The National Library of Latvia: Engaging people with media and information

Introduction

On the 23rd of August 1989, thousands of people from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined hands and formed a human chain stretching across the three states in a pro-independence demonstration from the Soviet Union. This event, dubbed the Baltic Way, became a symbol of Baltic solidarity and cemented itself in public memory (Eglitis and Ardava, 2012). In 2014 the National Library of Latvia (NLL) recalled this historical demonstration by organising a human chain to deliver almost 2000 books from its old buildings to the new one, thus celebrating the upcoming opening of its new premise. This event marks how the renewed library connects people with its collection and Latvian history.

The new building named the Castle of Light, located in the centre of the nation’s capital Riga (Figure 1), not only centralised the library’s collection but offered a space to respond to new challenges and opportunities brought by media and emerging technologies. In the recent decades public libraries transformed into platforms and playgrounds for engaging and producing media content (Nijboer and Hammelburg, 2010), introducing media labs and makerspaces to reflect communities’ needs, foster creation, and socialisation, and promote digital literacy skills (Nicholson, 2019). Similarly, the renewed NLL within the Castle of Light became a space for education, recreation, and performance, prioritising the expansion and improvement of its digital services (Baklāne, 2014).

The Castle of Light has been in operation for almost a decade. Building upon the existing publications that discussed the NLL during these years (Baklāne, 2014; Vilks, 2019), this work aims to reflect on how the National Library of Latvia engages people with media and information. The focus of this article is on the permanent exhibition Book in Latvia located on the ground floor of the library’s building. Using an autoethnographic account as well as the library’s website, this paper discusses the NLL’s approach to promoting media literacy skills present at the exhibition. Thus, this article also contributes to the scholarship that evaluates how Latvian public libraries connect local communities with media and promote media literacy skills (Balina, 2014; Spurava et al., 2021; Kine and Davidsone, 2022). Before proceeding to the account and its discussion, this paper will explore the connection between media literacy and public libraries.

Media literacy by public libraries

Media literacy is “the knowledge, skills and competencies that are required in order to use and interpret media” (Buckingham, 2003, p. 36). Media literacy promotes critical engagement with various forms of media and stimulates reflexive analysis and evaluation of the produced and interpreted meanings. Being media literate means being critical during the exposure to information (Potter, 1998). Media literacy is grounded in teaching and learning about media using critical thinking skills and critical analysis of information (Mihailidis and Diggs, 2010). Naturally, libraries with their educational role and access to various digital media tools have a great potential for becoming community hubs for media literacy education (Spurava et al., 2021).

During the past two decades public libraries across the world have been embracing digital technologies, shifting from information consumption to information production, and capitalising on the new media to engage people in educational activities (Tripp, 2011; Rhinesmith and Stanton, 2018). At the same time, the global political climate, notably Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and the rise of ‘fake news’, prompted public libraries to develop media literacy initiatives (LaPierre and Kitzie, 2019). Moreover, librarians themselves started to notice the media literacy needs of their communities, recognising their responsibility for delivering media literacy education to the public (Park et al., 2023).

These developments resulted in the introduction of what Mihailidis and Diggs (2010) call the XXI-century libraries that operate as a home for media literacy education, providing access, cultivating investigation, promoting critical thinking, and empowering creativity and self-expression. The XXI-century libraries can include Dutch libraries that introduced activities intending to promote awareness about the dangers and opportunities of media production and consumption (Nijboer and Hammelburg, 2010). Or American public libraries that began to conduct displays, participatory workshops, lectures, and discussion groups, while also creating and distributing printed hand-outs (LaPierre and Kitzie, 2019). Another example comes from Irish libraries that launched public information campaigns, as well as produced an interactive exhibition that touched upon such relevant topics as deep fakes (Kerrigan et al., 2023).

Modern public libraries are expected to embrace and take a more active role in informing and educating their patrons, providing various resources, and directly facilitating learning (Nicholson, 2019). By doing so, the libraries move beyond simply providing media access toward offering guidance rooted in media literacy practices. Such guidance is usually delivered by librarians, who, in order to raise critical consumers of media, need to become lifelong learners, connecting people, spaces, and media in an engaging and transformative way (Hobbs et al., 2019). Considering the ever-evolving state of media, as well as different patterns of media production and consumption by different categories of people, librarians need to revisit their training and be open to new ideas and collaborations.

One way of doing so is to engage patrons in library activities. Cilauro (2015) argues that librarians can learn about media from and with young patrons, describing how organising Minecraft Gaming Day introduced and demystified virtual worlds to the librarians while engaging the youth as active builders of the library community. Such was done by Tampere City Library, located in Finland, which designed its own internet-based game for children to play with librarians, which supported awareness between a story and a fact (Hakari, 2013). Nicholson (2017) suggests further stepping into youth’s media interests, such as comics, gaming, and anime, supporting informal learning and the development of new skills that are relevant for the youth.

The librarians are key figures in promoting media literacy education, however, there are cases in which they express difficulties in keeping up with the ever-shifting dynamics of contemporary media, especially when there is no formal continuing professional development (Kerrigan et al., 2023). This is especially evident in the Latvian case, where the lack of time and low level of technological competence result in unprepared librarians, who do not have a clear understanding of their role in supervising patrons’ digital activities (Spurava et al., 2021). Kine and Davidsone (2022) also highlight the lack of media literacy methodological materials and pedagogical training available for Latvian librarians.

Overall, during the past decades media literacy education firmly entered public libraries, which began to offer different initiatives for their patrons with the aim to support critical thinking skills and assist them in their daily media consumption and production activities. Despite that, in some cases, librarians, who are key facilitators of media literacy education in public libraries, are left without the adequate theoretical and practical support required for promoting media literacy. To overcome this, the existing research suggests librarians collaborate with their patrons, learning about new media and its effects, while promoting critical thinking skills.

Reflecting on the National Library of Latvia

The existing research presents a variety of initiatives that public libraries employ to promote media literacy skills. The NLL also offers courses in media literacy for library specialists (Vilks, 2019), since it is an accredited institution for continuing vocational education and training, included in the Register of Educational Institutions of Latvia’s Ministry of Education and Science (National Library of Latvia, 2019). Moreover, the library’s goals in supporting critical thinking skills about media production and consumption are present across its offerings, including its permanent exhibition Book in Latvia, and the activities based around it.

The Book in Latvia is a free-of-charge permanent exhibition located on the ground floor of the Castle of Light. The library’s website states that the exhibition 1) shows books that are printed in Latvia and/or are in Lettish and 2) discusses their impact on the nation’s culture and identity. While this summary is concise, it does not reveal how the exhibition engages its visitors with media and information. To answer that question, this study employs an autoethnographic account of the author’s visit to the library on 26 July 2022. Autoethnography is about personal experiences that describe everyday moments that cannot be captured by more traditional research methods (Adams et al., 2017). It presents a researcher’s own experiences to describe and reflect upon cultural practices while being mindful of their positionality (Adams et al, 2015). Simply put, autoethnography is “qualitative, self-focused, and context-conscious” (Ngunjiri, 2010, p. 2).

My visit to the NLL and especially the Book in Latvia exhibition had a lasting impact and showcased a way both traditional and new digital media can be combined with embodied experience to support media literacy skills within a public library. As a media educator, I research, organise, and conduct activities that promote media literacy skills, and the visit to the NLL offered me something new and thought-provoking. Autoethnography provides a method to critically reflect on my visit to the exhibition, and the impact it had, while connecting it to the field of media literacy education. The following part presents the autoethnographic account.

Visiting the Book in Latvia exhibition

I entered the Castle of Light on the morning of 26 July 2022. The building caught my attention from the moment I arrived in Riga. It’s large, imposing, and modern, and it stands out amid its surroundings. The architecture itself was a strong enough reason for me to visit the place. The building was designed by Latvian-born architect Gunnar Birkerts, and its look resembles a glass mountain that is featured in Glass Horse (Zelta Zirgs), a classic work by renowned Latvian poet Rainis (Vilks, 2013).

The actual entrance to the library is in the middle of the ground floor, opposite it are the exhibition spaces. It is common for libraries to have exhibitions, especially when it comes to academic libraries (Swanick et al., 2015; Jones-Edman et al., 2019). I was curious to see what they offered, and, instead of exploring the library’s collection, I entered the first exhibition hall – the Book in Latvia.

From the start, I was surprised by how museum-like the space looked. Coming from Finland, local libraries provide spaces for exhibitions that feature their collections or various art objects. In my experience, library exhibitions in Finland are less elaborate with artefacts hanging on walls, or presented under glass, often together with accompanied texts. In some cases, such as with Helsinki Central Library Oodi, there are no dedicated exhibition spaces, and the exhibits are located amid the bookshelves. Another example is the city library in my hometown Tampere that recently mounted an interactive cave installation made from book pages and paper standing in the middle of the collection hall.

The Book in Latvia looks different, it resembles a modern museum in the way the space is organised, and the artefacts are presented. The information is provided in two languages: Latvian and English. The space is open but divided into four sections each in its unique style. The first section is dedicated to the history of books in Latvia and presents the library’s collection in a way one could have seen in other public libraries (e.g., Ng-He, 2022). There are various old books on display with accompanying texts providing insight into their significance for Latvian history and culture. Some of the texts offer information about printing, bookbinding, handwriting, and other relevant techniques. This section offered me much information about Latvia and its place in European and world history, even though, at some point, it was hard to concentrate on reading the texts, since some of them were lengthy and placed well below the eye-level of an adult.

It feels that the exhibition curators predicted possible tiredness from reading texts, and thus introduced interactive activities in the second section titled Senses. This section consists of a Y-shaped wooden table where visitors can explore books with their five senses. Using our bodies we can explore how books smell, taste, sound, and feel, as well as reflect on our reading practice. This type of sense interaction is familiar to me from visiting botanical gardens, however, it was the first time to experience a book like this.

Apart from engaging the visitor with interactive exhibits, the section provoked me to think and consider how I consume content. For example, there are two screens in the shape of human eyes (Figure 2), the first shows reading movement of a child’s eye edited with the eye tracking recording, the second shows the same but for an adult’s eye. This surreal display of two eyes moving completely different from each other illustrates how our eyes behave while reading, what is called the saccadic eye movements – a process of deliberate transfer from one fixed point in the text to the next. This exhibit prompts introspectiveness: how do my eyes behave while reading, how do I read? Moreover, it invites considering a different perspective, not only of children and adults, but also of the one who reads and the one who observes reading.

Other exhibits deconstruct books into different materials used to make it, as well as raise awareness of challenges in reading with visual impairments. Overall, through Senses I established a deeper connection with books. While the previous section has books unattainable under thick glass, this section supports an embodied experience of the media.

The next section is titled Power. It is illuminated with red and thus easily stands out within the darkly lit exhibition space. While the colour red represents the danger that often comes with power, it was hard not to connect this choice with Latvia’s recent history, when the country was occupied by the Reds or the Soviets from 1940 till its independence in 1991. The section’s exhibits also make connections to Latvian history, discussing how the Soviets (as well as the Nazis who temporarily occupied the state during the Second World War) viewed and used books as media. Not surprisingly, this section also introduces books as tools of political manipulation and propaganda. The section overall uses a video game and other audio-visual media together with more conventional exhibits (a painting, manuscripts) to introduce censorship and ask who is in charge of publishing books. It also discusses how one can come under influence of a powerful text, be it religious or a political book, and what this can lead to.

Something that caught my eye was a text about the 18th-century Potato Propaganda, a time when European nobility used books to introduce people to potatoes, their appearance, and growing methods to reduce famine risks. Propaganda usually contains negative connotations, since as Soules (2022) shows, the research has often linked it with military conflicts and authoritative regimes, however in general “propaganda aims to win the compliance of its mass audience and mobilise it to act, or not act, in the propagandist’s interests” (Soules, 2022, p. 6). In hindsight, the Potato Propaganda had a positive effect and now potatoes are a staple in different European cuisines. Nevertheless, it is necessary to acknowledge who initiated this propaganda and for what reasons, and the text provides such information. Overall, this section highlights how media, specifically books, can be used as tools for propaganda, and it prompts us to always reflect upon the broadcasted messages as well as who creates them and for what reason.

The final section is called Spirit, which is a brightly illuminated small room. Inside there is an interactive stand that resembles a large book. Each book spread has a piece from a famous novel, for example, The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle or One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (Figure 3). Each time a person opens a spread, the surrounding white walls of the room illuminate with animated visuals connected to the story, complemented by fitting sound effects. This section once again calls to our senses, presenting an audio-visual accompaniment to a selected piece, allowing us to get immersed in a book.

This was a thought-provoking experience. It takes popular novels and utilises digital media to stimulate our imagination when reading while immersing us in a created world. The existing research has been advocating for immersive interfaces in education (Dede, 2009; Bronack, 2011), while media education scholars have been discussing immersive implications of virtual reality with the aims of fostering engagement, empathy, and compassion (Jones et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2022). Although not a virtual reality, Spirit presents an immersive experience that engages audiences with books on a sensual, audio-visual level. The borders of a book, usually feasible to us (book cover or a tablet), disappear with the aid of digital media and spatial design. As a media educator, I saw the potential of such an immersive room in connection with other forms of media, for example, one can similarly look inside a smartphone, or experience a news story beyond the text.

Overall, after exiting the exhibition it seemed that I not only learned about Latvian history and culture but also developed a deeper understanding and connection with books as media. This connection allowed me to be introspective about my relationship with books, as well as to reflect on the societal impact of literary works.

At the intersection of history, culture, and media

The Book in Latvia exhibition gives more than a historical insight into the role of books, it deconstructs them, and provides opportunities for embodied engagement with them while provoking critical reflection on the power of literary works at global and individual levels. The exhibition extends further with workshops and tours based on it. For example, the library organises the ‘Virtakas klases’ that offer face-to-face classes and workshops for schoolchildren of all ages, as well as adults. Activities for primary school students include a lesson on book illustrations that discusses illustration techniques and different functions of illustrations through ages; or a joint activity with the Latvian Railway History Museum in which students visit the nearby museum and, drawing inspiration from it, design and letterpress print travel postcards.

These activities showcase how the NLL participates in the trends in public library innovation, outlined by Kirstie Nicholson (2019). The library provides spaces for making and creativity, offers opportunities for informal learning, and extends its outreach via partnerships. Hence, the NLL is not just a public library, it is also an education facility and a content producer that cooperates with outside institutions to take advantage of different demographics, networks, and resources to offer new opportunities for its patrons (Nicholson, 2019).

At the same time, the Book of Latvia illustrates how the library supports critical engagement with media and information. The exhibition space unites traditional displays with interactive activities, audio-visual media, and an immersive room to inform, inspire reflection, and establish a deeper embodied connection with the media. The exhibition asks important questions: How do you interact with books? What roles do they play? How do books represent our cultures? Who publishes books and why? These are the questions that facilitate the development of critical thinking skills about media production and consumption, these are the questions that facilitate media literacy education.

The Book in Latvia is one of many exhibitions located within the NLL. For example, in the summer of 2022, in addition to a sculpture exhibition and a children’s posters display, there were two historical exhibitions: the B for Baroque, dedicated to the cultural heritage of the Baroque period, and the Awakening. The Story of the Herrnhutians, dedicated to a religious group that influenced Latvian culture. According to the NLL’s website as of September 2023, there are currently 12 temporary exhibitions at the library’s building, as well 11 online exhibitions. This variety reflects that exhibitions are an essential part of the NLL’s work (Vilks, 2009), and often these exhibitions exist at the intersection of Latvian history, culture, and the library’s collection, such as the case with the Book in Latvia.

The research has been promoting collaborations between libraries and museums (e.g., Waibel and Erway, 2009), however, the NLL is transforming itself into a library-museum that offers a variety of permanent, temporary, and digital exhibitions free of charge. The NLL’s approach to engaging people with media and information is rooted in trends in public library innovation (participation, making and creating, learning, partnership) and media literacy education (development of critical thinking skills about media production and consumption). What makes this approach stand out is the additional mirroring of museums’ services: interactive and thought-provoking exhibitions that use art, digital media, library’s collection and present it in an engaging and accessible way.

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