The following articles address the idea of libraries as a safe space from different perspectives, from guides on how to make the library a safe space to articles addressing the question of whether the library should even be considered a safe space.
This article focuses on LGBT+ patrons and their struggles in libraries and the US in general. It gives a good overview of how to address these issues to create a safe space for LGBT+ patrons in the library.
This article addresses providing safe spaces in school libraries for LGBTQ youth, whether through welcoming environments, item selection, or other methods. It also addresses bullying in schools and how to address this issue in the school libraries.
This article draws on qualitative interview data from students and library managers to explore how students use the school library, and how this relates to the library as a safe space. It finds that school libraries can be highly valued for their capacity to foster belonging and sanctuary and allow exposure to books and opportunities for reading.
This article debates the question of whether public libraries should be safe spaces and compares this idea with the idea of libraries being places known for free-thinking public forums, where all ideas are welcome.
The author of this chapter will explain how libraries define safe space through policies, procedures, and professional codes of ethics. The chapter will generate a history of libraries as safe spaces, explain how libraries attempt to create safe spaces in physical and online environments, and show how library practices help and harm patrons needing safe spaces.
This article discusses how Kindness an e Initiative at the Dr. Micheal Conti School in Jersey City, New Jersey, where the author is the school librarian and literacy support teacher, promotes a climate where students feel accepted.
This piece focuses on creating a safe space for several subsets of the elementary school student population, including Muslim students, children with autism spectrum disorder, and students with social-emotional challenges. These groups do overlap and intersect, and they are united in their reliance on the library as a refuge. However, school librarians know that any child might seek out the library at any time, depending on their situational needs and the day. Thus, the final subset is the nucleus of even-keeled, neurotypical children who still express the need for a school library's sheltering space.
Academic libraries and their students and faculty have different definitions of safe space. The attempts of both parties to construct a safe space for digital scholarship in the library can clash based on these divergent perspectives. While the number of academic libraries providing some form of digital scholarship support is increasing, the library definition of safe space and the working culture of the library can potentially render libraries unsafe spaces for innovation and digital scholarship. The author of this paper will address the challenges that academic libraries face in creating safe spaces for digital scholarship. Significant challenges include working and leadership styles differences among librarians and the library’s assumption that academic libraries automatically function as safe spaces.
The author of this chapter will explain how libraries define safe space through policies, procedures, and professional codes of ethics. The chapter will generate a history of the concept of libraries as safe spaces, will explain how libraries attempt to create safe spaces in physical and online environments and will show how library practices both help and harm patrons in need of safe space.
This article explains that the most beautiful aspect of public libraries is that they are public spaces, open to everyone in our society. Everyone is welcome. In the public space, just as there are wonderfully diverse people, there is also a small element of dysfunctional people that can be frightening and confronting. If someone had told me in 1989, upon starting my first library role, that, after more than twenty years in public libraries, I would deal with newspaper fisticuffs, serial poopers, overdue fine rage, punches being thrown at me, public threats, heroin overdoses, sperm deposits, roller-skating arsonists, and bully standover tactics - I would have laughed at them and said, "But it is a library! We are a quiet, civilized, public workspace!" My list does not even include the many different stories colleagues have shared with me about their confrontations.
This author Regarding public libraries, immigrant Hispanics pose both a challenge and an opportunity to the library community. On the one hand, this group, which makes up half of the adult U.S. Hispanic population, is less likely than other Americans to have ever visited a U.S. public library and is much less likely to say that they see it as “very easy” to do so. At the same time, Hispanic immigrants who have made their way to a public library stand out as the most appreciative of what libraries have to offer, from free books to research resources to the fact that libraries tend to offer a quiet, safe space. And they are more likely than other groups to say that closing their community library would have a significant impact on their family.