the community context
This week's topic ponders the idea of the relationship of the public library and the groups that have sustained it and that will sustain it. Our earlier topics talked about why people wanted to start public libraries and how they have had to navigate the tricky waters of political and legal structures to achieve their goal. This week's topic wonders if they are thinking about more than themselves when they do this work.
As noted in the summary paragraphs of this week's reading, "the public library's social ecology still reflects a divide between the interests and aspirations of those who are most closely identified with the institution and the interests and aspirations of those who would potentially most benefit from effective public library service."
A question we have before us is "do we know the interests and aspirations of those who would potentially most benefit from effective public library service?"
We know that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, but are those squeaky wheels those who have always been squeaky wheels, and thus the ones who have always been served by the institution we are concerned with? Who else might there be out there who could really benefit from a good public library, but who we don't see and don't hear from?
Which may lead us to consider our place in our public library ecology
Any community potentially has several institutions around which people might coalesce. Churches and schools offer such opportunities, but faith is an individual thing and schools lose their attraction for those who have no direct link to them through children. The library is a common feature in the lives of everyone who resides in a community and thus holds the potential to assist people to find ways to maximize their potential, their social capital.
In fact, it is a tool that may allow groups to form and later to join with others. Such ecological evolution may require a public library to consider adopting roles beyond that of information and/or culture repository if the institution is to realize its potential as a community focal point.
But to do that, we might ask ourselves how integrated we are into our public library's community
How do we, as individuals, fit into our communities?
- Looking at where we came from and where we are now, we can
see that many of us are socially and geographically mobile. How
does that rootlessness connect to folks in our community?
- Perhaps the folks in our communities are old stock and have lived here forever; how do they relate to newcomers?
- Perhaps the folks in our communities are just as rootless as we are and are looking for somwhere to anchor in their new communities. United Van Lines noted that as Americans move around "the South emerged as a top migration spot in 2007, with North Carolina coming in as the top destination (61.6% inbound)."
- How important are the churches in our communities to the lives of our patrons (our current patrons and our potential patrons)? How many of us are members of our local churches and know people both as fellow parishioners as well as library patrons?
- How familiar are we with our local service organizations? Do we know the service focus for the clubs in our communities? Are any of us members of a service organization?
- What do we know about the changing demographics of our communities? Who are the newer groups that are changing the look of our communities? Are they familiar with what the public library has to offer? Is the library offering services of value to them?
Which leads us to asking about how our local public library adds to the social capital of our communities?
Robert Putnam describes social capital as a bonding mechanism, but also talks about how some community organizations bond together people of like mind, while some seek to build bridges to people who don't immediately recognize that they have commonalities of interest. We intuitively feel that our public libraries are bridging mechanisms, but are they?
Who does the public library serve in actuality and who else is out there in the community that might benefit from a public library that really served their unspoken and sometimes unseen needs?
- Who are the unserved and how do we know who they are?
- How do we reach them and should we?
- Will our efforts to bridge the gap between the public library and the "unserved" alienate those who have always supported the public library and have formed a bond with it?
There are no answers here, only questions to ask ourselves. If we can ask them of ourselves, we perhaps can begin to see where our institution might be headed.
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