Cultures of Participation

While glancing through Module II on Sunday, one of the questions that Dean brought up stuck with me. I’ve been thinking about it continually, and thought that this might be a nice place to address it. The question was “Is there a culture of participation in libraries?”

Throughout high school and continuing into my first year of university, I worked in a public library. I’m from a firmly middle class city in Alberta of about 100,000. Although the public library is heavily used, the majority of users get in and get out quickly. Thus, the only group of regular users in the library are members of the rather small homeless population. This unique culture of participants is probably rather different than the cultures of participants referenced in this article. Still, I think this is important. In the case of this library, the community that exists utilizes certain services – often the regular patrons (most of whom are homeless) are camped out in the periodicals area, reading the day’s newspapers. These patrons are also likely to attend movie nights and concerts. While most of them are not connected to any form or social media, these men and women still create community in the library. During the four years I worked there, I got to know each of these patrons quite well – some would want to have the same conversation every day, some would want to chat about their lives and backgrounds, and still others were looking for help accessing social services. I did what I could in each situation. What amazed me was that while I felt like I got to know these people well during the time I worked for the library, they knew each other infinitely better and could always tell me why someone wasn’t in the library that particular day (perhaps he or she was sick, had chosen to go to the mall or the YMCA instead, etc…). I can guarantee that none of these people are on Twitter, or creating mashups of their favorite YouTube videos.

The long and meandering point that I’m trying to make is that as information professionals, we must  be aware of our library’s existing communities and cultures of participation. In the library that I worked in, regular patrons were anxious to share stories, information, and insights – they just didn’t do it in the way that we imagine patrons participate now. I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but I really do believe we can be too quick to jump on to the 2.0 bandwagon without giving proper consideration to the systems already in place. In the case of my dear public library, the library’s most frequent users are not likely to be heavy social media users and wouldn’t heavily benefit from their library having a large online presence. And I don’t think that it’s a bad thing to meet your patrons where they are rather than where social media enthusiasts think patrons should be.