Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

6.22.11 | I wanted to point readers to Alexis Madrigal’s important article in The Atlantic about the digital identities of the New York Public Library.

The library, he writes, is “no longer only a place where people take out books and scholars dig through archives. The library has become a social network with physical and digital nodes.”

In our continuing coverage of libraries, we’ve often touched on NYPL’s work as a space for innovation and its participation in the New Youth City Learning Network. Most recently, we wrote about the overnight scavenger hunt designed by Jane McGonigal in connection with NYPL’s centennial celebration.

In “What Big Media Can Learn From the New York Public Library,” Madrigal writes with his media professional hat on, but his conclusions—namely that even in the face of gigantic budget cuts the “the NYPL is succeeding online because of desire” and the ability to view its users important “collaborators”—have important lessons for educators and schools.

Madrigal visits the NYPL’s communications department, which produced “Biblion: The Boundless Library”—a mobile storytelling app designed to open up hidden parts of the NYPL’s collection. He also talks with the library’s digital team members who are adding value to the library’s collections through public projects like What’s On the Menu?, described as an effort to “crowdsource the transcription of tens of thousands of menus that, by virtue of their fonts and designs, are resistant to OCR [optical character recognition], the way computers turned scans into text.”

“The public library can be used to organize people to organize information,” Doug Reside, digital curator of performing arts, told Madrigal.

That’s a powerful idea for educators too, that schools should be looking to students, the main users, to drive their own learning.

Madrigal’s discussion about how information is being democratized in the digital age is also fascinating, especially the historical bits about the NYPL itself. But the important piece for educators is the idea of the library as a center of community conversation around information—both at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and online all over the world.

Read the full story here.