Fourth place may be a lousy position in a marathon, but looks to be a winning place for trainers, libraries, and all they serve.
Let’s recap the initial places, as defined by Ray Oldenburg in his influential book, The Great Good Place: our first place is our home; our second place is where we work, and our third place is the treasured community meeting place where we, our friends, and colleagues come and go.
In listening to the comments made by a student who loves libraries, a group of us participating in one of Maurice Coleman’s recent biweekly T is for Training podcasts realized that libraries are poised to help define, create, and nurture a new concept for a fourth place: a community gathering place for social learning—a place onsite and online where communities of learning are developed and nurtured.
It makes so much sense, and speaks so well of the present and future of libraries, that a couple of us (including Jill Hurst-Wahl) immediately described the idea on two separate blogs within a few days of each other. And it didn’t stop there: after all, we’re trainers—we’re supposed to know how to get an idea across when we’re excited about it.
We have continued to think of all that this sort of fourth place means and could mean to libraries and library users. It builds off the existing pattern of library as third place—a community meeting place that is at the heart of communities and community. It acknowledges the library as a center of learning at a time when those who do not engage in learning are quickly left behind. It combines the wonderful information and entertainment resources libraries continue to provide with the growing dedication all members of library staff have to helping others learn to utilize the resources available to them. And best of all, it gives libraries a chance to be at the head of the pack in meeting onsite and online community members’ needs for first-rate lifelong learning rather than making the mistake we made years ago in not taking the leadership role which Google, bookstores, and others took while we were asleep at the wheel.
The idea of fourth places as gathering places for social learning seems to appeal to everyone who hears the concept. A colleague who runs a learning center here in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, immediately expressed a great deal of enthusiasm for the concept and plans to write about it for the thousands of colleagues she has across the country. Which is both a tribute to the idea and a warning to those of us who hope that libraries will remain at the center of the concept. If we don’t grab and run with this concept which sprang out of a conversation among a small group of workplace learning and performance practitioners who happen to be affiliated with libraries across the country, we’ll only have ourselves to blame when the Google of social learning centers basks in the success of the vision we helped create.
Our choice here remains obvious: use it or lose it. I’m betting we can use it to help build community partnerships in ways we’re only starting to imagine.
) for the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. She also blogs at 
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