The Place of the Public Library: An Inquiry into Emergent Technologies, Ideologies and Communities.
    (SSHRCC funded)

Summary:
What is the place of the public library in a rapidly changing, information-driven, and technologically-advanced society? Today, Canada's public libraries are undergoing profound and dramatic changes. A deluge of books, journals, microforms, and advances in information technology (IT) in the form of computers, electronic networks and software, along with increased privatization, decreased government funding, and calls for greater accountability at all levels of the civil sector, have put into question the very role, physical design and organization of public libraries. Within the larger context of an emerging public discourse about the development of an 'information superhighway', these concerns reflect pressing public issues, with substantial consequences for business, government, citizens and communities. They also bring up theoretical issues concerning the civic roles, spatial design, and ideological basis of an important public place: the communal meeting place of people and ideas that is the central public library.

This research aims to examine the place of the central public library--its designs, roles, uses and everyday operations and identities--in the larger cultural context of urban life, public spaces and emergent IT. In particular, the research seeks to critique ideologies, both dominant and competing, that underlie, create, and contest the very purpose, goals and identities of public libraries in contemporary society. The new Vancouver Public Library and the Metro Toronto Reference Library, two of the most recent central libraries built in Canadian urban cores, will be used as the focus of the investigation. Despite their importance as civic and community sites, neither of these two libraries have been studied extensively, and a comparative study of this scope in Canada has never been attempted.

The project has several overarching goals. The first is to consider the traditional and emergent civic roles and designs of Canada’s central public libraries. Have the civic roles of public libraries changed over time and space, and if so, what information technologies, societal influences and ideological positions have encouraged past and current shifts in library culture? Second, we will identify the sense of place and community created in light of new IT and user demands and expectations. Finally, this study will advance our understanding of the role of information technology within society and space, as manifest through its impact on the shaping, construction and identities of an important civic place. Fulfilling these goals will thus ground the current theoretical debates on telecommunications and the geography of the telematic or ‘wired’ city in a forum of everyday life, where the consequences of IT are played out at a human scale.

This research, then, represents a unique and worthwhile opportunity to make a significant contribution by enriching the theoretical and empirical knowledge bases of both geography and library and information science, and by providing insights useful not only to academia, but to governments, professionals and the public at large. In particular, the findings will address i) the design, purposes and identities of libraries in various temporal and cultural contexts, with an emphasis on the emergent information society, ii) the architectural design, spatial organization, service amenities and accessibility of the library as a civic place of community interaction, iii) the impact of IT on the library as a working environment (i.e. the physical infrastructure) and a place of work (i.e. impact on library staff), iv) the politicized process of negotiating a civic mega-structure in the context of uneven power relations, and finally, v) how central libraries can best serve their civic roles as information epicentres and community places, while remaining flexible to the changing needs and demands induced by technological and societal developments.