Please join us in exploring the benefits and controversies that libraries bring to their respective communities. We will address public and university libraries, but we will also spend considerable time investigating “outsider” libraries. These include the Underpass Library under a Canada freeway, the BiblioBurro delivering books by donkey in Chile, and the trash library built by sanitation workers in Turkey. How do these non-traditional libraries both form and inform the community? What do they say about our relationship to reading, freedom of information, and the durability of the book?

Special for Fall ’20: We will partner with Saginaw’s Roethke House Museum library for some hands-on experience, and we will also Zoom with a variety of librarians throughout the fall. This will be a small class, so we will meet twice weekly in a traditional face-to-face (LEC) format. I am VERY excited about the opportunities we have this fall.

If you are interested but want more detail, or if you want to make any suggestions as to the content we cover, please email me at sfrances@svsu.edu. I will be finalizing the syllabus in a few weeks.

*ENGL 390 is a special topics class, so technically this is a new topic and not a new class. But it is the first time that this topic has ever been offered.