SWAP MEETING

Public Librarians From Around the World Trade Ideas About Technology

Across the foundation, we work with thousands of grantees who are out in the field day after day, and they generate an extraordinary wealth of knowledge about the best strategies and tactics for addressing the problems we focus on. But most of our grantees don’t have the opportunity to share that knowledge with each other. It’s a waste of a precious resource. So, in 2006 we thought about better ways to help grantees learn from one another and create a network to share information so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel constantly.

That was the idea behind a six-day peer-learning meeting we hosted in December with library leaders from Botswana, Chile, Latvia, Lithuania, and Mexico—the five countries our Global Libraries initiative has worked with so far. Instead of filtering their expertise through the grantmaking organization—us—they transferred it directly and interactively.

The Global Libraries initiative is dedicated to helping people benefit from free Internet access in their public libraries. Chile and Mexico, longtime grantees, shared five years’ worth of experience. Botswana, Latvia, and Lithuania, which just announced their first grants in November, brought new ideas to the table.

The participants held sessions on a range of topics: What are the best ways to overcome the challenges of installing hardware in rural places? What kinds of content do people find most useful? How can libraries train people to use computers most effectively? How can libraries make the case to governments that providing Internet access should be a priority?

They also visited a number of libraries near Santiago, Chile, where the meeting took place. Chile was the perfect location because its successful library project has expanded from a basic access and training initiative to one focused on developing high-quality local content. Biblioredes: Abre tu Mundo (Open Your World) has transformed Chilean libraries. All 378 libraries in the country now offer free Internet access, which generates more interest in libraries generally. In the project’s first year, adults used libraries 50 percent more than in the year before. But people didn’t go just for the computers; once at the library, they took advantage of other services. Chile’s libraries now loan out 75 percent more books than they did when the project started. Biblioredes has put libraries at the center of civic life in Chile.

Chile’s libraries served as models for library leaders from the other countries. At the meeting, they didn’t just talk about what success looks like—they saw it.