The Cambridge Public Library Foundation hosts special events that focus on pressing issues that face public libraries in this time of dynamic change. If you would like to learn more about Foundation events and receive our periodic mailings, please click here.
THANK YOU to everyone who joined us (virtually!) on October 20, 2020 for the fifth installment of our Dream Big series, Big Data, Big Problems: Looking to the Past to Understand the Present. While we wish we could have gathered our community at the Main Library as in years past, Dream Big 2020 nonetheless featured an illuminating and timely conversation Harvard Professor Jill Lepore and Executive Director of the American Library Association Tracie D. Hall.
Jill and Tracie discussed Jill’s new book, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, and explored how the early work of a little-known company in the 1960s was a precursor to today’s world of Big Data surveillance and advertising psych-ops. We invite you to click image to your left to stream DREAM BIG 2020 in its entirety. |
The fourth installment in our Dream Big series, Dream Big: Protecting Democracy by Defending the Vote, took place on October 29, 2019. It was an honor to host this illuminating and timely discussion on voter suppression and its impact on democracy. Dream Big 2019 featured guest speaks Carol Anderson, the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University and author of One Person, No Vote; Lawrence Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School and author of They Don’t Represent Us (forthcoming in 2019); and moderator Rachael V. Cobb, Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science & Legal Studies at Suffolk University.
On October 23, 2018, we held our third Dream Big event, Dream Big: Justice for All - A Conversation About Educational Justice in Prisons. Our guest speakers were the Honorable Leslie E. Harris, Associate Justice, Dorchester Juvenile Court, Suffolk County (retired); Elizabeth Hinton, author, historian, Associate Professor, Department of History & Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University; and Michelle Kuo, author of Reading with Patrick, Assistant Professor in the History, Law and Society Program, American University of Paris. Kim McLarin, Associate Professor, Emerson College, author and regular guest on WGBH-TV's Basic Black, moderated the panel discussion and guided the community discussion that followed.
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On April 23, 2018, we welcomed architect and visionary William Rawn to speak about his work at Inspired Library Design: The Patient Search For Common Ground. Rawn is the founding principal of William Rawn Associates, Architects, Inc., the firm that designed the Main Library (2009), the new Valente Branch (2019), and other major projects in Cambridge, Boston, and beyond. After a presentation by Rawn, Maria McCauley, Director of Libraries, and Janet Axelrod, Chairperson of the Library Trustees, led a discussion to dive deeper into his work.
In October, 2017, we held our second Dream Big event, Democracy Matters. Our guest speaker was Timothy Snyder, Levin Professor of History, Yale University and Author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Callie Crossley, Host/Executive Editor of WGBH Radio’s “Under the Radar with Callie Crossley Show,” led the community discussion following Professor Snyder’s remarks.
We held the first Cambridge Public Library Foundation event, DREAM BIG: The Future of Public Libraries, in October 2016. The Cambridge Public Library’s auditorium was the site of a lively, overflowing crowd that engaged in a discussion with Library Director Maria McCauley and panelists Nicholas Negroponte, John Palfrey, Jeffrey Schnapp and Sarah Goldman.
You can find a complete listing of Cambridge Public Library events on their website: click here for the Library events page.
Past Events header photo © Tim Plenk