Linkubator Roundup: Week of October 9, 2016

Well, it’s Friday, and in addition to needing the weekend pronto, I also need to look back on the past week of work here at the Incubator.

It was a pretty normal week of features and fun on the web, but it was also an important one: one of our writers– who chose to remain anonymous at this time– shared their story of organizing a creative and community-building response to #BlackLivesMatter in their academic library for the new school year.  It’s the first time we’ve shared a #BlackLivesMatter-specific post, but it’s certainly not the first time Libraries have responded with creativity and passion to the movement and others like it.

The post–  Why Libraries Matter: My Experience Planning a Black Lives Matter Program— documents the difficulties and red tape one librarian encountered, but it also shares the final program plan and a reflection on how the library can to continue to support students of color on campus.  The goal for us in posting this was the same as it is for all of our posts: to catalog one librarian’s experience with the hope that it will be useful to others working toward similar goals.

We like to think the goal of bringing creativity into the library space meshes well with the goal of social justice– that it might make both efforts more effective and lasting.

Even when administrations balk.

So it was a normal week. A normal, extraordinary week.

Cheers,

Erinn

Top Features:

• A must-read: Why Libraries Matter: My Experience Planning a Black Lives Matter Program
• Banned Books Week at the end of September is always a treat– and not just for the delicious sense of thumbing one’s nose at censors while re-reading Speak and then donating to RAINN. Banned Books Trading Cards at Chapel Hill Public Library are a wonderfully creative response to censorship each year!  Check out the 2016 set, and look back on previous years.
• Kinesthetic intelligence and literacy is just as important to teach as ABCs! Get kids moving with our latest movement-based storytime plan: Book to Boogie: City Shapes

Around the Web

• I can’t get enough of this: Hidden Figures: The Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Powered NASA.  There’s an ARC of this on my desk that I devoured.  A must-buy, but definitely worth some creative programming, too.  Just think!  STEM, social justice, history, and movie screening potential. It’s a goldmine.
• You will just die of envy over the astonishing restoration of NYPL’s Rose Main Reading Room. I took one look and got a little verklempt. And then I added it to the top of my library tourism list.
• The Walters Art Museum’s new manuscripts website looks pretty rad, too.

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