CIL - Day 3 - Planning & Realizing the “Fourth Place”

This was a kind of quirky session which was nonetheless interesting and valuable. Paul Signorelli from Signorelli & Associates was supposed to be Skypeing in for the first part, but there were technical difficulties and this could not happen. The two live co-presenters, Jill Hurst-Wahl from Syracuse University and Maurice Coleman from Harford County Public Library had planned ahead though and were able to fill in for Paul and then present their own ideas.

I was primarily interested in what the concept of the "fourth place" was as I'm quite familiar already with the concept of the "third place" (the first and second places being home and work/school, with the third being somewhere to be when you're not at places 1 or 2, commonly a coffee shop, bookstore, or as some have suggested, a library).

To start they provided a broad definition of a library which I think can be in many cases useful:

1. A place that connects people with knowledge
2. For students, a place that increases their hours of learning activities.

The "fourth place" concept is to really play up this "place of learning" role of the library. Some of the ideas in how to do this I thought were quite interesting and to a point applicable in our situation. In particular:

• create a space that allows the users to redefine it. Get furniture that can be easily rearranged so that people can setup for study groups or individual study or whatever they need
• use signs to encourage behavior rather than discourage behavior (“Texting encouraged, silence cell phones keep calls brief & quiet”)
• also mentioned was a vision of the library as a dirty, noisy place where people can learn different skills (bicycle repair and gardening were mentioned as specific examples that at least one library was doing)

An interesting, although probably not practical in my situation, suggestion for this dirty place was the acquisition of used shipping containers to build a kind of garage like structure where such kinds of classes could be done without having to worry about getting grease all over the carpeting. I'm afraid that given the realities of our location, such an implementation will have to be tested out by a different public library.