Conversation: everyone's talking about it

Yesterday we held what's thought to be the the first practical experience of 'living library' in the UK. The idea of Living Library is that you can get direct access to experience or knowledge by borrowing a person, for a conversation about some aspect of their lives, personality or role.

It was a tentative start - a gathering of interested folk at CILIP (formerly the Library Association) with a presentation by Martin Field from New South Wales about how the scheme has been run at Lismore Library: followed by an experimental practical session in which participants volunteered to be 'books' or 'borrowed' someone. So we had nine or ten books, from the recently bereaved, the new grandparent, a person of faith, a vegetarian, a refugee, a gardener, living in a village in Nigeria, and so on.

There was unanimous satisfaction with the exercise and a lot of discussion about how it fits into efforts to contribute to community cohesion and contemporary calls for a more conversational democracy. There seems no reason why living library could not be run in places other than a public library (although I think being in the public realm will help to make it work); and it could be organised around a specific theme (such as a child health issue or wartime reminiscences) as well as being general. In a way it reminds me of telephone conferences, being a simple but effective communication device for achieving certain ends, celebrated by those who've tried it but curiously not widely adopted.