The term A Living Library is a metaphor. Everyone and
everything on earth is part of A Living Library of diversity (people,
birds, trees, air, and water) and all the things we create (parks,
gardens, buildings, schools, libraries, curricula, artworks, computers,
networks, businesses, ceremonies, and communities). As such, A Living
Library is a wholistic, conceptual and aesthetic framework and vehicle
for linking culture and technology as part of nature: a fundamentally
important systemic idea.
A Living Library is also a Think Park: an environment meant to make
us think, feel, and be more empathetic. The term, Life Frame refers
to our perception of life and all the elements that we see. The Life
Frame literally frames life so we can see it and experience it better.
Bonnie Ora Sherk and Life Frames, Inc., in conjunction with local
communities, develop content-rich, themed, indoor/outdoor community
learning environments based on these interrelated concepts. These
enchanting learning environments, with their integrated programs and
processes, incorporate the unique resources of the locale: human,
ecological, economic, historic, technological, and aesthetic. The
local people (students, parents, teachers, neighbors, businesses,
and professionals from all disciplines) form Community Research Mentoring
Teams and are involved in all aspects of the research, planning, design,
implementation, use, maintenance, management, and electronic communications
of these places and programs.
These site and culturally-sensitive environments with integrated interdisciplinary
project-based curricula, community programs, and products are called
Living Libraries, Think Parks, and Life Frames. A major goal of Life
Frames, Inc. is to develop an electronic network of Branch Living
Libraries around the globe, linking diversity, commonality, and customs,
using state-of-the-art technologies to demonstrate the interconnections
between biological, cultural, and technological systems.
An exciting current example is the OMI / Excelsior Living Library
& Think Park that is currently being developed in the southwestern
part of San Francisco. Three schools sit on a contiguous piece of
land of about nine acres that includes a culverted hidden river and
other features—Balboa High School, James Denman Middle School, and
San Miguel Child Development Center (PreK-12). They are currently
separate campuses of typically bleak, "factory model" schools with
mostly concrete, asphalt, and chain-linked environments. We are transforming
and linking these schoolyards and the schools' curricula by creating
a series of indoor/outdoor community learning zones that incorporate
the ecological, built, and cultural milieu of the site—past, present,
and future. This becomes the beginning core-content of the interdisciplinary
project-based learning and physical transformation process.
Every aspect of the process of researching the site, funding, planning,
design, implementation, use, maintenance, management, and communications
is part of the project-based interdisciplinary curricula and is being
documented through a variety of digital and other technologies. All
findings and expressions are being translated into the OMI / Excelsior
Living Library Multimedia Digital Archives, the Living Library Website,
and will be linked live through various technologies to Branch Living
Libraries as they emerge around the globe. There are also many other
opportunities for additional Living Library community-originated products
and processes.
