The HRC thanks Anne Farrow for serving as guest author for the following entry.  Anne is the senior content editor for the Encyclopedia of Connecticut History Online, a project of the Connecticut Humanities Council. Formerly a career journalist, Anne co-authored Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery. Marcia Trotta, co-editor for Museums, Libraries and Urban Vitality, is a reading specialist with the Connecticut Humanities Council.

When Hartford's leaders pinned - very briefly - their revitalization hopes on a professional sports franchise more than a decade ago, they should have had this lively essay collection to read. As Museums, Libraries and Urban Vitality powerfully demonstrates with examples from big cities and small towns, on big budgets and shoestrings, the keys to community engagement and civic involvement are found in America's libraries and museums.

Editors Roger L. Kemp and Marcia Trotta illuminate in more than 40 essays combed from an array of national journals that the best search engines are still people, and that human culture in and of itself, is still a source of community renewal and change.

For museums and libraries of every size, there is information - and helpful suggestions - in this collection. All of the book's essays date from before the national economic collapse of the last 18 months, so the various solutions institutions found for revitalizing themselves seem doubly useful in today's lean landscape.

In "San Jose Creates Joint City and University Library," Lorraine Oback describes the creation of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library in San Jose, an example of how two big institutions who both needed new libraries and had limited financial resources worked together to build a single, magnificent facility.

The city of San Jose and San Jose State University formed a team, a plan and a collaborative model for library design that serves the learning needs of the community and the college. The two libraries had different cultures, Oback writes, "so determining how to merge their operations was challenging," but the model they built could be recreated throughout the country, and has saved the taxpayers millions.

As other essays in the collection document, museums and libraries can serve as anchors for residential use, as the focus of downtown renewal, and as cultural attractions that add to the luster of a city or neighborhood. Once a library or museum becomes, in a consistent and deliberate way, a place for people and a place for community interaction, it revitalizes everything around it.

In addition to the essays, this useful paperback also contains appendices of cultural milestones in U.S. history, municipal and state library and museum directories, and a thorough glossary of library and museum terms and acronyms.

Among the "take-aways" that appear and reappear in revitalization projects from throughout the country are:

• The "Lone Ranger" approach never works. To effect change, build teams from inside and outside the institution;
• To better serve the community, include the community in all your planning;
• Have a dream, but be practical. Where will people park? Jump on a bus? Get something to eat? Gather and talk? Be comfortable?
• Libraries and museums may once have been ivory towers, but the national model has changed, and community engagement and usership is now essential.

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