Megan Lotts

Advancing a Culture of Creativity in Libraries

This book shows academic and public libraries the many benefits of nurturing a culture of creativity, offering hands-on guidance on encouraging cross-disciplinary collaboration, launching active-learning events that highlight collections and services, fostering goodwill and trust-building, and forming partnerships that promote library visibility. Today's library workers have many roles to play: information gatekeepers, connectors, collaborators, and storytellers. The key ingredient is creativity, which acts as the lynchpin of functioning successfully as a team as well as impacting communities in positive ways. This book examines creativity and how it can be applied in library work culture, programming, and outreach. Lotts shows how libraries can encourage staff to approach teaching, learning, and problem-solving in unconventional ways. This invigorating book demonstrates why the challenges of our current historical moment provide us with a unique opportunity to stop and consider our work and our goals; dives into several case studies of creative and playful library projects, many of which can be adapted for reuse, investigating how they came to be and the impact they have had on their communities; discusses getting buy-in from administrators and funding organizations; offers pointers on collaborating with communities; guides readers in assessing the impact projects have on communities; and talks about how to learn and grow from failure and frustration.