Woonsocket Call: "Different Kind of Storytime at Harris Library"


Leslie Page, Director of Woonsocket Harris Public Library, displays some of the new computer gear the library won to stage a demonstration project about how libraries can become more relevant in the digital age.

By Russ Olivo, Staff Writer 

Woonsocket, RI --- If you could change one thing about the city to make it a better place to live, what would it be? It’s not just an academic question.The top librarians at Woonsocket Harris Public Library really want to know. They’re on a mission to collect the stories of scores of city residents – focusing on their fondest memories, what they like best about the city and what might be done to improve the quality of life.

“We’re doing the outreach right now and we want people to come forward,” says Library Director Leslie Page. “We’re going to hopefully use what we learn to help the city with the comprehensive plan. We decided that what we wanted to do was ask people in the city to tell us their stories.”

The effort is part of a broader project designed to demonstrate how libraries, in the digital age, can serve as more than just places where people come to borrow books and read magazines.

It began months ago when the Governor’s Office of Innovation and the state Office of Library Services offered a motherlode of computers, digital recording equipment and other resources as the prize to the library that proposed the best project for demonstrating how libraries could operate in a world where ink and paper are rapidly getting replaced by bytes and livestreams.

“Our idea was that we would use technology to investigate our city’s identity,” Page says. “Who are we as a city, what do we want to become?”

In May, Page says she found out that Woonsocket Harris Public Library won the contest, which included 40 Apple iPads, a desktop computer, a laptop, and some additional financial resources to remodel a room at the Clinton Street library into a digital recording studio.

Page says she doesn’t know how many other libraries entered the contest, “but we were told it was very competitive.” She said the Westerly Public Library also won a prize, but only after the Carnegie Foundation made some additional resources available, including a $40,000 grant for Woonsocket Harris Public Library.

It’s not uncommon for libraries, historical groups and genealogical societies to compile oral histories for posterity, but Page says she believes what sets the Harris Library’s proposal apart from that well-worn turf is that a key part of the project involves a partnership with the city’s Planning Department. When the library is done collecting the material, it will be given to City Planner Rui Almeida, who intends to incorporate the feedback into the next version of the comprehensive plan.

Assistant Librarian Margaret McNulty agrees.

“We’re serving as a model for how libraries can transform using technology,” she says. 

“We’re offering our videos and empowering our community to be active voices in the future of our city. That was a component of our project that was different than oral history projects.”

Almeida says collecting feedback for the comprehensive plan from people who live in the city is an exciting idea.

So what’s a comprehensive plan?

The subject might not find its way into the usual coffee-shop conversation, but the term refers to an actual document – book-length – that every city and town is required to compile and update on a regular basis, usually once every few years. Almeida calls it “the Bible of the city” – a statement of intent for how local government envisions using a vast array of resources, from architecture and parks to rivers and roads, in the years ahead.

“This is going to ask a lot of residents and citizens about the city itself, the good memories they have, the challenges they have and the things they would do tomorrow to make it a better place,” says Almeida. “This is Comprehensive Plan 101, if you will – the community buy-in. The visions and the goals of the city are mirrored in the comprehensive plan, not only from the planning point of view but also the human point of view.”

To the layman, the comprehensive plan may sound like a lot of bureaucratic hoo-ha, but Almeida says a community’s ability to achieve goals for economic development, the use of land and other natural resources is less likely unless it commits to a vision for the future – in writing – ahead of time.

“Done correctly,” he says, “they become very important.”

As the demographics of the city change, McNulty also sees the project as an opportunity to answer a bigger question about community identity. A personal goal is to solicit feedback from as diverse a cross-section of the civic fabric as possible, cutting across generations and ethnic groups to create the most current version possible of what she calls the city’s “collective identity.”

“In the past we had that Industrial Revolution, harder work-ethic and French-Canadian closeness, but we kind of dispersed into little pockets around the city with different cultures,” she says. “Now we’re trying to draw everybody together into the hub."

McNulty and Page say their goal is to collect the stories of at least 200 city residents for the project. They’ve scheduled some time, starting tomorrow, when residents can simply go to the library to participate.

Staff will be on hand to gather personal narratives from 6:30-8 p.m. on Thursday, and Friday from 10-4 p.m. The library has also set up a blog where new dates and times for story-collection sessions will be announced. The blog can be viewed online at https://tinyurl.com/SRWoon.

Anyone who’s interested in contributing may also reach Page at 767-4125, or McNulty, 767-4126.

“If there’s a big group, we’re willing to go where they are,” says Page.

The computer equipment the library won from the Governor’s Office of Innovation will be used to video-record individual contributions, but that is just the beginning, according to Page. Using both the equipment and the grant from Carnegie Corporation, Page intends to create a digital production laboratory that will be made available for public use.

“We’re painting it now,” she said.

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