Poets & Writers Theater

In this CBS Sunday Morning video, correspondent Conor Knighton reports on how public libraries across the country are renovating and evolving beyond acting as repositories for books and becoming innovative community centers that meet the many needs of their patrons.

In this CBS Sunday Morning video, Reginald Dwayne Betts speaks about founding Freedom Reads, a nonprofit organization that designs, builds, and places mobile libraries in prison housing units. For more, read “Freedom Reads” in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It’s all about providing access, not only to education, not only to learning, but also to a free public space where people can actually come together and engage,” says copresident Andreas Dracopoulos of the newly renovated and transformed Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, a branch of the New York Public Library in Midtown Manhattan that reopened in June.

The New York Public Library's newly renovated reading room now includes a book train, an adorable and technologically impressive book delivery system with cars running over a total of 950 feet of horizontal and vertical track, which provides an efficient and enjoyable experience for staffers and visitors.

The Lacuna, the center of the Bay Area Book Festival, is an outdoor interactive library made out of fifty thousand free books donated by the Internet Archive and constructed by the FLUX Foundation.

After undergoing more than two years of renovation at the New York Public Library’s main branch, this time-lapse video captures over fifty thousand books reshelved in two minutes. The reopening of the historic Rose Main Reading Room and the Bill Blass Public Catalog Room was celebrated in October 2016.