About Us

 

Our Mission & Approach

CIRCL is a coordinated network developing participatory research, policy recommendations, and culturally-responsive advocacy strategies to amplify rural libraries and promote sustainable rural librarianship. 

By uplifting rural libraries through community-driven collaborations, CIRCL functions as a catalyst for identifying systemic barriers to rural library engagement and as a forum to pilot fair alternative educational pathways to librarianship. 

CIRCL cultivates caring, coordinated, and collaborative partnerships by centering varied perspectives and imaginative insights to advance rural libraries and elevate community well-being through information access. 

In our unwavering commitment to and multi-scaled approach to enacting positive change through centering rural library perspectives, we aim to:

  1. Facilitate mutual aid
  2. Increase the agency of community libraries
  3. Conduct and share rigorous research
  4. Activate the potential inherent in rural communities
  5. Create caring & culturally responsive systems
  6. Remove barriers that negatively impact rural libraries
  7. Reflecting to and responding to the professional development needs of rural libraries
  8. Amplifying the visibility and value of rural libraries

Through these core functions, we aspire to be a coordinated and collaborative hub, demonstrating that when compassion, imagination, connection, and innovation come together, shit gets done.

What We Do

Scan

Work with network members to find opportunities and challenges in the rural community and library ecosystem.

Prioritize

With network input identify high impact areas of examination, experimentation, and understanding.

Understand

With compassionate rigour, CIRCL assembles working groups to take on vital subjects and challenges in a participatory fashion

Implement

Staffed CIRCL working groups develop tools, policies, and professional development to take on high impact challenges.

Advocate

The CIRCL network advicates for tested solutions to improve rual communities through librarianship working through local library staff and key stakeholders.