1. Susan Goodwin Associate Director Arts Connect

2. Collaboration between ASCEL WM and Blast Theory

3. Librarians as Creative Producers
Librarians as enlightened commissioners, capable and confident of offering inspiring briefs for artists in the future.

4. ASCEL agreed to:
Explore and agree a focus for a shared creative enquiry project
Together with artists, explore potential art forms and creative approaches to raise the profile of their work with young people
Develop the framework for an Arts Council England Grants for the Arts application

5. Librarians would like to explore how the arts can:
Celebrate contemporary reading and creative writing – celebrating and amplifying ‘library-ness’
Persuade people into the library, especially people with low literacy and those hard to reach groups, who don’t normally come and to help them return as regular users
Get people actively involved and feeling part of the library community – feeling a connection and wanting to come back

6. Bureau of Silly Ideas

7. Mark Storor

8. Blast Theory

9. What happened next
Librarians found the combination of the 3 artists’ approaches inspiring
All 3 artists invited to return to explore how their ideas might work across several libraries / areas
Decided to develop the 3 projects in sequence, with APFOJ as the first

10. Susan Goodwin Associate Director Arts Connect susan.goodwin@wlv.ac.uk