Flint, Michigan

The City of Flint, Michigan, is the birthplace of General Motors and has long ridden the fortunes of the automobile industry. With a population of 140,761, composed almost equally of whites and African Americans-with smaller percentages of Native Americans, Asians, and Latinos-the city has the tenth highest average wage of any U.S. metropolitan area. At the same time, 45 percent of the children in Flint live below poverty level-and the city faces the difficult problems of suburban sprawl, declining school enrollment, and a diminishing tax base.

Flint also has many assets: several institutions of higher education; popular annual art and jazz festivals; and a nationally acclaimed cultural center that includes a planetarium, an art institute, a museum, an institute of music, a radio station, and a community meeting hall. Along with these the city boasts another acclaimed cultural institution-the Flint Public Library.

The Flint Public Library (FPL), according to director Gloria Coles, "continues to uphold, as it has for the last 144 years, the fundamental principles that make public libraries public libraries. It is open and nonjudgmental to those who enter its doors. It provides a full spectrum of recorded knowledge and opinions. It is free."

In keeping with these principles, the FPL has a strong legacy of collaboration with community groups. At a time when GM was laying off thousands of workers, the library offered specialized services to those who needed information on changing careers and obtaining further education. Working with Region 1-C of the United Automobile Workers of America, the FPL initiated a live reading series that highlighted minority writers of prose and poetry. A project with the Genesee Valley Area Agency on Aging provided computer training for senior citizens who needed these skills for employment. And the FPL has worked with schools and social service agencies to bring young people the fulfillment and pleasure of reading. Each year a cadre of storytellers representing the FPL reaches out to thousands of children.

This history of collaboration with the community led naturally to the FPL's central role in the Flint Community Networking Initiative.

What does a public library focus bring to the Flint Community Networking Initiative?

Emphasis on training

Librarians are professionals trained to identify, organize, and provide access to information, which makes them perfect "navigators" for communities trying to make sense and use of a global network of information. "The premise of the planners of the Community Networking Initiative," says one report, "is that training librarians to become both skilled cyberspace navigators and digital resource publishers is a prerequisite for the development of a successful web-based community network."

Emphasis on community skill-building

A major goal of the initiative is to equip community leaders with the skills to "employ the strategies of virtual community to build and sustain our real community." To this end, Flint librarians work with other information providers to build their understanding of civic networking and the World Wide Web and to help them create home pages and publish information on the web.

Integration of digital with other kinds of resources

When future patrons come to the Flint Public Library to log onto the web, they will be able to access print, video, audio, and face-to-face communications that complement what they find online. For example, a patron might read a book or magazine article about Native American crafts and then consult the home page of the Greater Flint Arts Council to find out about Native American cultural events throughout Michigan. A notice about a breast cancer screening posted by the Health Department could be augmented by general information on breast cancer from the library's health collection.

The Flint Community Networking Initiative (FCNI) evolved from a single Internet training project for 30 librarians into a large, collaborative project with a fully equipped computer and Internet training facility. The FPL and the Mideastern Michigan Library Cooperative obtained an initial grant in 1994 from the University of Michigan Community Stabilization and Revitalization (CSR) Project, a federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grantee. Through a contract with the University of Michigan School of Information and Library Studies (SILS), 30 Flint-Genesee-area librarians received general Internet training. Twenty of these continued training in the spring to become expert navigators and publishers on the World Wide Web. The report (www.sils.umich.edu/FlintCSR/report/report.html) on the CSR Internet Training initiative is available for those planning similar efforts.

Faculty at SILS, whose project to reinvent library education is supported by a substantial grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, were impressed with the Flint Library's commitment to public access to technology and its history of community involvement. As a result, Professor Joan C. Durrance, in conjunction with Flint Public Library Director Gloria Coles and Mideastern Michigan Library Cooperative Director Sara Behrman, developed the Flint Public Library as the first living laboratory for CRISTAL-ED (Coalition on Reinventing Information Science, Technology, and Library Education). This provided the Flint Community Networking Initiative with additional grant money and in-kind support.

Nuts and bolts

The Flint Public Library's Internet Training and Community Networking Center provides World Wide Web access through a joint Merit/Ameritech dedicated ISDN line. The center consists of 18 Power Macs on Ethernet, nine with Windows compatibility, and a workgroup server running the Apple Internet Server Solution. The center has multimedia creation tools and an extensive documentation library. The center's equipment and connectivity enable Flint librarians to add value to the World Wide Web.

With these two sources firmly in place, others were quick to follow. Apple Computer gave a prestigious Apple Library of Tomorrow equipment donation, and the Mideastern Michigan Library Cooperative obtained a Library Services and Construction Act (LSCA) grant for an Internet training center. Parallel to the development of FCNI, the FPL also received funding from the Library of Michigan's LSCA Technology Grant Program to upgrade internal networks and establish a wide area network linking all computer and CD-ROM stations in the Flint system. This takes Internet access beyond the training lab and integrates it into everyday use by staff and the public.

In February 1995 the Flint Public Library hired Sheryl Cormicle Knox as project director and lead trainer, just weeks before the library's Community Networking and Internet Training Center officially opened. Several rounds of training for librarians have been offered, as well as curricula aimed at the staff of community agencies and the general public. In addition, FPL's WebStation is a growing resource built by the librarians themselves.

In its tradition of involvement, the Flint Public Library will cooperate with diverse community groups and agencies in the Flint-Genesee area to introduce leaders to civic networking, develop an understanding of the World Wide Web, and establish a initial presence on the web. The partners in the initiative are also working with the Greater Flint Education Consortium and the Genesee Freenet. By mid-1996 staff and volunteers at the library were imparting Internet and web skills to the public.

By providing access to networked information in the library, the project brings together the wealth of local information physically stored in print form with the relevant retrieval tools found on the network. The community focus will include recycling information, government information, sources of funding for small businesses, college scholarships, health information, and much more. The FCNI's web page currently points to the web pages of the Genesee County Health Department, the Community Capital Development Corporation, the Greater Flint Arts Council, the Salem Housing Task Force Corporation, the Community Foundation of Greater Flint, and the Flint Neighborhood Coalition, with more pages to come.

What made it happen

The Flint Public Library's history of connectedness to its community and prior collaboration with schools, organizations, and agencies meant it was already a central institution in the town and a logical hub for a community information network.

The library's partnership with the University of Michigan School of Information and Library Studies is a model collaboration between an academic institution and a public library. SILS faculty and staff had the vision and expertise to serve as advisors to the project, to plan and conduct the Internet training, and to help with technical matters like connecting the ISDN line. Students in a community information class at SILS designed the network's first graphics and home pages. The university, by way of its grant from the Kellogg Foundation, was also a funding source. The library, in turn, has become a valuable laboratory for SILS research on librarianship and community information.

Federal seed funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, by way of the CSR Project, was a critical "jump-start" that leveraged private money. Now that the project is running, the partners have committed themselves to sustaining the initiative on their own and plan to pay a greater portion of the operating costs each year.

Private funding also helped fuel the project-both the Kellogg Foundation's grant to SILS for the creation of new library science curricula and Apple's in-kind donation of equipment.

The Library of Michigan has funded six other Internet Training Centers throughout the region, and all regularly share materials, resources, and experience. In addition, because of extra dollars attracted to the project through collaboration, the Mideastern Michigan Library Cooperative has established two more Internet training "mini-hubs" in its three-county service area. All sites are now being used to train a core of librarians. Soon they will be used by librarians and local leaders to create community-specific information resources.

Last updated: 3 June, 1997 mrl
http://www.benton.org/Library/Libraries/flint.html