I just moved to a new neighborhood and went to the local library branch called the Dudley Branch Library. It was a really interesting experience and unlike any library I had been to before.
The first thing that was different was as I walked in I saw lots of graffiti on the ground paying respect to someone who was killed outside somehow. I tried to find out more but I couldn’t. Regardless, it was a different feeling than I’ve had entering a library before. As I walked in, I was immediately into the space. It was built in 1978 and the space is great. It is basically one large room that is lit with glass brick. Behind most of the glass brick are trees so it is like a filter on a filter and the light is very soft and lovely.
There were a lot of services offered like resume building, and career related stuff. They also boasted a large children’s section and a huge collection on African American studies. Aside from that though, the collection seemed pretty strange and there weren’t like a lot of things I would think of as staples in a library. There was a bank of computers and kids were on each of them. It was sort of funny though because every one of them was playing video games on the internet and nobody was doing research for book reports or school or anything like that.
Probably my favorite thing about the library were these posters everywhere encouraging kids to read. They were posters of celebrities reading their favorite books (the singer Brandy, John Leguizamo, the two tortured looking teens from Twilight and something called a “Ne-Yo”). This was so lame…if I was a kid these posters would make me not want to read. How can we get kids to read more and do it is a non-pandering way?
