An Inspiration Lab computer station
Although the VPL has dozens of branches all over the city, my favorite location is the central library in downtown Vancouver. You might have noticed that I have an affinity for libraries having visited the Peabody Library, the Grimm Zentrum, and the Library of Congress on several occasions
The central library isn’t the largest one in the world, but it does have some of the most varied collections I’ve seen in a library. The second floor houses literature in French, German, and other world languages and its digital library also has a sizeable collection. My favorite thing about the central library is the Inspiration Lab, it shows that libraries of the 21st century don’t just exist for people to read existing literature, but is also a space to remove the traditional gatekeepers of the publishing industry and allow everyone the opportunity to create content.
Here, you can find recording studios for video and voice, high-end computers with video- and photo-editing suites, as well as digitization stations. Users can start their own YouTube channel from scratch here with their professional cameras and recording equipment, studios even come complete with green screens and sound absorbing walls. This is the future, the democratization of content creation as well as lowering the barriers of entry to be seen by others. Those with old VHS tapes from their aunt like me can use the digitization stations to convert tapes into DVDs or mpg files onto a USB stick.
If you are a resident of the City of Vancouver all of these facilities can be used for free with a valid library card. Visitors and guests from nearby cities who have reciprocal agreements with Vancouver can also obtain their library card for a nominal fee. My aunt told me to go as soon as I could because she wasn’t sure how long those machines would be around for.
VCR did kill the radio star, but DVDs killed the VCR.
