Today’s post comes from Penn Press’s Senior Editor Bob Lockhart, who recently attended the opening of the new library at a local public school here in Philadelphia. Read on to learn more and find out how Penn Press—specifically, one of our newest publications—played a small but critical part in this occasion.
On a weekday afternoon in early November, folks gathered at Horace Howard Furness High School in South Philadelphia to open a library. Furness High School was one of the hundreds of public schools in the Philadelphia school system without one. The library was the brainchild first and foremost of Furness students, with assistance from Penn Libraries and school staff, and the result was years in the making. As of its opening, the library contains 2,867 books, and students are continuing to select books to be added to the collection in the many languages they speak.
Penn Press played a small role by donating eight copies of our new, three-volume set of books drawn from the online Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia: The Greater Philadelphia Region, Greater Philadelphia and the Nation, and Greater Philadelphia and the World. One set will stay in the library, and the others will go directly into classrooms. I attended the official opening as the Press’s representative. What I witnessed was an inspiring example of students and teachers improving their school, and by extension, their intellectual lives.
Sets have also been donated to the Free Library of Philadelphia as well as the city’s public library system, and the Press is collaborating with Teachers Institute of Philadelphia on a series of workshops offered by TIP to Philadelphia public school teachers and drawing on the contents of the books.
The full story of the library’s creation can be found here: https://www.library.upenn.edu/news/furness-high-school-library
(Header photo by Brian Hogan, Strategic Communications, Penn Libraries)
