are at the Center of Community Collaboration in Kent, Ohio
New digital tools give communities innovative and engaging ways to tell their own stories. In Kent, Ohio, a community-wide collaboration among Kent State University, Main Street Kent, and the Kent Historical Society & Museum uses story maps to teach residents about the town's rich history.
TOWN HISTORY & STORY
Building Bridges Within and Among Communities Through Stories
Not all bridges are physical. The ways communities are connecting with one another, and themselves, is happening differently in light of COVID-19 and with new tools like OurStoryBridge: an online platform that captures and houses community stories.
LIBRARIES
Libraries Lead the Way—Again
Every aspect of civic life has involved reinvention and adjustment, through this pandemic era. One of America's most "traditional" institutions has adjusted fastest and best.
LIBRARIES
After years of working to increase library funding, the Adams County library system rebranded in 2009, replete with a new name, Anythink Libraries, and a new strategic approach to serving the community through hospitality.
Anythink Libraries Serve Adams County Through a Spirit of Hospitality and Innovation
FROM THE READERS
From your towns to our inbox, notes from South Dakota and North Carolina and more.
“Our Towns” Reader Response Roundup features film screening feedback, a unique effort to support libraries nationwide, and national perceptions being addressed at the local level.
ARTS
Creating and Reimagining Community through a Crisis
A look at the impact of Covid-19 on the culture sector in Erie, Pennsylvania.
LIBRARIES
Libraries During the Pandemic
This is a report about how that drama is playing out in one sizable American city, and what its lessons indicate for the country as a whole.
Big Little Ideas
Why Some Libraries Are Eliminating Fines
Are fines consistent with a fundamental mission of libraries: to serve the public with information and knowledge? And to address that mission equitably across the diverse population of rich and poor library users?
Reports From America
The Post-Pandemic Future of Libraries
"I've never been prouder to be a librarian."
Local Institutions
PUBLIC LIBRARIES' NOVEL RESPONSE TO A NOVEL VIRUS
America’s public libraries have led the ranks of “second responders,” stepping up for their communities in times of natural or manmade disasters, like hurricanes, floods, shootings, fires, and big downturns in individual lives. Throughout all these events, libraries have stayed open, filling in for the kids when their schools closed; offering therapeutic sessions in art […]