As everyone knows, libraries are no longer just about books. They provide community services, cultural activities, and new uses for their facilities that are limited only by the imagination. This mind-set is in full swing at the African-American Research Library and Cultural Center (AARLCC) in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.—so much so that patrons are not the only ones coming away enriched and impressed after a visit there.

The AARLCC, an unusual combination of research library, cultural center, archive, and traditional public library all in one building, has attracted the attention of other librarians, library directors, and even museum directors interested in emulating aspects of its model. Indeed, thanks to a grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library is hosting a conference in Fall 2014 to study the future of African-American library collections in general and the AARLCC model in particular.

Inside, the first floor of the AARLCC’s two-story, 60,000-sq.-ft. space has an art gallery that features permanent and traveling exhibits; a 300-seat auditorium, with three stage rooms and a monitor-equipped green room in the back; two 75-seat seminar rooms, each with a ballet bar; a small conference room; and a gift shop. A 30-sq.-ft. circular Harambee room, where patrons can go to reflect, has an echo chamber and features panels showcasing the history of black Fort Lauderdale.

The second level contains the library space, which encompasses the public library plus the special collections, which is the research library of non-circulating reference materials. Here, the holdings—housed in a climate-controlled area—include rare books, artifacts, artwork, and manuscripts. Total holdings for both the circulating and special collection number roughly 85,000 books.

Public Libraries

According to executive director Elaina Norlin, AARLCC—which opened in 2002 and which she has helmed since 2009—gets about 250,000 visitors per year. Part of the award-winning Broward County Library System, AARLCC’s public library space comprises an adult and children’s section, which offer traditional services, such as access to computers, contemporary books, and story time. Books are acquired from Brodart via the central collection-management department downtown.

Although books are acquired through the central system, AARLCC is closely attuned to the tastes and needs of the patrons. “Outside of borrowing mysteries and contemporary and urban fiction, adults use the library mostly for practical reasons—anything relating to a career,” notes Norlin, adding that she’s also noticed that “our patrons are interested in nails and hair—the natural hair movement is slowly coming down here, so books on natural hair, especially for children, are flying off the desk.”

Because the local population is largely unemployed or underemployed, Norlin says, there is a high demand for GRE and GED study manuals, résumé-writing books, books on starting and funding a business, and practical databases: newspapers, the Foundation Center, Business Insight, and Ancestry.com, to which the library subscribes and provides free access. The county system has a relationship with Nova Southeastern University, allowing AARLCC to use Nova’s databases for free, and “customers use it too for their practical needs.” New acquisitions are listed weekly on both The Broward County library system’s Facebook page and its website (which is powered through Wowbrary), on which cardholders can also access digital magazines through the Zinio portal.

Norlin—who was once called a “bionic librarian” by Library Journal—is well known for her commitment to outreach, literacy, diversity, and thinking outside the box; over the course of her career she has delivered, both nationally and internationally, over 40 workshops, training sessions, and presentations on marketing, web-usability design, facilitation, strategic influence and conflict management to a variety of institutions. She is also the coauthor of the book Usability Testing for Library Websites. No surprise, then, that she and her team, using grants and strategic partnerships, have cleverly contrived non-traditional and creative ways to supplement the county budget so that the center can provide audience-building programs and services that are both relevant and exciting for the patrons—and utilize as many of the AARLCC spaces as possible.

Grant-writing is also key. Norlin said that working families were having problems visiting the library in the evening. So she went out and got a grant from the Florida Humanities Council to support an after-work program that provided a free dinner to families and taught them to read to their kids. The program was so popular, Norlin said, “that the families were in tears because of how helpful it was.”

Additional funding comes from the 85-member Friends of the Library (FOL), which raises money for programs such as summer reading. Other popular programs funded through FOL efforts include the annual joint Conference on Children’s Literature and Ashley Bryan Art Series (a day of learning for teachers, librarians, parents, and others who encourage children to read); and new this year, the ticketed Destination Fridays program (“similar to First Friday events that are held throughout the country but destination focused”) for attendees to learn about the locations, score travel bargains, and even win tickets. “Every library in Broward County has a FOL,” Norlin explains. “A lot of things we couldn’t do without the Friends.”

To cover larger-scale projects such as hosting the South Florida Book Festival, which is now in its third year, there is an AARLCC endowment fund. The Festival, which will take place on July 26 and 27, brings in national authors, including Earl “The Pearl” Monroe (Earl the Pearl: My Story) and Christian fiction writers S. James Guitard (Mocha Love), ReShonda Tate Billingsley (Rumor Central), and Victoria Christopher Murray (Destiny’s Divas) among others.

The Special Collections & Cultural Centers

When the Special Collections first opened, items were purchased, because there was a larger budget. That has changed, Norlin points out. “What we are stressing now is local history, and we have the community bring in South Florida historical materials that we want to preserve. The archive that everyone loves is the Esther Rolle Collection. She was Bahamian, and her family is from Pompano. Her sister brought her collection to us, and we have her Emmy and her NAACP Image awards.”

The museum-like space of the cultural center is a popular showpiece of the community. The state-of-the-art facility has enabled the Center to mount over 38 major exhibits and offer 184 cultural programs to over 895,000 attendees in the twelve years since its opening.“I get calls from public libraries and museums all the time saying ‘we want to model something off of you.’ The Tampa Public Library has been to visit us two or three times. We are also part of the Florida African American Heritage Preservation Network, and their museums came to see how they can incorporate a library in their museum space,” Norlin said.

A History of Its Own and the Future

AARLCC is one of three U.S. public institutions dedicated to African-American and African diasporic research collections that were modeled on The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. (The others are The Auburn Avenue Research Library on African-American Culture and History of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System in Atlanta; and the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library of the Denver Public Library in Denver, Col.) Last year, a visit to AARLCC from Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg, was the occasion of a brainstorming session that grew into something grander.

“I’m a newcomer to the library world,” Muhammad told PW, “so I’ve taken an outsider’s view, asking how critical are these cultural institutions like Elaina’s and mine. And it wasn’t clear that our relevance was appreciated by the younger generation. We have to ask ourselves: will we be funded to do transformative work or underfunded and ignored?”

Norlin and Muhammad had a conversation about that very issue, and out of that came the idea to hold a national conference, inviting the “brightest minds to discuss the future of special collections on African-Americans and Africana. Elaina was absolutely crucial to doing high level planning.”

To that end, the Schomburg wrote a grant proposal and subsequently received a $95,000 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for “The Future of Black Collections Conference.” The conference will be held at the Schomburg from October 30–31, with fifteen or so invited speakers representing leading archivists, librarians, museum curators, and humanities faculty from public and academic libraries—every institution with African-American and African diasporic collections. The goal of the conference will be to provoke needed dialogue as well as to introduce solutions to mitigate the unique challenges that African-American and African diasporic research collections face.

“Elaina represents a generation apart from the older leadership, which comes from the baby boomer generation, [rather than our] generation, Generation X,” notes Muhammad. “Not that [the older generation] hasn’t shepherded our institutions to their audiences, but now there are younger users and a broader demographic, with diverse nationalities, so we have different challenges facing us than our predecessors, to whom we are deeply indebted.”