GLOBAL LIBRARY PROJECT

This project seeks to document the important role of public libraries throughout the world in engaging and supporting an informed citizenry. By providing unrestricted access to information, offering literacy and educational support, and advocating for free and uncensored speech, the shared commons of a public library is one of the last non-commercial public spaces we have in our increasingly privatized global society. Of particular interest to the project is how social, cultural, historic and political issues have shaped a librarys role in the community. This project grew out of Robert Dawsons 18-year The Public Library: An American Commonsa photographic project published as The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Princeton Architectural Press in 2014. Dawsons earlier work focused on the shared commons of the landscape and environment of the American West, and on global water issues. He then applied this concept of a shared responsibility to a documentation of the American public library system.

In 2016 Dawson began The Global Library Projectwith his wife Ellen Manchester, co-director and curator and their son Walker Dawson, videographer andresearcher. They traveled to Belgium, Holland, France, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Ukraine and Moscow. Their journey took themfrom a library in the infamous refugee camp called the Jungle in Calais, France to Holocaust-haunted former synagogues turned into libraries in Poland to libraries close to the hot war in eastern Ukraine to the National Library of Russia called the Lenin Library. Special attention was given to the role of European libraries in assimilating the large numbers of refugees fleeing poverty and war. Two years later, Dawson was awarded a 2018 - 2019 Fulbright Global Scholar Fellowship. It allowed Dawson and Manchester to photograph for six months the role of libraries throughout Greece, Italy and Israel. In the summer of 2019 Dawson and Manchester photographed libraries in Mexico and throughout Canada. A book proposal oftheir work from North America and Europe,calledLibrary Road Trip: The Global Library Project, has been developed and is currently being marketed to publishers.Work from the project will be presented in a series of traveling exhibitions, videos, public programs, lectures, blogs as well as book publications.

In the future the project will explore the role of libraries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Oceana, South and Central America.

"Who knows where the emerging new commons will take us? But Robert Dawson shows us in this collection what is at stake: when a library is open, no matter its size or shape, democracy is open, too."
- Bill Moyers

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Click here to view the Global Library Project album.