All the outputs from the Designing for Communities with Communities project are now complete.
The Co-designing Public Library Spaces Toolkit has been published on the State Library of New South Wales website. It provides practical guidance and support for public libraries planning on including codesign in the design of their new spaces.
Our final paper, which assesses the overall utility and value of the codesign interventions in the two case studies, is published as an open access article:
Hider, P., Wakeling, S., Jamali, H. R., & Garner, J. (2025). Planning and using library codesign: Towards a toolkit for public libraries. Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association, in press. https://doi.org/10.1080/24750158.2025.2570760
Our third paper, which focused on codesigning public library spaces with children and young adults, has been accepted for Public Library Quarterly. The author accepted manuscript can be accessed at: https://researchoutput.csu.edu.au/ws/portalfiles/portal/617749199/Children_codesign_AAM.pdf
Our second paper, which gauged the effectiveness of the community workshops in our two case studies as codesign interventions, has been published as an open access article:
Wakeling, S., Garner, J., Hider, P., Godfrey, A., & Jamali, H.R. (2025). Evaluating the effectiveness of a public library codesign workshop process. Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association, in press. https://doi.org/10.1080/24750158.2025.2540229
The project’s first paper reported on the design of the community workshops for the first two case studies, and the other preliminary research that was carried out for them. It has also been published as an open access article:
Hider, P., Garner, J., Godfrey, A., Jamali, H. R., & Wakeling, S. (2024). Designing for Communities with Communities: A Public Library Codesign Project. Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association, 73(2), 148–176. https://doi.org/10.1080/24750158.2024.2332973
We have also published a background paper on the design characteristics of recently built public libraries in the Sydney area. It has likewise been published as an open access article:
Wakeling, S., Godfrey, A., Hider, P., Garner, J., & Jamali, H.R. (2025). An analysis of the design characteristics of new public library buildings. Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association, in press. https://doi.org/10.1080/24750158.2025.2485681
You can also read our article reporting the results of the pilot study that informed this project:
Wakeling, S., Shephard, M. T., Hider, P., Jamali, H. R., Coe, M., & Garner, J. (2022). Public library building and development: Understanding community consultation and the design process. Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association, 71(4), 308-327. https://doi.org/10.1080/24750158.2022.2115587
