LibGuides: The Urban Library: Home

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Welcome to the Urban Library

Here at the Urban, we're engineering your public library of the future as an environmentally-friendly, creative space with literacy for all. Create a vegetable patch in our community garden, sign up for eco-punk workshops, and bring your inventions to life in our tech-loaded Makerspace.

The future takes its shape in cities -- your future is just one library away.

Mission Statement

At the Urban Library, we work daily to provide the Anaheim community with impartial, accurate, and high-quality informational sources, to emphasize the benefits of diversity and equity through our hiring and services, to promote creativity and literacy, to encourage lifelong learning, and to make relevant resources accessible to everyone.

We believe that urban spaces come with a specific set of challenges, not unique or overlooked, but often unaddressed by the communities that occupy them. We believe that this is not due to a lack of desire, but a lack of healthy "third spaces" that foster communication, and a lack of resources available to tackle the problems of urban living. Our goal is to provide that third space, to facilitate that conversation, and to offer the resources to do just that.

We foster community through our Makerspace, which allows people to share ideas and make new creations.

We encourage lifelong learning through our extensive workshops calendar, which teach new skills.

We promote literacy through our easy-access Summer Reading Programs and Online Databases, which offer high-quality information and motivation.

We address the problems of urban living through our collections, which cover everything from capitalism to the environment.

Values Note: Our values are taken from the ALA's Core Values of Librarianship.	Diversity We value our nation's diversity and strive to reflect that diversity by providing a full spectrum of resources and services to the communities we serve.
Education and Lifelong Learning ALA promotes the creation, maintenance, and enhancement of a learning society, encouraging its members to work with educators, government officials, and organizations in coalitions to initiate and support comprehensive efforts to ensure that school, public, academic, and special libraries in every community cooperate to provide lifelong learning services to all.	Social Responsibility ALA recognizes its broad social responsibilities. The broad social responsibilities of the American Library Association are defined in terms of the contribution that librarianship can make in ameliorating or solving the critical problems of society; support for efforts to help inform and educate the people of the United States on these problems and to encourage them to examine the many views on and the facts regarding each problem; and the willingness of ALA to take a position on current critical issues with the relationship to libraries and library service set forth in the position statement.
Democracy A democracy presupposes an informed citizenry. The First Amendment mandates the right of all persons to free expression, and the corollary right to receive the constitutionally protected expression of others. The publicly supported library provides free and equal access to information for all people of the community the library serves.	Sustainability ALA is supporting the library community by showing its commitment to assisting in the development of sustainable libraries with the addition of sustainability as a core value of librarianship. This consists of practices that are environmentally sound, economically feasible and socially equitable. Libraries play an important and unique role in promoting community awareness about resilience, climate change and a sustainable future. They are also leading by example by taking steps to reduce their environmental footprint.

Values

Note: Our values are taken from the ALA's Core Values of Librarianship.

Diversity

We value our nation's diversity and strive to reflect that diversity by providing a full spectrum of resources and services to the communities we serve.

Education and Lifelong Learning

ALA promotes the creation, maintenance, and enhancement of a learning society, encouraging its members to work with educators, government officials, and organizations in coalitions to initiate and support comprehensive efforts to ensure that school, public, academic, and special libraries in every community cooperate to provide lifelong learning services to all.

Social Responsibility

ALA recognizes its broad social responsibilities. The broad social responsibilities of the American Library Association are defined in terms of the contribution that librarianship can make in ameliorating or solving the critical problems of society; support for efforts to help inform and educate the people of the United States on these problems and to encourage them to examine the many views on and the facts regarding each problem; and the willingness of ALA to take a position on current critical issues with the relationship to libraries and library service set forth in the position statement.

Democracy

A democracy presupposes an informed citizenry. The First Amendment mandates the right of all persons to free expression, and the corollary right to receive the constitutionally protected expression of others. The publicly supported library provides free and equal access to information for all people of the community the library serves.

Sustainability

ALA is supporting the library community by showing its commitment to assisting in the development of sustainable libraries with the addition of sustainability as a core value of librarianship. This consists of practices that are environmentally sound, economically feasible and socially equitable. Libraries play an important and unique role in promoting community awareness about resilience, climate change and a sustainable future. They are also leading by example by taking steps to reduce their environmental footprint.