Examining Concepts of the Public: Who is Served by Information Services?

The goal of this panel is to define foundational social and epistemic “boundaries” within the “public sphere” that libraries and information institutions typically consider when defining their constituents of interest. Defining what we mean by the “public” or “communities” in “public libraries,” for example, is important, not only because the concept of a “public” is plural and contextually situated, but also because the boundaries of said public are often artificially outlined depending on social and cultural aims. To what degree do information services act like politics, strategically defining “community” to exclude as much as include? In politics, the “public” and its representative rights vary from state‐to‐state and county to county. Is this variation the same as regional differences in reading, described, for example, in The Geography of Reading (Wilson, 1938). Is it more overtly racial (e.g. Lipsitz 2011) or political (e.g. Bishop 2009)? What is a “citizen” in this space, and how does that differ from our construction of the public? Which publics are being denied their needs through the boundaries erected by these institutions and systems?