Culture
How Libraries Can Help Map the History of Rural America
With a grant from the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge, Historypin will help libraries weave together the history of rural American communities.
Public libraries aren’t what they used to be—and for the most part, that’s a good thing. Over time, they’ve evolved into many different shapes and sizes. Their roles have also changed in order to stay relevant to the communities they serve.
“Libraries are really gathering places,” says Jon Voss, the strategic partnerships director of Historypin. The global nonprofit is one of 14 winners of the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge on Libraries. “In popular thought or literature, we think of them as storehouses for materials, but that's really changed in the past 20 years at least.”