Director of Libraries Message for January
Recently I’ve been learning about something I had not known of before, positive psychology, “a field studying the traits, experiences, and institutions enabling individuals and communities to thrive.” It came to my attention via a white paper collaboratively published in November by the Humanities and Human Flourishing Project within The University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center and The New York Public Library. Titled Libraries and Well-Being, a Case Study from The New York Public Library, it uses survey data and research to spotlight “the positive impact of public libraries on individual and collective flourishing.”
This report uses the 5 characteristics in positive psychology’s “PERMA” model, Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment, as a lens to indicate the impact libraries have on an individual’s and community’s well-being. You can read the report in the link above if you would like the details, but in short, the study finds three “stages” of flourishing supported by libraries:
- Libraries create a foundation for well-being, providing patrons with a “sense of stability, safety, refuge, and peace”.
- Libraries foster the core elements of well-being by generating comfort and joy, fostering connection, care and support, and finding meaning and purpose.
- Libraries promote personal development beyond well-being by supporting personal growth and expansion.
Admittedly if you are reading this, you likely already know your local libraries support your well-being without having to read a report about it. Yet as a library director I want to shout about this from the rooftops because this type of survey research is still rather rare. When telling our stories, we often have to fall back on transactional counts of items checked out, programs attended and hours open to reflect our community impact. Those numbers are important, but surveys that state results like “74% of respondents reported that their Library use positively affects how equipped they feel to cope with the world” are pure gold, because we know it to be true and it speaks to “why” libraries do what we do.
We would love to hear from you about how you think your Santa Cruz Public Library supports your well-being. In the meantime, I’m going to demonstrate one of the report’s findings, that libraries promote “engagement with the world through discovery, inspiration, and enrichment,” by pointing you to our “Staff Favorites of 2024” reading list. Compiled by staff from across our libraries, this list of excellent reads is sure to inspire, provoke and generally add to your personal “To Be Read” pile! The title I added this year is “Evenings and Weekends” by Oisin McKenna.
Happy New Year, and we look forward to seeing you in your local library many times over in 2025!
Christopher Platt
Director of Libraries
Mensaje del Director de Bibliotecas
News Archives >>
