Loida García-Febo

The Living Library: lending out people

Imagine a library program that allows you to check out people for a 45 minutes chat. Think about a library offering people as if they were part of their library collection- breaking down all library conceptions. 

The Living Library Project was first presented in 2000 to the public at Denmark’s largest musical event, the Roskilde Festival. Since then, it has been adopted by organizations in Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Iceland, Norway, and Portugal.

 
The basic idea was that the Living Library was to be a physical space decorated as a library and full of humans acting as books. Attendees to the festival would go there to chat with people from different backgrounds to learn more about their lives.

The idea caught the attention of the Director of the Council of Europe’s European Youth Centre Budapest. He worked with the organizers of the Roskilde Festival to present a Living Library at the Sziget Festival, one of the largest music festival in Europe. Soon music festivals around Europe were hosting Living Libraries. The Directorate of Youth and Sport of the European Youth Centre Budapest published Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover! A Living Library Organizer’s Guide.

Finally in 2005, the Central Library of Copenhagen Public Libraries hosted its fist Living Library. It worked out well and other libraries became interested into the project. So far libraries in Copenhagen, Oslo, Sweden, and Almelo in The Netherlands have tried it.

The Malmo Library in Sweden has run various installments of the Library Living Project which allows customers to check out a journalist, an animal rights activist, a lesbian, a person with a disability, an imam, a minority (Danish woman), an ex-convict, and a transvestite among others. The Malmo library offers people as items of their library collection- smashing all library conceptions. Their purpose is to foster mutual understanding via conversations with people from the local community. Libraries are using this project to fight prejudice.

The program has attracted attention from the international media and from librarians around the globe. To me, the possibility of using a program like this to promote understanding through dialogue is fascinating. Some librarians have expressed doubts about the Living Library being the best way of reducing prejudice. Others have compared checking out people to checking out tools (there are rural libraries that lend gardening tools to their customers.) Either way, I think it is a brave initiative to try and fight a disease that eats our hearts, brains and souls. Prejudice should be fought any way we can.

Posted by Loida García-Febo on March 24, 2008 | Comments (1)