After strategic planning BootCamp last week, I’ve had Nelson and Garcia’s 18 service responses on my mind non-stop.  It’s a significant step to drill down the services we can offer at public libraries to 18 clear bullet points.  My last post on this blog offered a few anecdotes advocating for simplicity in the communication arts.  Having 18 concise service responses for public libraries to choose from is a great starting point as we strive for simplicity.  The next piece of Nelson and Garcia’s process requires that a library creating a strategic plan pick only a few of these 18 responses as priorities.  My assessment of the current climate is that public libraries have had a really hard time spelling out their mission and vision in the digital age, and that is one of the reasons we have wishy-washy statements of purpose.  A little while back Wendy Lukehart of the DCPL wrote a great piece about “Mission Envy” on the Urban Library Council’s Foresight 2020 discussion board.  I republished it here a while back on my old personal blog and it’s a really nice piece.  Read it, and consider how you might clarify your library’s mission.

Still, I keep coming back to my favorite service response offered in the 18.  It is a rather new service response, one that likely does not land high in the priorities at my library.  I suspect that at this point it is not the highest priority at many public libraries at all, but its one that I am interested in and hope to see more libraries embrace in the near future.  Without further ado, it is:

Express Creativity: Create and Share Content

Residents will have the services and support they need to express themselves by creating original print, video, audio, or visual content in a real-world or online environment.

It is easy enough to imagine tackling this priority at your library with physical-world activities.  You probably already do so via arts and crafts programs, poetry slams, or any collaborative activity that results in a finished product like a mural or an exquisite corpse drawing or a work of fiction.  It’s a little harder to figure out how that creative process can be facilitated by a library in virtual or networked setting.   I’m aware of two tools/projects that become activities supporting this initiative, no doubt there are more. I thought I’d share the two I’ve been looking at and invite people to post similar projects.   As I find new things I’ll do my best to keep posting them to this blog as well.

1) Available at Cleveland Public Library, and perhaps at other libraries: Scratch.

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

2) Currently in development at IIT Institute of Design: ThinkeringSpace.

ThinkeringSpace is a system, made of both physical and virtual environments, that aims to promote creative and critical thinking skills for the 21st century. Celebrating the book, it presents opportunities for doing things together, sharing ideas and authoring in new ways. Focused on school-aged children in libraries, the project is part of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative.