Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Building Bridges: The Role Of The Relational Librarian, Sunniva Evjen

New Librarianship Symposia Series: Fall 2021

Building bridges: the role of the relational librarian

The link between interpersonal trust, participation, social capital and democracy is evident through scholarly work in different research areas (see for example Sullivan & Transue 1999). These concepts are also relevant to discuss in relation to “improved communities”, not least in connection to the recent “social turn” of public libraries, which encompasses an understanding of the library as “a locus and an enabler of social processes in the interpersonal sense” (Nolin & Söderholm 2015). Both public library practice and research has sought to discover how libraries contribute to community-building activities, which in …

Working For A Better World: The Librarian As A Change Agent, An Activist And A Social Entrepreneur, Mia H. Mathiasson, Henrik Jochumsen

New Librarianship Symposia Series: Fall 2021

For many years, the social role of librarians has been a topic of heated debates, both within the library field and within library research. Such debates have traditionally been about questions of neutrality and the professional identity in librarianship. Recently, visions of librarians as radical positive change agents (Lankes 2016) have influenced and shaped this debate, raising new questions about neutrality or “post-neutrality”, professional agency and personal and political ideologies. However, what does it mean to be a radical positive change agent? To expand our understanding of the librarian as a radical positive change agent, this paper introduces the concepts …

Revisiting The Ideal Of Neutrality, Anne-Sofie Bollerup

New Librarianship Symposia Series: Fall 2021

Revisiting the ideal of neutrality

The idea of a neutral library and a neutral librarian is appealing. Without influencing or judging, the librarian trusts the citizens own judgement and steps away from her own opinion in order to serve and guide the users. The notion of neutrality as an ideal has been the dominating position among both librarians and Library and Information Science-researchers.

Advocates for the principle of neutrality claim that the idea of neutrality is both an expression of representative democracy and respect for the individual’s rights and that neutrality is an active choice (Blomgreen & Sundeen, 2020; Tewell, …