Introducing the Creative Library Project

Welcome to the Creative Library Project (liberate the library!), a collaboration between the Students' Union Liberation Officers and the University Library at the University of Sheffield. Through this project, which ran between October 2023 and June 2024 we co-produced, co-delivered and co-evaluated a series of library based creative workshops, developing the Library's Digital Commons through a lens of library liberation. Our workshops involved a range of digital creative methods, incorporating collage, poetry, digital stitch-craft, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, life and creative writing, music and zine making.  The workshops aligned with the liberation priorities of our students, organised within Black History Month, Disability History Month,  Reclaim the Night events and LGBT+ History Month. Our study  reflected on the potential of  information creation as a process and we adopted a pedagogy of joyful hope with an ambition to make the library an inclusive site of transformative learning. Based at the University of Sheffield, UK, we received funding from Research England, via the University's Participatory Research Network, IATUL, the International Association of University Libraries and the AHRC-RLUK Professional Practice Fellowship Scheme. Vicky Grant, Head of Library Student Education, was appointed as an AHRC-RLUK Fellow to lead this work. The project will be sustained through a Library Liberation Festival (Lib Fest) organised for 2024-2025 and beyond.  You can see our outputs, including the zine, animation, articles and a creative writing toolkit (OER) here.

library@sheffield.ac.uk