Vinyl, Hip-Hop & DJs: A Festival for Everyone
Montgomery County Public Libraries
Innovation Synopsis
Montgomery County Public Libraries (MCPL) has been offering an annual one-day family-friendly free musical festival since 2018. Just for the Record – A Vinyl Day celebrates vinyl music, its culture, art, and sound with creative programs and activities. In 2023, MCPL fused Vinyl Day with the 50-year anniversary of Hip-Hop, presenting activities, workshops, and panel discussions related to music and dancing, and a competition where DJs from across the country competed, a first, for a public library in the USA. The Vinyl Day festival was a unique opportunity for MCPL to reach a diverse audience, representing a full spectrum of ages, races, and backgrounds, and providing a space for meaningful learning interactions. The event established the library as an important cultural center.
Challenge/Opportunity
The 50th anniversary of Hip-Hop in 2023 provided MCPL with the opportunity to integrate musical popular culture into the Vinyl Day festival and to reimagine its format. The innovative model envisioned using hip-hop as a mechanism to reach broader segments of the county’s culturally diverse population, with an emphasis on teens and younger people. This model program showcased the library as an inclusive and diverse community space where everyone is welcome and where there is something of interest for everyone. The 2023 Vinyl Day Festival opened the door for MCPL to implement future library events that reach all segments of the county, ensuring that the library continues to evolve to serve the community at large.
Key Elements of Innovation
During Vinyl Day, participants were able to attend free events for the whole family, including children’s storytimes, kids dance parties, teen and adult workshops on music production, songwriting, DJ basics, breakdancing, album cover painting, and creating graffiti tags. There was also a panel discussion with well-known artists (DJ Kuttin Kandi and Danny Nguyen), an open DJ format set, and vinyl record sales by the Friends of the Library, Montgomery County (FOLMC). The juried competition “Faderation: United Cuts & Scratches Mid- Atlantic Scratch Battle for DJ Supremacy,” the first ever hosted by a public library, added an innovative twist. In addition to FOLMC, MCPL partnered with a non-traditional set of organizations including the Mid-Atlantic Scratch League, which provided many workshops and a DJ scratch battle, Levine Music, which offered a space for the DJ events, and Classroom 2 Community, which video recorded and photographed the event.
Achieved Outcomes
On Vinyl Day 2023, the library became a vibrant space, filled with music and buzzing with interaction among participants over a wide range of demographics. More than 1,500 people attended the event, many of them for the first time. All programs and workshops were full to capacity. Customers responded very positively to the event. MCPL received numerous comments from attendees mentioning that the festival was a very gratifying experience and expressing their surprise at attending such a cool event in the library. New partnerships were created for the event, partnerships that will continue to flourish in future festivals and other library events.
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