Libraries today provide a wealth of services. As Beth Jefferson, president and CEO of Bibliocommons, notes in The Aspen Institute’s Dialogue on Public Libraries, with this changing service model, librarians need to become “curators” of their community, sifting through resources to create programs that meet the community’s needs and promote community culture and engagement. The MICA Fellowship provides on-the-job training to public librarians in curatorial practice, guiding them to better understand their community and how to create, curate, and promote programs with community input and involvement.

The MICA Fellow worked with three librarians, chosen by application, to teach them principles of curatorial practice, including visual literacy, research and observation skills; forging connections among the library and the community; and creating, curating and promoting programs and exhibitions. The librarians participated in group discussions about curatorial practice, then they worked with the Fellow to jointly curate “Open Stories,” a series of exhibitions that provided opportunities for community members to make connections through art including poetry, photography and the book arts. Fellows are expected to provide a foundation for continued development of community-based curatorial work in the Library’s culture.

The project will result in librarian professionals trained in curatorial practice, who will bring this training into their work with their own communities to shape and design services and programs, and will help to develop a culture of community-based curatorial practice among our adult librarians. In the long term, we aim to develop a curriculum for community-based curatorial practice that can be shared with other library systems.