PLACE – Public Libraries – Arenas for Citizenship

1. PLACE – Public Libraries – Arenas for Citizenship Professor dr. polit. Ragnar Audunson, Oslo University College – Shanghai International Library Forum 2006

2. Background and research objectives • Citizenship implies a feeling of community • Community is dependent upon a degree of shared identity and shared values (social capital) • Securing welfare presupposes living communities as a level between market and state • In today’s multicultural and digital society creating arenas forstering community is not a trivial task • Can libraries fulfill that role

3. Research questions • How and to what extent do people take public libraries into use as a public space, e.g. As a social meeting place or as a sphere for publicd discourse • High intensive versus low intensive arenas – the library as a low intensive arena • Study the interplay between the library as a virtual and physical meeting place • Barriers to community participation might vary in different communities according to degree of multiculturalism, education etc. Study undertaken in 3 communities in Oslo varying along such dimensions

4. Theoretical background and basic concepts: social capital • Social capital: That glue of trust, common values, standards and norms, stable social relations that bind a communigty together. • Is social capital eroding?

5. Basic concepts: Community • The growth of multiculturalism creates a multitute of communities based on age, interests, ethnicity etc. • We need a community between this multitude of communities. • Their cultural expressions of all these communities are to be found in the library • Can the library be the community of communities?

6. Basic concepts: Citizenship • Partly it denotes formal rights, privileges and obligations of being citizen in a given country. • Partly it denotes a person who is a concerned and informed participant • In many languages – German and the Scandinavian – the concept has a collective dimension. You are citizen together with someone (Mitbürger, medborger) • Citizenship presupposes social capital

7. Basic concepts: high intensive versus low intensive meeting places • High intensive meeting places: meeting places where you live out your primary interests • Low intensive meeting places: Meeting places where you are exposed to other interests and values than those dominating at your high intensive meeting place • Democracy and tolerance presupposes low-intensive meeting places • Low intesive meeting places have to be designes

8. The project’s initial survey • A survey was unertaken in three communities in Oslo to measure: • Social participation, integration and social capital • Trust in different institutions, among them the public library • The use of the local library as a meeting places • Opinions as to what the library should do to develop meeting places in the community

9. Caharcteristics of the three communities • One is a suburb with a high percentage of immigrants – more than 30 per cent and a lower educational level than the Oslo average • One is a former inner city working class districts, now being gentrified • One is a typical middle class districts

10. Is the local community important in people’s lives? • It is more important for the inhabitants in the low status community thsn in the gentrified and bourgeois community • It is more important for those with low than for those with high education • More important for old people than for young people • The effect of education is higher in the gentrified community than in the two other.

11. How is the library used as a meeting placd • As a public square? • As a place that directs you to other arenas and meeting places • As a public sphere in its own right • As an arena where you qualify as a citizen – acquires knowledge and information • As an anera where you live out joint ionvolvements with friends and colleagues • As an arena for virtual meetings on the web • As an arena where you are exposed to the unknown ”other”

12. He library as a meeting place: the results • The library is heavily used as a meeting place along all these dimensions • Encounters with people belonging to a different culture than oneself has the highest score • Two striking differences between the communities: a. Virtual meetings most important in the gentrified community. B. Multicultural encounters most important in the low status community • The effect of education differs between the communities: - The library is most important as a virtual meeting place and as an arena for meeting friends in order to work on common projects for the low educated in the gentrified community

13. Some preliminary conclusions • The local community is important in the personal lives of citizens in a metropolitan city. That is an important premise for planning the library structure • The library is a complex meeting place where a multitude of meetings take place • The concept of low intensive meeting places seems to be fruitful