Le Cheile/Together Engaging Libraries

This project is funded through the Engaging Libraries Fund, a partnership between the Carnegie UK Trust, Wellcome and the Wolfson Foundation. It aims to support public libraries to run engagement activities and research within the themes of health, society and culture. Our project is in partnership with the Western Isles Library Service and the Social Enterprise the Science Ceilidh. It is exploring research on, with and by rural communities, the challenges of social isolation, loneliness and its impact on culture. It focuses on the mobile and branch libraries in the Western Isles - both as a tool to engage and reach wide rural audiences with the findings from rural health research - and as a topic of inquiry in and of themselves, by investigating how the library service and its role in the wellbeing of rural communities, culture and relationships have changed over time.