On November 10th-11th 2022, the LibrarIN project consortium held its kick-off meeting in Athens, Greece, hosted by Athens Technology Center.
New approaches to make European public libraries sustainable
LibrarIN is a research project, funded by Horizon Europe call Research and innovation on cultural heritage and CCIs, that provides new avenues for participatory management and sustainable finance for European libraries as key cultural institutions. It will examine ways that libraries can develop new functions, services, and engagement with the individuals, organizations, and communities they serve. This requires social innovation based on public value co-creation and a demand-driven design of library services.
LibrarIN consists of:
- An integrated conceptual framework to understand the process of value co-creation in public libraries service delivery, complemented with an evaluation of different approaches to knowledge transformation in public libraries, both in terms of their processes and their impact
- New metrics for public libraries transformation and new empirical case studies on existent and ongoing efforts to develop innovative public services in ways that enable the co-creation of value, including a novel European survey on innovation in public libraries
- Policy and managerial recommendations, and policy and managerial tools, to implement new ideas and scale up best-practice experiences that effectively use value-co-creation to unlock social assets. The policy tools also include indicators for monitoring and evaluating existing initiatives to support public libraries’ service transformation
LibrarIN has a particular focus on three co-creation areas: digital transformation, living labs, and social entrepreneurship and public-private-third sector innovation networks.
The 10 consortium members include Athens Technology Center which is coordinating the project and its communication activities, the Lisbon Council for Economic Competitiveness, the University of Lille, Konstanz University, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, LIBER, The University of Alcala, Roskilde University, the University of Maastricht and the Austrian Institute of Technology.
