“It’s a model for how we should treat other people vs an artifact of the past.”
-Andrew Constatino
CBS Sunday ran a great piece recently on the reimagination of libraries as destinations of thought, creativity and community and how these once stodgy old buildings that were being made obsolete have become welcoming centers of new thought and community engagement well beyond their walls.
I found the piece very relevant to what’s going on in the sports business world in the next week, as two centers of history and thoughts, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, and the Pro Football Hall of Fame, out on their annual induction events this weekend and next. It also ties well to the visit we had this past week to the new US Olympic and Paralympic Hall of fame and Museum in Colorado Springs, another “building” whose usefulness through technology, engagement and community is leaning forward not back.
The ties that bind the library stories with the Halls of Fame extend both into the past and the traditional and the vision for the future. This past week the Baseball Hall, under the guidance of our colleague Josh Rawitch, launched a platform with Candy Digital to move along with an NFT program, and other projects, from education to popular culture to outreach to diverse communities, continue to expand interest to both a traditional and a non traditional generation. The Football Hall has advanced its programs for members into areas like healthcare and innovation and entrepreneurship, making sure that these icons of the past are not just trotted out once a year to an adoring public and then sent away for another 51 years.
In the end, Halls of Fame, like libraries are much more about the storytelling (more and more through multimedia) of the people and places than just the pieces of bats or balls or helmets that people come to a building to see. With each story there is emotion, thought, history, adversity and sometimes a bit of controversy, all complex pieces that make us who we are.
While it is great to see the library revival…I have a special place for libraries, which provided me a safe haven when I was very young and gave me a mental break when I was walking the streets of New York between jobs with long cold hours to fill…and have an even more special place for the sports “libraries,” the Halls of Fame, which can use all of their tools of the trades to link generations and teach the past to a generation of the future on whatever device possible.
Congrats inductees and the leaders of Halls and the civic leaders of libraries, your leaning forward is welcomed and needed as bridges to the past and the future, especially in a time when memory, and sometimes community, can be a fleeting thing.
