Community Technology Projects Making Them Work

Community Technology Projects: Making Them Work

As a newly minted librarian, Heller volunteered at a grassroots independent library founded to bring together the work of disparate art communities of Chicago. Since then she has participated in many library technology communities with stints on boards, working groups, conference planning committees, and social media-based outreach. Grounded in her research of dozens of community tech projects, Heller presents a guide exploring how they work, how to get involved, and how to make them better. Library technology managers, grantmakers, scholars, and project managers will all benefit from Heller’s incisive discussion of such topics as a historical overview, including the humble beginnings of OCLC and early library computerized cataloging projects, that offers lessons for today; how to find community needs that match your motivation; using personas to learn about community members; choosing a name and legal structure for a new community; five in-depth case studies, including Project Bamboo, Hathi Trust, and the Digital Public Library of America; techniques for project management, documentation, and discussion; forging a path from small, grant-funded projects to a sustained collective good; reconciling hacker ideology and geek culture with inclusive communities; proven methods for supporting tasks and emotions in library tech communities; and successes and challenges of vendor user groups. For readers who want to get started with community technology projects, as well as those who are already engaged in collaborations, the techniques and best practices in Heller’s guide will provide the tools and inspiration to make better library technology communities.

Entering Cultural Communities

Arts organizations once sought patrons primarily from among the wealthy and well educated, but for many decades now they have revised their goals as they seek to broaden their audiences. Today, museums, orchestras, dance companies, theaters, and community cultural centers try to involve a variety of people in the arts. They strive to attract a more racially and ethnically diverse group of people, those from a broader range of economic backgrounds, new immigrants, families, and youth. The chapters in this book draw on interviews with leaders, staff, volunteers, and audience members from eighty-five nonprofit cultural organizations to explore how they are trying to increase participation and the extent to which they have been successful. The insiders' accounts point to the opportunities and challenges involved in such efforts, from the reinvention of programs and creation of new activities, to the addition of new departments and staff dynamics, to partnerships with new groups. The authors differentiate between "relational" and "transactional" practices, the former term describing efforts to build connections with local communities and the latter describing efforts to create new consumer markets for cultural products. In both cases, arts leaders report that, although positive results are difficult to measure conclusively, long-term efforts bring better outcomes than short-term activities. The organizations discussed include large, medium, and small nonprofits located in urban, suburban, and rural areasùfrom large institutions such as the Smithsonian, the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the San Francisco Symphony to many cultural organizations that are smaller, but often known nationally for their innovative work, such as AS220, The Loft Literary Center, Armory Center for the Arts, Appalshop, and the Western Folklife Center.

Broadband Adoption