Participatory communities in libraries

Abstract

Participatory libraries extend services beyond access and enhance communities life with community collaboration. This vision is community-centered and not collections-centered and is difficult to understand and implement in traditional library contexts. Some unanswered questions are: Why should libraries take the initiative and become participatory? What is meant by facilitating community participation? How does the librarian's job change if the community co-creates services in a sustainable way? The authors tried to understand how participatory librarianship is understood and applied and which different initiatives have been experimented by libraries in different countries. They involved academics and practitioners from different countries (France, USA, Denmark, Italy) to investigate their participatory library's vision. The findings demonstrate that participatory approach in libraries is going to experience a great change: libraries go from content warehouses to content creation facilitators, they serve new types of communities including digital natives and marginalized ones, academic libraries are sustaining open science. These trends will influence the role of the librarian as he becomes a facilitator and advocate for communities.Authors will invite participants to WLIC 2023 to fill a questionnaire on their opinions (https://forms.gle/YEcWAd6o2HLbuFFj7)