A Librarians Guide to Community Design

Libraries provide access to information. Increasingly that information -- particularly if it is made available by municipal, state or federal government agencies -- is available on the Internet. It is found on diverse website, categorized in a wide variety of ways, and formatted as human readable webpages, .pdfs that are to be downloaded. What is a librarians role -- what can be the librarian's role -- in connected their constituency to that information?

Answering that question -- and connecting it to technology development -- has been at the heart of work in Feito Na Biblioteca, a two-year funded project in two Brazilian cities: Belo Horizonte, MG and Porto Alegre, RS.

While this project has been very explicitly aimed at developing three apps that serve the communities needs, we've also been paying close attention to the process so that we can describe how other librarians can undertake similar work in their communities, whether in Brazil or other countries world wide.

In this guide, we will describe how librarians can do this type of engagement, the ways that they can reach out to the varied communities that are necessary to complete the work, and how they use the systems they have already set up to develop, show, and share a wide variety of civic engagement apps.

A work in progress, this guide will grow as we continue to do our project (which you can follow on the Facebook page [[1]]). In addition, we will develop and share many of the tools that we refer to so that librarians can download them (in English and in Portuguese) to use in their own work.

If at any point, you have questions or want more information about this project, please feel free to contact us at [[2]] and we will get right back to you.

First, find the themes

There are many places a librarian and a library can start in organizing information and improving access and usability. There are so many places to start, in fact, that starting can be impossible. Bogged down in a quagmire of need and possibility. So, how do you actually narrow down the wide range of what could happen to what you can do first in your community? This part of the guide is devoted to working with your constituents