Human Library: Understanding Experience Sharing for Community Knowledge Building

The human library is an event intended to engage members of the community in sharing and learning from each other's experiences, and is growing in popularity internationally. Human libraries fall within the larger scope of community knowledge sharing but have received little study and remain largely unsupported by technology. In this study, we examine how community libraries organize and host these events. We present how libraries have attempted to utilize technologies and leverage community support to enable human library events. Our findings reveal inconsistencies in the purpose of human library events, as well as technology applications that are not sufficient to support fully collaborative community knowledge building. We highlight opportunities for increased community participation and technological innovation and also suggest a broader consideration of computer-supported collaborative work in the context of human libraries and experience sharing.