What IS The Sustainable Gardening Library? Intro (Part 1 of 5)

Check it out https://sgi-gardenlibrary.maps.arcgis.com/home/index.html

People ask me that all of the time. I like to think of it as the go-to resource for sustainable gardening information. We include farming and landscaping practices, too. We’re putting everything in one place so people who want to grow flowers and food, or create outdoor living spaces in more Earth-friendly ways, don’t have to spend hours searching all over the web to find what they need.

But it isn’t what most people think of as a traditional library.

How the Sustainable Gardening Library is the same as a specialized public library:

  • It’s free.
  • Anyone can use it.
  • It’s organized by categories.
  • It’s a library devoted to a single specialty: Sustainable gardening and farming.
  • It hosts a variety of materials: Documents, spreadsheets, images, videos, and links to materials on our content providers’ websites. 

How the Sustainable Gardening Library is different from a public library:

  • It’s a digitally native library. We’re 100% online. There is no brick-and-mortar library building.
  • There’s no card catalog, or digital equivalent, just a simple visual directory.
  • We don’t use the Dewey Decimal or other standardized library classification system.
  • Content providers are restricted to three categories: Public gardens, arboreta, and other non-profit horticultural organizations; colleges and universities; and government agencies.
  • We have no books, for a variety of reasons, but mostly because the information we collect is not published in book form, or not publicly distributed at all.
  • Our content is hosted on Esri’s map-based portal, ArcGIS Online, which enables library guests to search for information by topic, horticultural zone, geographic region, or organization providing the content.
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