O agora das bibliotecas ou a biblioteca ágora : bibliotecas públicas, coworking e inovação

In a context of evolving technological and social changes, leading to today's information and knowledge society, we aim to understand the new concept of public library, and what services and spaces are emerging all over the world in public libraries in order to attract new users and meet the needs of people. As background, we associate the role of public libraries with the policies for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth strategies under Europe Strategy 2020. We present a new concept of public library that responds to the new challenges of today linking them with the educational, cultural, social, political and informative roles it plays. In this sense, there was a concern to demonstrate the importance of public libraries in the development of integrated cultural, social and educational policies through some concrete relevant examples, namely: the Library Parks in Medellin, Colombia ( with a distinctly social dimension), the BiblioRedes program in Chile (with a focus on information and communication technologies) and the National Program of Public Libraries (RNBP), which, to date, has provided Portugal with more than two hundred modern public libraries . Finally, under these new spaces and facilities offered by public libraries, they tried to develop the concept of public libraries as an area of work through several examples that have in common the concept of co-working. Based on this concept we propose the creation of co-working spaces in public libraries, through an actual project to be implemented in the Municipal Library of Montemor-o-Velho