I am extremely fortunate to work in a library, an institution that is designed to help others and to share knowledge, resources, and expertise. Snell Library is a very busy library. Every year, we have two million visits. On some weekdays we receive well over 10,000 visitors, with thousands of them in the building at one time. It’s great to see a library so fully used and appreciated.
Just as important, Snell Library fosters projects that help others in our Boston community and well beyond. Our staff has worked alongside members of the Lower Roxbury community to record, preserve, and curate oral histories of their neighborhood; with other libraries and archives to aggregate and make accessible thousands of documents related to school desegregation in Boston; and with other institutions and people to save the personal stories and images of the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath.
Our library is the home of the archives of a number of Boston newspapers, including the The Boston Phoenix, the Gay Community News, and the East Boston Community News, with more to come. The Digital Scholarship Group housed in the library supports many innovative projects, including the Women Writers Project and the Early Caribbean Digital Archive. We have a podcast that explores new ideas and discoveries, and tries to help our audience understand the past, present, and future of our world better.
It’s National Library Week, and today is Northeastern’s Giving Day. So I have a small request of those who read my blog and might appreciate the activities of such a library as Snell: please consider a modest donation to my library to help us help others. And if at least 50 students, parents, or friends donate today—and I’d really love that to be 100, even at $10—I’ll match that with $1,000 of my own. Thank you.
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