| Berliner Bibliothekswissenschaftliches Kolloquium |
26.11.2024 | 18 Uhr | ZOOM | IBI
The importance of acts, arrangements and autonomy: Contrasting public library policies in three European cities
Rianne van Melik, Jamea Kofi, Friederike Landau-Donnelly
Radboud University Nijmegen | Netherlands
Johanna Rivano Eckerdal, Lisa Engström
Lund University | Sweden
Alexa Färber, Marion Hamm
University of Vienna | Austria
Public libraries are increasingly acknowledged as important social infrastructures that not only support literacy and knowledge transmission, but also stimulate a sense of community, social cohesion, and mental wellbeing. In our research project “Infrastructuring Libraries in Transformation” (ILIT), we investigate how libraries in the Netherlands, Sweden and Austria are constantly in flux, dynamic, and contested. Therefore, we utilize the concept of infrastructuring instead of infrastructure. This means that we not only look at object-centric notions of what a library is, but also how it comes into being through daily practices of library staff, management, policymakers, users, and other stakeholders. We do so by investigating three themes: community librarianship, institutional support, and local involvement. In this presentation, we will first briefly introduce our research project and the main findings of our recently published paper on community librarianship (Rivano Eckerdal et al., 2024). However, the presentation’s main focus is our second research theme (institutional support) by answering the following research question: How do national, regional, and local policies envision and fund libraries as social infrastructures? Drawing on stakeholder and critical policy analysis, over 30 qualitative interviews with policymakers and library management, and three collaborative zine-making workshops, we will visualise the multi-level policy landscapes of the public libraries of Rotterdam, Malmö and Vienna. We aim at grasping the extent that policies on different levels, from international to local, influence public libraries in these three cities.
| Zum Gesamtprogramm |