On April 9th our museum director Joe travelled to Bucharest to deliver the very first, slightly experimental, prototype, still-work-in-progress Banned Books Seminar! What is the difference between a seminar and a presentation? In the seminar the participants, all of them librarians from different libraries, are PART OF the discussion, and we are there to LISTEN. We co-created the event with help from Tallinn University as part of their ELU project, so we engineered it for them specifically, and thanks to our partners EduCab we put together a great group.

Turns out, that produces a great result! The discussion was fascinating, and you know it is working when the participants start taking over and rapidly talking amongst themselves. It was great to see the back-and-forth, the sharing of knowledge and personal experiences. Like Estonia, Romania is a country with a traumatic history of censorship, so it is therapeutic for librarians to discuss these things together. Normally they do not do that, so creating a specific place and time for the discussion is necessary.

Lots of discussion also about future potential events and the urgent need for them, so we look forward to being back soon 😉