Impact on Cultural and Civic Engagement

Community-centered author programs

In 2022, the Library hosted 32 author programs offered in a variety of formats, including in-person events for the first time in two years.
About 2,000 people attended author events in real time. Author programs recorded and uploaded on the Library’s YouTube channel earned another 7,600 views.
About 90% of author programs featured speakers who were BIPOC or from other traditionally marginalized communities.
People who filled out surveys about the Library’s author programs rated them an average of 9.6/10; within this group, 33% identified as BIPOC or mixed race; 57% identified as female; and 3% identified as non-binary.
The Library prioritized hosting authors with disabilities, including celebrations for the release of Alice Wong’s “Year of the Tiger” and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s “The Future is Disabled.”
Continued our Guest Curator series, which invites BIPOC authors, artists and performers to create their own series of programs for our patrons. Poet Shin Yu Pai curated a series featuring BIPOC thinkers and authors whose work sits at the intersection of the personal and sociopolitical, including poet Pamela Sneed, chef Sean Sherman, and poet and former professional cagefighter Jenny Liou.
The Central Library hosted a Young Women Empowered (Y-WE) summer day camp, a weeklong series of workshops and activities with 35 young people.

“The House of Broken Angels”: A bilingual Seattle Reads

Started in 1998, Seattle Reads is a citywide book group that encourages people to read and discuss the same book, deepening their engagement in literature.
The Seattle Reads selection for 2022 was “The House of Broken Angels,” by Luis Alberto Urrea, with copies of the book available in Spanish as well as English.
Local Latinx arts group La Sala helped select this year’s title and acted as the Library’s community liaisons throughout the program. All of the materials were bilingual as well.
More than 9,000 people participated in Seattle Reads by reading the book and/or attending a Seattle Reads program.
The Library distributed 1,300 copies of “The House of Broken Angels” throughout the community with the help of our community partners La Sala, Seattle Escribe, and El Centro de la Raza.
“The House of Broken Angels” was the Library’s most checked-out digital novel in 2022.
About 375 people attended the three Seattle Reads programs with the author, including an event in Spanish. It was the first time since 2019 that Seattle Reads events were in person.

Making popular titles accessible

Added 110,000+ copies to the digital collection in 2022, 12.5% more than we added in 2021. Over 151,000 patrons downloaded more than 4.7 million digital books (e-books and e-audiobooks), an 8% increase.
Added 203,000+ physical items using funds from all sources, including 13,000+ copies of Peak Picks titles.
Over 113,000 people checked out at least one physical item in 2022, a 34% increase compared to 2021. As patrons returned to our libraries, our physical circulation continues to rebound.
Peak Picks celebrated its fifth anniversary. Since the collection launched in May 2017, over 86,000 Library patrons have checked out more than 800,000 Peak Picks titles.
Created approximately 1,800 Your Next 5 librarian-created reading plans for people who requested them.
Completed diversity audits of our collection and added more than 800 titles that increase representation by BIPOC and LGBTQ+ and other authors, along with titles promoting greater understanding of other issues.

Access to cultural and natural treasures

Doubled the number of institutions participating in the Museum Pass program, with 12 partners participating by the end of 2022. Received more than 16,000 Museum Pass reservation requests in 2022.
In April 2022, we reinstalled the 21-foot-tall historic Soul Pole artwork outside the Douglass-Truth Branch after successful conservation work, holding a small ceremony to celebrate the reinstallation and honor the organizations and people involved in the creation of the Soul Pole.
Added 1,100+ items to our digital local history and culture collections with additions to our Black Culture and History Collection, Seattle Historical Photograph Collection, Northwest Photograph Collection and COVID-19 Community Collection.

Creating knowledge with our communities

Each year, our public engagement program looks at race and social justice issues in partnership with communities most affected by them, creating and celebrating community-produced knowledge and centering BIPOC leadership.
Public Engagement programs reached an audience of 275 community members at events and almost 2,700 community members through social media promotion in 2022.
Co-created a virtual program with “Unspoken Truths” historian Delbert Richardson in May 2022 on the theme of “Resistance/Resilience/Remembrance/Liberation.”
Helped organize and curate the seventh annual Legendary Children, an annual celebration of queer and trans Black, Indigenous and people of color communities, which returned as an in-person event at the Olympic Sculpture Park in Sept. 2022 after a three-year hiatus.
Six hundred people attended the live Legendary Children event; and thousands engaged with a series of Instagram posts before and after Legendary Children.