LIBER is pleased to announce our participation in the Horizon Europe project, LibrarIN. The three-year project, launched on November 1st 2022, receives funding in the Horizon Europe call Research and innovation on cultural heritage and CCIs.
LibrarIN is a research project that provides new avenues for participatory management and sustainable finance for European libraries as key cultural institutions. It will examine ways that libraries can develop new functions, services and engagement with the individuals, organisations and communities they serve. This requires social innovation based on public value co-creation and a demand-driven design of library services.
The 10 consortium members include Athens Technology Center S.A. (Project Coordinator), the Lisbon Council for Economic Competitiveness, the University of Lille, Konstanz University, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, LIBER, The University of Alcala, Roskilde University, the University of Maastricht and the Austrian Institute of Technology.
Anna Triantafillou, LibrarIN Project coordinator from Athens Technology Center shared her thoughts on the newly launched project:
“Value co-creation is often defined as the involvement of citizens in the initiation and/or design of public services. However, we need to link co-creation to the value generated at the end of the production process too. Besides, value co-creation through co-production in public services encompasses new practices, such as innovative forms of cooperation with stakeholders, organization policy instruments – methods, processes and regulations that are developed and adopted by public sector organizations (including areas where private and third sector organizations, or social entrepreneurs, provide a public service) in order to meet social demands and to resolve societal challenges in a better way than existing practices. Changing social needs, together with budgetary constraints, call for radically new and innovative public service models. The vision of LibrarIN is to discover, analyse and provide managerial and policy recommendations for transformative strategies that integrate the co-creation of value in public libraries through the introduction of a new paradigm of public service and social innovation”.
The first in-person meeting of the project took place on the 10th-11th November 2022. Project partners met in Athens to get acquainted, discuss and put into place action plans for the coming months. The project website will soon be launched with further information available.
For more details about LibrarIN and LIBER’s involvement, see our project page.