The Human Library

Once upon a time when I was in library school, I had to do a blog for a class on Digital Collections I was taking. It's still up over at wordpress, and at some point I might move it over here, but it's not really one of my favorite works. 

Anyways, our teacher had assigned this project to previous classes and some students stuck with it. She gave us links to them as examples. While I was reading one of them I came across this http://humanlibrary.org/ which still seems like such a neat idea. 

Basically the idea is to help break down prejudices by letting people get to know and ask questions of someone in a group they know little about. Volunteers are recruited as the "books" and people can come to events as "readers" to check them out. 

One of the reasons I love libraries and decided that's where I wanted to work is that they are (or at any rate should be) supportive of people learning anything they want. This to me includes learning about other people in an open environment.