The City As Classroom vs. The City As Advertising Platform

On May 2nd, 2016 I had the pleasure of speaking to York University Libraries as part of their Library Futures Series. This is what I said.

The title of my talk today is The City as Classroom vs. The City as Advertising Platform. Despite what the title suggests, I will be talking about libraries and a possible future that libraries could pursue in the present.

More precisely, my talk is about in situ discovery — or, in other words, it’s about discovering information that is enabled by being in a particular place. For most of our history, librarianship has been concerned with enabling information access, discovery and use inside of the library building. Today I would like us to consider how we might support information discovery outside of our buildings and out of our sight.

I’ve divided this talk into three parts:

• The City as Playground
• The City as Billboard
• The City as Library

The ideas that I’m discussing today largely come from the work that I started during my sabbatical in 2014. The City As Classroom is the title of Marshall McLuhan’s last co-authored book. When I submitted the title of this talk a couple of weeks ago, I did so when I still thought I was going to lend some of McLuhan’s ideas to this topic but as I started writing I uncovered a particular connection that I thought might prove useful to explore with you today.