With the Obama Presidential Center set to open in just a few days on Juneteenth, HPR attended an exclusive preview to learn the story behind the center and to highlight its ties to Hawaiʻi.
The vast 19-acre campus of the center includes various public amenities, a museum dedicated to Barack Obama's life, and a new library to archive and share the documents from the former president's administration.
Unlike most presidential libraries, however, it's not a presidential library at all — it’s a new branch of the Chicago Public Library, where visitors can access Obama's digitized presidential documents and read titles from his personal collection in the President’s Reading Room.
The library's collection included some titles that are sure to be familiar to and treasured by Hawaiʻi residents.
“Shoal of Time,” Gavan Daws’s bestselling history of Hawaiʻi, “Hawaiian Modern” by architect Vladimir Ossipoff, and works by Nobel Laureate biochemist and Hilo High alumnus Jennifer Doudna were among some of the books with Hawaiʻi ties.
To learn more about how the library was envisioned and what purpose it was built to serve, HPR spoke with Chicago Public Library Commissioner Chris Brown. For him, the library was a place of diverse perspectives connecting and uniting in a shared space.
“I think so much of what our libraries do is they are inclusive of stories, histories, narratives of all backgrounds, all voices, conflicting opinions, tensions within our stories — but they're all housed in one place,” Brown said.
“Getting to see a president who had that multiethnic background… there's a lot about this campus and the library that I feel is inclusive of many identities, many people, and I can see how the world's going to visit this space and feel a sense of inspiration and belonging and reflection on how we shape our communities and where we live and how we bring change home.”
Brown explained that the new library branch would be the first public library to be built on a presidential campus.
Obama is said to be the first “digital” president, and digitizing his presidential documents to be accessed via an online portal distinguished him from past administrations who stored their physical documents in presidential libraries.
The reason for breaking this tradition is clear. According to Brown, it makes the library an accessible, future-facing public resource that is built, first and foremost, to serve its community.
“When they were thinking about what kind of library to have, understanding that those archives are available online, and realizing that there was an opportunity to invest in local neighborhood, and seeing them build and invest in a neighborhood Chicago Public Library, I think, is indicative of them wanting to invest in neighborhood and give back to the community,” he told HPR.
For more coverage of the Obama Presidential Center, click here.
