Community Brainstorming at the library

ZANESVILLE, Ohio – The Muskingum County Library System reached out to the community for ideas on how to grow further.

February 22, 2018 almost 50 people from Muskingum County showed up to the Community Brainstorming event, where representatives of H.B.M. Architects from Cleveland and Muskingum County Library System opened a discussion on how to better impact the community.

“We’re thinking big, we’re  looking at the vision of what our libraries can be, and you know we want to serve our communities in the best way that we can,” Marketing and Community Relations Director Sean Fennell said. “In order to do that we need to hear from our community members and that’s really what this is about. This is just the very beginning process of this, so we’re really just collecting information.”

During the event H.B.M. Architects and library faculty showed pictures of various libraries and asked the attendees to write down what they would like to incorporate into Muskingum Counties’ library system.

Fennell shared they also provided a Facebook Live video to all who couldn’t make the event.

“We had close to 300 views and almost 150 comments that were shared,” Fennell said. “Then I would actually write them down on the [post-it notes] and put them up on the appropriate area as well. So people who are online joining us on our Facebook live event had a voice and their comments will be represented in the findings for the architects as well.”

Following the meeting the architects collected the post-it notes to organize.

“They’re really going to come up with common themes, ideas, and get them into more digestible form opposed to just thousands upon thousands of bright colorful [post-it notes],” Fennell said. “Right now the next step is for us to see the outcome of all of this input, so that we can start to make sense of what direction our community wants us to go in.”

Fennell assured that this event was just the beginning to expanding for the communities needs.

“If they want to see big changes to the library then that’s something we’ll have to move forward with, but at this point that’s not necessarily what we’re looking at,” Fennell said. “We’re really just trying to get an assessment of all of our locations, the services we currently provide, making sure that we can enhance those services, and create an atmosphere that’s welcoming to everyone.”

The Muskingum County Library System will continue holding Community Brainstorming events in the future.