Art and Design Commons^™

To Lend Is To Love: The Benefits Of A Lending Library On Campus, Lucia Boulos

Honors Projects

This project centers around the construction of a lending library for Bowling Green State University’s campus. It seeks to answer questions concerning the frequency of reading both academically and leisurely, the preference of printed texts over electronic texts, the financial toll of textbooks and other materials, and how to make resources more accessible for students and community members. The concept behind a lending library is to “take a book and leave a book.” Participants can choose to do both or one of those options. The final structure is installed by the Community Garden behind the Fine Arts building. The project …

Design Hub: Activating Community By Design, Ed Williams

Theses and Dissertations

MOTIVATION

At the turn of the century, Robert Putnam (2000, 27) wrote “...a powerful tide bore Americans into ever deeper engagement in the life of their communities, but a few decades ago that tide reversed and we were overtaken by a treacherous rip current.” Putnam is describing a loss of “social capital” throughout American society. Research suggests that many of our contemporary issues are the result of a decline in “social capital,” or “community.”

This pervasive lack of community is thought to be detrimental to “educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health …