Library stars: access, entrepreneurs, meeting places - a perspective from Stockholm

This photograph shows the conference venue
The key note for the day was given by Inga Lunden, City Librarian, Stockholm, and Director of Stockholm Public Library.

Inga highlighted the themes for the day providing examples of how public libraries provide access, invite entrepreneurs, and create meeting places. She described a library she had seen at the IFLA conference in Durban, where at Thekwini (between Durban and Pietermaritzburg) the library staff talked with the people in the community while they were growing a vegetable garden together. This garden grew, outside the library, as ideas were shared about health, and raising children, and over time more and more people joined together. This is a culture of participation, where people participating in growing beets, also came to participate in using the library.

The mission for Inga’s library is that “Stockholm Library will inspire to knowledge and imagination with knowledge and imagination”. She highlighted the need for all library staff to have a sense of curiosity and sense of adventure, the need for big ears and fast feet, intuition and sense of trust and timing and the confidence to use it as well as the networking skills of s spider. She said that we are working to change from information systems to communication systems, from intermediary culture to participatory culture, from final cut to always beta and not have to wait until everything is perfect.

Inga talked of the need for new skills – for patrons and staff, including reading and writing, research and analysis, negotiating across culturally different communities, forming bonds with community leaders and that libraries have to role to encourage people to play/stimulate/perform/appropriate/sample/remix

Stockholm is growing (to around 800 000 people). It is also growing in knowledge, diversity and complexity. Inga stressed that in libraries we can make use of people’s creativity and capacity – not only within the elite, that we should work with partners who we don’t usually work with

Inga also mentioned that libraries and museums are in the security business – libraries want to make people less scared of each other – to make them meet people from other areas. Stockholm are working on the library net, the net library and a new central library. They are linking ideas from the three areas so that each works better. For example every time someone wants to renew a book they have the opportunity to comment on the book and write a review for others in the library to read.

“When people in motion meet a library in motion everything is possible” comes from the Stockholm strategic plan, This has Stockholm public libraries striving to be more accessible, urgent, effective.

Claudia Lux, Director Berlin Public Library, and President of IFLA spoke of the IFLA libraries success database which is used for advocacy on an international level. All kinds of libraries were asked to add their success stories to the database