Curated Futures Project: A Third Library is Possible

Faithe Day, Synatra Smith, Jodi Reeves Eyre, John MacLachlan, and Christa Williford, editors

February 2022. (electronic only)
CLIR pub 179

The Curated Futures Project is a guide for professionals in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums to navigate beyond discussions of decolonizing collecting institutions to begin taking practical steps to enact change.

Organized and edited by CLIR Postdoctoral Fellows and alumni Faithe Day, Synatra Smith, Jodi Reeves Eyre, John MacLachlan, and Christa Williford, the project is the first in a series of collaborations that respond to the theme, “A Third Library is Possible.” The theme draws from the possibilities of the “third university,” a notion developed by la paperson in the book,  A Third University is Possible.

Contributors to five collaborative projects use a variety of mediums, including podcasts, gaming, and mapping visualizations, to speculate about aligning academic libraries with social impact. The projects include:

• Geographies of Engaged Digital Scholarship: Remaking Space and Place in the Academic Library, by Rachel Starry, Marta Brunner, Matthew Sisk, and Sean Tennant
• FLAME—Future Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Excavation—a Podcast Series, by Jennifer Grayburn, Petrouchka Moïse, Ece Turnator, and Laura Wilson
• Game-Based Design for Inclusive and Accessible Digital Exhibits, by Rebecca Y. Bayeck, Smiti Nathan, and Alex Wermer-Colan
• Visualizing Scholarship as Social Change, by Justin Schell
• The Third Library and the Commons, by Annie Johnson, Carrie Johnston, and Aditya Ranganath

The Curated Futures Project is the third installment of the CLIR Collaborative Writing Project; previous publications were The Process of Discovery and A Splendid Torch. Unlike the earlier works, the current project’s authors began their work knowing that in-person engagement would be impossible.