The fourteen winners of the Knight News Challenge on Libraries awarded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation were announced on June 23, 2016. The projects aim to help shape the future of libraries, meeting twenty-first-century information needs as centers for digital learning, data sharing, community connection, and discovery.
The winning ideas highlight libraries as essential to addressing information challenges and creating new opportunities for communities to engage with ideas and each other. They position libraries as digital-age problem solvers, tackling issues from information literacy for children, to using technology tools to make library collections more accessible and open, to giving people the resources they need to tell deeper stories about their lives and communities. Five of the projects will receive investments of between $150,000 and $393,249 each, while nine will receive $35,000 each to test early stage ideas, for a total of $1.6 million.
Two organizations in the mid-Atlantic region were honored with awards, while another four were given funds to test and support their forward-thinking approaches to digital learning and discovery.
The winners were the Brooklyn Public Library and Foundation Center in New York. “TeleStory: Library-Based Visitation for Children of Incarcerated Parents,” led by Nicholas Higgins, Odette Larroche-Garcia, Nick Franklin and Story Bellows, was awarded $393,249 at the Brooklyn Public Library. The project aims to increase childhood literacy by offering video story time and visitation services for children of incarcerated parents in the trusted space of public libraries.
The Foundation Center’s project, “Visualizing Philanthropic Funding for Libraries,” was awarded $300,000 and is led by Amanda Dillon and Kate Tkacik. This project helps libraries find funding opportunities, increase understanding of funding sources, and track funding trends through a data-visualization tool and capacity-building training.
Other libraries were awarded $35,000 each to test their ideas. They include “Digging DEEP: A Digital Extension Education Portal for Community Growth” at Pennsylvania State University, “Free Library of Philadelphia Cultureshare” at the Free Library of Philadelphia, “Future-proofing Civic Data” at Temple University, and “The People’s Media Collection” at PhillyCAM.
For a complete list of all fourteen winners and further details of the projects, click here.
From: Knight Foundation