I am writing right now from my laptop by a sunny window in the Albert Lea Public Library in southern Minnesota, but for now I want to share some images and thoughts from my visit to the Skokie Public Library back in Illinois. I’ve been following the great work of Toby Greenwalt, Richard Kong and Mick Jacobsen there for a while via Twitter and their posts on listservs, but thanks to ALA being in Chicago this year I got to meet them all and see the Skokie Library in real life.

The building itself is pretty fantastic, as the architect was James W. Hammond of Skidmore Owings & Merrill. It is a vintage 1960 building, and with that come blessings and curses. The original furniture and interior is amazing, but as libraries begin to reconsider their program for the digital age much of it can seem cumbersome and inflexible (that’s modernism for ya). Despite these challenges, Skokie is moving forward with some interesting initiatives. The one I’m most excited about is the Media Lab that the gentlemen I mentioned earlier are running with.

The Media Lab is under construction right now, so I will not show any pictures just yet, but I believe it will be a much smaller, sort of modular version of the media creation extravaganza Chicago Public Library has over at their YouMedia space.  This is an interesting and exciting way of approaching the problem of new media literacy in our networked, participatory culture because the services Skokie Public Library will be providing are small-scale, relatively low-cost, and the whole project looks measurable and replicable from my vantage point.

Here’s a few pics from the library.

Check out the green roof, as seen from the staff lounge.

There’s a movie theater in the library…

There was no way to show this, but in the storytime room, the ceiling was full of little fiberoptic cables making it look like a night sky when the lights were out.

Finally, a nice circulating video game collection.