MIT’s Public Library Innovation Exchange published the names of its 2026-2027 Library Ambassadors on Oct. 6, fourteen library professionals and three mentors from Maine to Alaska, and the entry between a youth services librarian in Kentucky and a librarian trainee in Miami-Dade reads Kathryn Rosenburg, Library Programs Coordinator, St. Johns County Public Library System, Main Branch, St. Augustine, Florida. The county put out its own announcement fourteen days later. Two of the fourteen are Florida librarians, hers and the one at Miami-Dade’s main branch, and a third Floridian, from the Palm Beach County Library System, is in the cohort as a mentor.

The program is in its fifth year and the page says the network it feeds now totals 81 people, which is a number worth holding onto, because what an ambassador program actually distributes is other libraries’ solved problems. The page describes a cohort drawn from rural, tribal, military base, suburban and urban systems, and it names the audiences the work is pointed at, among them homeschooled families, tweens, teens, multigenerational households, adults with disabilities and English learners. PLIX stands for Public Library Innovation Exchange, and what the county’s release calls the PLIX Ambassador Program the MIT page calls its Library Ambassador program, which is one cohort under two names and worth knowing if you go looking for the roster yourself.

What she told the county she wants out of it is specific, and it is the part a reader with a library card can check later. Both passages below are in the county’s release and both are hers.

“I want to learn from others, work on new ideas together, and find ways to keep STEAM programs strong and sustainable.”

“I also want to take these programs beyond the Main Branch Library and make them available to all of our communities.”

The mechanism she named for doing that is twelve portable kits, built so that staff at any branch can run a science, technology, engineering, art or mathematics activity with very little setup. The system she would be sending them to has six branches, which its own calendar lists as Anastasia Island, Bartram Trail, Hastings, Main, Ponte Vedra Beach and Southeast, plus a bookmobile the calendar carries as its own filter.

Twelve kits, six branches and a bookmobile.

What nobody has priced

Neither MIT’s announcement nor the county’s release puts a figure on any of this. No stipend, no travel budget, no grant, no funder named, and no cost to the county stated either way.

Twelve kits is the only part of it with a unit cost in its future, and no document says what a kit costs or which budget buys one. The release names Tyler Jarnagin, Public Affairs Manager, as the contact for questions about any of it.

What is already in the building

The release credits her with a Learning Hub at the Main Branch running monthly hands-on STEAM activities, and it names three of the subjects: dinosaurs, outer space and the human body. It also credits her with the murals on the branch walls and windows, the ones in the teen area and beside the seed library staying up through the year while the window at the entrance to the children’s area is repainted for different themes and events.

The release closes on the system’s own mission statement, which reads Connect, Learn, Enjoy @ Your Library. On her own page at MIT she lists what to ask her about as art and video games, says she has lately been preparing a large program for World Space Week, and gives what she is looking forward to as nerding out and collaborating over STEAM with others.

“Sometimes STEAM can seem intimidating, and I want to change that. I want both patrons and staff to feel confident trying something new.”

What the branch calendar actually carries over the next week is Family Storytime in the Main Branch Meeting Room twice on Oct. 27, Cold Brew and Play there on Oct. 28, the Main Library Book Club on Oct. 29 and Tech Help with David on Oct. 30, and no Learning Hub session appears on the Main Branch list inside that window. The Main Branch already has a room for this and the calendar calls it the Main STEM Space. What is booked into it this afternoon is the Crochet Club, four to five.