Leading Libraries
Library Science Service Learning and Border Pedagogy: Building Connections Through Community and Culture
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alex Mc Allister
Librarians must be equipped to consider numerous cultural issues in providing services to diverse groups of patrons. This is not always a priority of library science educators and practitioners in the United States. Henry Giroux’s theory of radical democracy and border pedagogy is one framework that can be used to examine libraries as traditionally hegemonic institutions controlling services and collections. Giroux’s attention to equity, freedom, and justice (radical democracy) reveals many issues prevalent in the field of library science. By encouraging students to explore new borders to deconstruct culture, power, and history, Giroux’s theory provides a framework whereby students can learn to create a sustained dialogue focused on respect for otherness. This study highlights library science student work, including journals and a service-learning project, which are used to build connections through community and culture. Students developed perspectives and self-reflection through journaling during a course on building connections through community and culture. The distance education students also work with community libraries to assess services and collections, and discover suggestions for improving connections to various cultural groups. As students learn to cross disciplinary, cultural, and political borders through a series of readings and the class project, their connections are informed by the spirit of Giroux’s theory to consider how underrepresented or marginalized groups are being served.
Technology and the " New " Library
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Piedad Ramirez
There is a growing body of scholars that considers that technology is undermining the commune, that is to say, those public social spaces that serve as platform for our essential need to communicate with each other as social beings (Putnam, 1996). Such observations buttress the contention that, rather than connecting us in a meaningful way, technology isolates us from one another (Stoll, 1995). In this view, online social spaces created by communication technologies are just that, online, simulated, computer-generated, and they cannot match the community-enhancement attributes of the physical spaces that used to bring us together. The basic premise of this paper is that the active familiarity with a physical place, a space where we interact socially, politically, culturally and economically with others, is a requisite component for a healthy society and an effective polis. I argue that one of the last of these spaces is the public library. In view of research done by academics like Putnam (1996), Stoll (1995) and Koren (2004), and culling research methodology from Powell (1990) and Brodman (1990), I analyze how the library has seen a restructuring of its space, from a place to read or take out books, to a place where a deeper form of social, public interaction takes place. I also review the manner in which libraries have undergone a reorientation of resources towards new environments in order to counteract and even benefit from the transformations occasioned by technology.
Libraries and Cultural Tourism: Challenges and Perspecitives
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mariela Modeva
Cultural tourism is an investigated but insufficiently studied phenomenon. It is seen mainly as an industry in its usefulness and contribution to the economy of the country or as an alternative form of tourism that specifically Bulgaria has identified as a priority for development by the Ministry of Tourism. In this sense, the theme is not new, but is insufficiently explored in terms of the correlation between the preservation of cultural heritage and development of cultural tourism in general and in particular on the role of libraries in the process. The objective of this paper is to prove that libraries have considerable potential to play an important role in the development of cultural tourism, to be the center of events related to creative tourism and this potential should be used. The author does not claim to complete comprehensiveness of the affected subjects. It has taken into account the fact that a number of researchers, national and international institutions working in the field of cultural tourism were interested in it. Regardless of its popularity, especially in the last decade have placed new emphasis and are not addressed so far outlined aspects of the role and functions of libraries for the development of cultural tourism.
