“The Book is Just the Beginning,” Part 2 September 3, 2017September 3, 2017 jshanahan Leave a comment Mihaela writes: In the first segment of this two-part entry, we explored the variety of events offered by the Chicago Public Library at neighborhood branches during their One Book seasons. Over the years, the library has increased the number of events at physical branches. But CPL has also created innovative digital programs to encourage participation via Twitter chats, digital blog posts, and CHIRP Radio. This post is about such online programming. For the 2014-2015 season, on Michael Chabon’s The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, OBOC launched chapter-by-chapter online “Reading Sprints.”… Read more
“The Book Is Just The Beginning” – Part 1 May 4, 2017June 30, 2017 jshanahan Leave a comment The “One Book One Chicago” (OBOC) program has evolved since the fall of 2001, expanding and diversifying its programming around the city. As noted in an earlier post, reading the chosen OBOC book is only one kind of participation in the larger social space of engagement with literary culture. Archiving Chicago Public Library’s One Book materials, English graduate student Mihaela Stoica has documented the great variety of OBOC-related events of the past several seasons. The main branch of the CPL holds physical files for previous OBOC seasons, with information on programming… Read more
Library as Platform, Library as Cloud … February 20, 2017June 30, 2017 jshanahan 1 Comment In 2012, in Library Journal, David Weinberger wrote about how libraries should perhaps best be conceived as platforms, canopies, and even clouds — beautiful, and suggestive, imagery useful to help capture the emergent architectures of public libraries. According to the 2016 18-month update of the City of Chicago Tech Plan, “Since the [new BiblioCommons] website’s launch in April 2014, CPL has seen a nearly 18 percent increase in website visits via mobile devices. Residents have been taking advantage of the new social features of the CPL site during the last year. More than 170,000 … Read more
Why “City Scale” Matters June 23, 2016October 10, 2016 jshanahan Leave a comment Reading Benjamin Barber’s suggestive If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (Yale UP, 2013) reminds me of the lofty aspirations Mayor Richard M. Daley had for the One Book One Chicago program in its early years. In a prefatory note in the guide for the third season, fall 2002, on Willa Cather’s My Antonia, he wrote: “One Book, One Chicago encourages all our citizens to read the same book at the same time to create a citywide book club. … One Book, One Chicago cultivates a culture of reading and discussion by bringing our diverse city together around one great… Read more