Place, Community and Political Interest

But you have not mentioned places or communities...

Place and community are inter-related, but are not co-extensive. Communities are frequently identified with a particular place, but need not be; only in communities of place, i.e. place-based communities, are place and community one and the same. More often, they are displaced from one another, with several communities sharing a particular place (as locality), or a community is spread across several places (linked either as territory or as diaspora). Jones, Jones and Woods (2004) suggest that communities are groups of individuals bound together by a common characteristic or common interest who enjoy a high degree of mutual social interaction. Communities are defined by shared meanings and they are enacted through established routine practices that occur within particular spaces and structures. These include both the material sites engaged by communal activities and the symbolic and metaphoric spaces in which people connect as a community, even while existing in different physical or social locations.

Jones et al. argue that the politics of place is constituted as much by the characteristics of the dominant community as by the characteristics of the place. This happens because communities have the following characteristics. They are a source of identity; they are filters through which people view the wider world; they have their own internal power structures, leaders and conflicts; and they can become forces of exclusion, because they rely on ideas of collective identity. The reference here is to Jones, M., Jones, R. and Woods, M. (2004), An Introduction to political geography: space, place and politics. London: Routledge.

To return to the academic library, although we appeared to have dropped this thread, if it constitutes a place of learning, then this place has several different communities, or stakeholder groups, with different interests: undergraduate students (learners); postgraduate students (learners and researchers); academics (learners and leaders of learning or pedagogues); library operational staff (administrators of learning resources); library professional staff (facilitators of learning); library technical staff (administrators of learning technologies); and college administrators and managers (educational resources managers and administrators). The question of order and direction, or practical politics so to speak, within the academic library, as Jones et al. suggest, is partly due to the characteristics of the dominant group and partly the characteristics of the place. Who, then, is the dominant community in the academic library, and how do they exercise their power?

Here we have a case where the most powerful community of interest within a politics of place, whose overarching purpose is to constitute a place of learning, may be the least visible. This would still be the case even where a user-centred (or rather learner-centred) regime operates at the level of the administration of learning resources and the facilitation of learning. The commitment to a user-centred regime within the academic library is often only professed, however, and is barely distinguishable from a resource-centred regime focused on the media form (books, journals, CDs, DVDs, etc.), not information content.

There is a long way to go, then, to shift the academic library more towards being a learner-centred, information-centred place of learning, developing synergies among the various communities of interest, rather than being a place where learning resources, considered as 'packages', are administered efficiently for serial 'users'. In this situation, use of RFID technologies does not contribute to the transformation of librarianship into information service provision, but locks it further into supply chain administration within the limited domain of circulation.