You’ll find the full background and the context to A Latitude of Libraries in The First Post, 11 January 2011. Here’s the abbreviated version.
In November 2010, New Zealand’s most populous region became a ‘supercity’, uniting seven discrete territories. As a result the public libraries of the whole Auckland isthmus are becoming one big public library system — the biggest, they say, in the Southern Hemisphere — with 55 bricks-and-mortar libraries, plus mobile libraries and the digital library.
In the Latitude of Libraries blog project, I plan to visit approximately one library a week over the next year.
Auckland is at latitude 36° 51', and that’s part of what this project’s name refers to. But latitude is also about what the Oxford Dictionary of English calls ‘scope for freedom of action or thought’. A latitude of libraries seems an appropriate collective noun — like flocks of sheep, gaggles of geese, etc. And a blog of that name gives the blogger permission to meander. I hope you’ll join me.
