This book shows academic and public libraries the many benefits of nurturing a culture of creativity, offering hands-on guidance on encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration, launching active-learning events that highlight collections and services, fostering goodwill and trust-building, and forming partnerships that promote library visibility.

This book demonstrates the ways in which cultivating a sense of play in library work fosters flexibility, creativity, innovation, teamwork, and increased patron and community engagement.

"Creativity is just connecting things," observed Steve Jobs. In today's diverse, ever-changing job market, creativity is more necessary than ever. In a profession offering a broad range of job opportunities, librarians are surrounded by myriad connections to be made. They are trained to recognize them. This collection of new essays covers a wide spectrum of methods for cultivating creativity. Topics include learning through role-playing games, libraries as publishers, setting up and using makerspaces, developing in-house support for early-career staff, creating travelling exhibits, creative problem solving, and organizing no-cost conferences.

For a library to fulfill its mission to provide community engagement and cultural dialogue, then diverse, excellent cultural programming is the key. This authoritative resource outlines all the steps. For a library to fulfill its mission to provide community engagement and cultural dialogue, then diverse, excellent cultural programming is the key. In Cultural Programming for Libraries, the director of ALA's Public Programs Office shares time-tested strategies and practical, inspiring samples from first-rate programs across the country. Librarians, staff, and volunteers will find the practical how-to for creating a comprehensive cultural program - from planning to funding to promoting. community needs Set goals and establish measurable outcomes Develop winning partnerships that result in high quality, well-attended programs Highlight and drive the use of collections Gain community support and visibility through programming Enhance your library's role as cultural center based on successful models Eleven five-star programs highlight outstanding events for varying audience sizes and price points to help customize your own library's effort. Marketing and promotional samples also inspire creativity in every chapter to help advance your library as a community cultural hub. Programming advocates in libraries of any size can use this authoritative resource to enhance skills, increase effectiveness, and expand their creative vision for promoting winning cultural programs.

By proudly owning the audaciousness of the Big Idea, libraries demonstrate both their resiliency and value to their communities. This resource shares the insights and practical knowledge to make it happen.

Contemporary society has seen an unprecedented rise in both the demand and the desire to be creative, to bring something new into the world. Once the reserve of artistic subcultures, creativity has now become a universal model for culture and an imperative in many parts of society. In this new book, cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz investigates how the ideal of creativity has grown into a major social force, from the art of the avant-garde and postmodernism to the ‘creative industries’ and the innovation economy, the psychology of creativity and self-growth, the media representation of creative stars, and the urban design of ‘creative cities’. Where creativity is often assumed to be a force for good, Reckwitz looks critically at how this imperative has developed from the 1970s to the present day. Though we may well perceive creativity as the realization of some natural and innate potential within us, it has rather to be understood within the structures of a very specific culture of the new in late modern society. The Invention of Creativity is a bold and refreshing counter to conventional wisdom that shows how our age is defined by radical and restrictive processes of social aestheticization. It will be of great interest to those working in a variety of disciplines, from cultural and social theory to art history and aesthetics.

This book examines the role, history and function of public libraries in contemporary societies as motors that drive development. It analyses through case studies, how contemporary libraries have been redesigned to offer a new kind of public space while also reshaping neglected areas in cities. Broadly understood the book seeks to comprehend contemporary library design, urban development and the revitalization of specific urban areas. Important and world famous architects – star-architects – have designed signature architecture in the contemporary libraries selected for this volume. The examples to be showcased in the book include the main Seattle Public Library, Salt Lake City Public Library, New York Public Library, Spain Library Medellin, Colombia, Halifax Central Library Nova Scotia, Canada and Library of Alexandria in Egypt to offer examples of what constitute the approach to libraries and urban development in many cities around the world nowadays. Data in the form of interviews to library directors, librarians and users, tours of libraries, visual documentation and archival research have been collected for most public libraries included as case studies for the book. The impulse to archive has been framed and understood in the literature as a modern desire to control fleeting reality. Libraries as such respond to this desire by collecting, storing and circulating resources (books and other kinds of media). But more recently there has been an emphasis on the public character of library spaces in which people gather not only to obtain information and read by themselves but also to experience the very urban quality of proximity to others in more informal and less structured environments as public space. Community events characterize the programming of all the libraries included in the book. The design of these new libraries fit into urban development initiatives where libraries – like other iconic cultural spaces of cities – become central components to market cities for the consumption of culture. Libraries become sites to be visited and explored by tourists while providing services for residents. They are also machines to accelerate urban development especially in areas previously neglected by development.

This book can help you create, encourage, and participate in an environment that is conducive to creativity, helping make change a more natural and organic part of the library's culture.

"This Report demonstrates that innovative cultural policies implemented at regional and local levels have a positive impact on the whole of cultural governance. It highlights the strategic frameworks best adapted to the digital environment, the emergence of exchange platforms and the dynamism of artistic incubators in the global South. It also points to the persistent inequalities and underrepresentation of women in the culture sector, trade barriers on cultural goods and services from the global South and the vulnerability of artists at risk. By providing yet unpublished statistics and data in these areas, this Report is essential for developing and implementing public policies that are adapted to the evolving needs of the culture sector"--Foreword.