Bringing Overdose Response and Prevention to the Library
Edmonton Public Library

You wouldn’t expect to find an overdose response and prevention team at a library, but Edmonton Public Library's flagship location is going next level to take care of some of its most vulnerable citizens. Nurse Tabatha Plesuk, who works with EPL as part of a pilot program under the city's Downtown Vibrancy Strategy, is equipped with naloxone and works alongside outreach worker Blake Loathes.

Plesuk and Loathes do two rounds of the library and surrounding area, seeing between 40 and 60 people each day. Their backpacks are filled with medical and safer sex supplies, clean tools for using drugs — like needles and pipes — and importantly, snacks. While the library isn't designated as a space for people to consume drugs, staff are equipped and trained to respond to overdoses. Plesuk also provides basic health support, like wound care, to people who are facing homelessness.

Libraries can offer access to support services in a way that may be stigmatized elsewhere, says Sharon Day, EPL's executive director of customer experience. "We connect our community to the services and those resources and everything that they need to really live a fully functioning, vibrant, exciting life."

Read the full article from the CBC.

Mellon Foundation Awards Grants for Memory Lab Expansion
Richmond Public Library and San Diego Public Library

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation recently granted two ULC member libraries — Richmond Public Library and San Diego Public Library — significant awards to expand Digital Memory Lab services. Memory Labs are a treasured resource for library patrons to digitize and memorialize pieces of personal history.

In Richmond, the record $900,000 grant will be used to expand and modernize the Richmond Public Main Library’s Memory Lab, part of the national Memory Lab Network and the only Memory Lab in Central Virginia. The five-year grant builds a state-of-the-art Memory Lab with equipment that enables all Richmond individuals and communities to preserve fragile documents, old photos, and memories by digitizing them for long-term safety, preservation, and sharing.

Richmond Public Library Director Scott Firestine explains, “Richmond Public Library is deeply engaged in this work at the request of patrons and members of the public. We are excited that Richmond Public Library will be able to offer City residents top-tier public resources for preserving and sharing their personal Richmond stories and memories.”

In San Diego, the $350,000 grant will allow to expand Digital Memory Lab services throughout San Diego by creating three additional digital memory labs — which allow patrons to save information and memories stored on antiquated media, including VHS and Betamax tapes, 8mm film, 8-track, reel-to-reel, and other audio tapes, slides and negatives and floppy disks. The funding will also go toward deploying five mobile pop-up labs traveling between library branches in all nine City Council districts in San Diego.

“The library’s mission is to inspire lifelong learning through connections to knowledge and each other,” said Misty Jones, San Diego Public Library director. “I am so pleased we will now be able to encourage more of our residents to connect the threads of their personal histories to those of others.

Learn more about this exciting Memory Lab work in Richmond and San Diego.

Strategic Planning for the Future
The Seattle Public Library

The Seattle Public Library's Executive Director and Chief Librarian Tom Fay recently sat down for an interview with The Urbanist to discuss the library's strategic planning process and how it will shape the library for the future. The library has been consulting patrons' and community stakeholders' input to shape the next decade of the system, as laid out in a vision document prepared by the consulting group Houston Foresight. Libraries have become a focus of cultural debates, safety issues arose from the pandemic, and the ever-looming recession destabilizes library funding.

In thinking about the library as a city service, he remarked that communities are seeing a gap in public places that are free. "You really see the library being, in many cases, that only third space that people can go to that is free space, the place just to be," says Fay. "There used to be a lot more of them, and I think what you see is the library taking on that role in so many areas of the city... It’s an important part for libraries, an important role."

Read the full interview with Tom Fay in The Urbanist.