Lockwood, 69, helped launch a media lab last fall. She’s currently working on grants to establish a tool lending library and a business incubator. And she’s trying to find a place for makers to create and invent.
“I want to hand off to the next person a library in motion,” she said.
The library was already evolving rapidly when she arrived in 2009, having just completed a multimillion-dollar renovation and expansion. The library has continued to change as people are changing what they want and expect from libraries, she said.
“They started out as book warehouses,” she said.”Then they became community centers, where they had programs and things would go on. Now they’re turning into centers of creation in addition to consumption. So that people are coming in learning and creating.”
That’s what led her to create the media lab, where any cardholder can come use the tools to record a podcast, shoot and edit a video or write and perform music for an entire band.
The hoped-for tool lending library, business incubator and maker’s space would all continue down the path away from book shelves.
She insisted that the library will continue to buy books — “people will always care about holding a traditional paper book in their hands” — but the library will also work to meet the demand for e-books.
There are few simple solutions to that issue, though.
“The publishers are fighting for their lives,” she said. “There’s no ownership of digital works. It’s having ramifications for us that very few people understand.”
Before she moved to Maine in 2009, Lockwood was a big city librarian, having served for 10 years as the assistant library director for the Baltimore County Public Library in Maryland.
She had spent summers in Maine, but knew little about the state before she moved here and went to work in Auburn, she said.
“I’ve learned that it’s a real place,” she said. “It’s not just a beautiful boats-bobbing-in-the-bay kind of thing. Maine is unique in ways I didn’t realize. I’d only ever been to the coast. You do have this notion of quaintness and affluence and so on. It’s much more complex than I realized in every way.”
She plans to seek some quiet in her retirement to her home in Harpswell.
There, she hopes to enjoy the idyllic setting, but she’ll miss the Auburn library, she said.
“This is the best job I’ve ever had,” she said.
dhartill@sunjournal.com
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- Auburn Public Library Director Lynn Lockwood will be retiring. She is standing in the Grand Reading Room at the APL.
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- Auburn Public Library Director Lynn Lockwood.
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