Geelong Regional Libraries

Geelong Regional Library Corporation is one of the largest regional libraries in Australia. Continuing to provide high quality library services while supporting expansion in designated growth areas during a period of fiscal restraint is a strategic challenge.
The GRLC Strategy 2021-2025: Connecting and Thriving acknowledges and responds to the cataclysmic changes of 2020 and 2021. It celebrates and seeks new ways to support reading, learning, thinking, creativity, work, community cohesiveness and care for Country.

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Big Sky Libraries

Big Sky Libraries (BSL) is a regional library service comprising three north-western NSW shires: Moree Plains, Walgett and Brewarrina.
In early 2020, after years of severe drought, there was intense flooding in northern NSW. This affected the first phase of the BSL community consultation process. Soon after, there was the Covid-19 pandemic.
Nevertheless, the BSL Strategy encompasses the inherent constraints, challenges and possibilities evident in the research, and uses repeated metaphors, associations and feelings as a scaffold for objectives and actions.
For example, the four focal areas are drawn from recurrent metaphors and inferences that emerged from the community research: heart, brain, memory and capillaries.

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Wagga Wagga City Library Review 2021

The Wagga Wagga City Library Review sought to position the library service for a future that would be radically different from the world in which it was originally conceived.
The Review’s findings and recommendations will help the library service reimagine and recalibrate its spaces, offerings and capabilities over the next 20 years.
By 2040, every one of Wagga Wagga’s citizens, businesses and visitors, across all demographics, should be able to find a reason to visit and use their library.

Photo credit: Jack of Hearts

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Wollondilly Library Strategy 2021

Wollondilly Shire is located in one of the fastest growing regions of New South Wales.
It covers a large geographical area and is predicted to grow by 50 per cent or more over the next two decades.
The Shire is entering a period of significant transition from a semi-rural to peri-urban identity. Changes to housing density, landscape, economic activity and civic life are already occurring. Transitions bring disruption and loss as well as new opportunities to innovate. Trusted civic places like libraries can play a critical role in supporting communities through change. The Wollondilly Library Strategic Plan 2020-2026 interweaves experimentation, innovation and community outreach in new ways. Extensive consultation has taken place; ideas have been tested and evaluated; the strategy development process has been participative and democratic.

You can read the Wollondilly Library Strategy here.

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Coffs Harbour City Council 2020

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Creative Library 2018

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Australia Council for the Arts: Future Leaders 2017/8/9

How ‘culture’ is framed, supported, experienced and deployed at a time of great social change and challenge has continued to engage the imagination of a diverse cohort of future arts leaders.

Building on Project Sisu’s successful 2017 and 2018 partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts, 25 arts practitioners from across Australia and Asia are navigating their own leadership aspirations against a backdrop of radical new creative possibilities in the 2019 Future Arts Leaders Program.
Drawing on the spectrum of creative expression represented in the program – dance, theatre, music, literature, and visual arts – we have crafted a learning field in which notions of cultural leadership are explored from many angles.
The 2019 program is fortunate to include arts practitioners from India, China, Vietnam and Philippines, alongside an immensely intelligent and talented Australian cohort of young arts leaders.

April – October 2019
Project Sisu: Annie Talve and Sally Gray

Creative Communities, State Library of Victoria and PLVN

Creative Communities: The cultural benefits of Victoria’s public libraries is a major piece of work of global significance to the international library community. It argues that the cultural benefits of public libraries can be perceived and analysed via six interdependent lenses: public places, cultural spaces, creative incubators, cultural connectors, multicultural mosaic, and the culture of the written and spoken word.

Project Sisu has developed a methodology for applying Creative Communities and the six lenses in practical ways. The Project Sisu team included Annie Talvé and Dr Sally Gray.

Download the Creative Communities report. [PDF]