My Library, Luang Prabang

Studying Japanese, learning to type, to program, to record your own CD, to grow teak or talk about your culture....it's all happening @ my library.

The statistics tell some of the story, with an average of 150 students a day, a new book checkout level of 1,000+ books a month, and 25,000 computer hours logged last year. But the story is really about the users.

My Library isn't new, it's just a new name reflecting the sense of ownership the users feel. This library was started in 2003 as the Listening Library, when our emphasis was supporting English study. Since then it has become an ongoing experiment in what happens when you give motivated users the materials and encouragement they need to study anything.

There is a lot of permission and support to study, ask questions, explore possibilities, to try...to have a dream and go after it. There is the sense that learning can be fun, or fun can be a break between the harder times of study.

In a culture where "saving face" is of the greatest importance and to fail is unthinkable one of our most popular books is "Dare to Fail." It is rarely on the shelf for more than a day as they discover that the road to success is usually paved with failure, and that trying, then trying again is what brings results.

We continue to expand, filling every corner, including tables in the hall as the users and their interests grow.

We have a whole group of experts now, some are staff but most are just users learning in a way they never thought was possible.

Developing thinking skills has become an important activity at the library. In their rote educational system they are not encouraged to think, have no hands-on science activities  and never learn problem solving skills. Many skills that we take for granted, like building a simple puzzle, are actually learned at a very young age and are dependent on access to toys as well as help from those who already understand the strategies. It is at this library that most users, even those of University age, have their first and only opportunities to do experiments,explore magnifying glasses and microscopes and learn with puzzles, mazes and thinking games.