As the Board, staff, Friends and patrons of South Shore Public Libraries have started exploring the organization's mission statement and core values, the ideas of 'public', 'community' and open access to information keep coming up. These mean a lot of different things to different people but all are near and dear to a public library's heart.

A related idea is notion of evaluation of information and what that means in the information age. For the last ten or eleven years, public libraries have spent a lot of time trying to ensure people have some sense of how to read information on the internet -- who wrote it, where did it come from, how current is it, etc. It seems now that we're living in a society of information overload, this seems to extend to all kinds of information -- in the media, through the internet, in books or even in conversations. Where do people find their information? Is it the whole story? What's the context and background to the content? Did someone pay to have some parts of a story more widely published than others? What's the whole story? These are some of the things open access, and freedom of information mean.

Late last year, the Chief Librarian invited a few staff members to brainstorm with her on some of the issues in a library context. Questions they asked themselves were around actions that could be taken to solidify a direction on how the library might increase its role in the community while incorporating the idea of freedom of information and public space. An evening of public consultation was held on January 3^rd at the Lunenburg Library Read more>>

Thus in January 2008, the newly nicknamed 'Ideas Project' was born. This was the working umbrella term for the initiative, which incorporates many facets -- all based on the principle that two important roles of the library are to provide people with the means for free intellectual development and to provide a place where community members can come together in this pursuit.

Some of the elements of this project include:

• deliberate planning to increase instruction classes on advanced internet searching and evaluation of information
• creating a place for community story-telling, discussion, information-sharing, ideas
• sharing, starting with four-part discussion series pilot in Lunenburg from February to May 2008
• continued consultation with Board, community members, staff and other interested groups to evaluate any proposed project