This Libraries and Policy essay explores the interrelationships between the public library goals of supporting democracy and remaining an apolitical institution and the expectations for demonstration of value and economic contribution at a time in which public discourse emphasizes austerity from public institutions. Libraries’ positions on democracy and neutrality are explored within the context of the tension between asserting value and demonstrating it, as well as the impacts of these positions on the ability to advocate for library value in political and policy-making processes. Building upon these analyses, we examine different ways that libraries can use research to advocate and demonstrate their value by framing the terms of value and austerity in language that acknowledges the tangible and intangible contributions of public libraries.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/671910

Democracy, Neutrality, and Value Demonstration in the Age of Austerity

Public libraries are heavily affected by political and policy-making processes that shape the funding, activities, and roles of libraries in society, with the explosion of information policy decisions in the past two decades significantly increasing the responsibilities of libraries while also increasing limitations on their activities. Research in library and information science, however, has paid scant attention to these issues over time. If libraries are to be able to effectively advocate for the interests of their institutions, patrons, and communities, researchers need to more strongly engage problems of politics and policy making that impact libraries. With greater amounts of data and analysis in this area, libraries will be better situated to advocate for their needs in political and policy-making processes, as well as better able to articulate their positions to members of the public.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/668582

Wake Up the Nation: Public Libraries, Policy Making, and Political Discourse

The period covered by the publication of Library Quarterly (LQ) has been one characterized by the arc of three defining contexts. First, libraries have been inextricably tied to educational...

/pdf/education-the-public-sphere-and-neoliberalism-libraries-3lojmguvrr.pdf

Education, the Public Sphere, and Neoliberalism: Libraries’ Contexts

A recent library institute on privacy noted that “privacy … is crucial to free speech, freedom of thought, and equal access to information,” now challenged by the “mass collection of … data,” and that “our profession has been slow to respond [to this] threat.” The failure is broader: a theoretical approach to privacy unmoored from contemporary reality. It is the context of what has been known for some time that reveals the shortcomings of privacy theories. This article will review where our current theories come from: the broader field of information ethics and its intellectual framing of privacy issues. The article will review theoretical and historical insights that should inform our ideas about what privacy is and when it is effectively absent or invaded. These insights provide a much more informative context for democratic values, concluding with recommendations to blend the two traditions and move privacy forward.

/pdf/the-structural-irrelevance-of-privacy-a-provocation-4mep5wdamy.pdf

The Structural Irrelevance of Privacy: A Provocation

This article introduces a theoretical framework for conceptualizing public library membership and belonging as an ongoing action net of joint intention and collective action between individual members of the public and the library. It provides an analysis of how membership is constituted, observed, and documented by public libraries from a social-constructivist perspective. Drawing on social theory and philosophy, organizational studies, and secondary public library data sources, a high-level typology of public library member categories from the political and organizational modes of public library action is proposed. Member types are characterized using institutionalized structures of public library use, access, data, discourse, behavior, and social media applications. Implications of this framework for future research and public library innovation are suggested in conclusion.

https://www.ruor.uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/33036/1/LQ-FINAL-PUB.pdf

Structuring an Action Net of Public Library Membership

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v005/5.2mattlage.pdf

Dismantling the Public Sphere: Situating and Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy (review)

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Dismantling the Public Sphere: Situating and Sustaining Librarianship in the Age of the New Public Philosophy (review)