The impact of the public library as a creative place in the community: A contextual review

This review examines recent literature on the public library as a creative place and the ways in which socio-cultural impact is being measured in assessments of cultural value. Inputs such as funding and staffing are frequently measured against outputs such as visitor numbers and lending frequencies, but qualitative measures (outcomes and impacts) are minimal in the literature because of the lack of persuasive evaluative frameworks and the difficulty of designing and facilitating the evaluations at local and national levels. Nevertheless, when combined with data about outputs and outcomes, the impact on individuals and their communities can be measured effectively and reported persuasively (Poll 2012, p.124). This contextual review provides an overview of current thinking about public libraries and creative spaces with particular attention paid to the rise of so-called makerspaces and Fab Labs. This includes discussion on the types of creative activities that are occurring in the public library context, and an outline of the rhetoric and reality of the public library as a community space. These outlines are reconsidered in a discussion of the evaluative frameworks that have been employed by libraries in the past, followed by an account of some prominent creative spaces that have been formally evaluated. The existence of creative spaces in public libraries is in a state of constant flux, and the development and redevelopment of evaluative frameworks will ensure that published reports will continue to appear throughout 2015 and beyond. This review provides a brief snapshot of the state of the field as it is in the first quarter of 2015.

Performing immobility / protesting immobility: The risks & rewards of public space protest performances

Though there is much interest in mobilities and performing mobilities as a characteristic of modern, urban, social life today, this is not always matched by attention to immobilities, as the flipside of mobility in modern life. In this paper, I investigate public space performances designed to draw attention to precisely this counterpoint to current discourses of mobilities – performances about the socially produced immobilities many people with disabilities find a more fundamental feature of day-to-day life, the fight for mobility, and the freedom found when accommodations for alternative mobilities are made available. Although public policy is increasingly aligned with a social model of disability, which sees disability as socially constructed through systems, institutions and infrastructure deliberately designed to exclude specific bodies – stairs, curbs, queues and so forth – and although governments in the US, UK, and to a lesser degree Australia, New Zealand and other Commonwealth nations aim to address these inequalities, the experience of immobility is still every-present for many people. This often comes not just from pain, or from impairment, or event from lack of accommodations for alternative mobilities, but from fellow social performers’ antipathy to, appropriation of, or destruction of accommodations designed to facilitate access for a range of different bodies in public space, and thus the public sphere. The archetypal instance of this tension between the mobile, and those needing accommodations to allow mobility, is, of course, the antipathy many able bodied people feel towards the provision of disabled parking spaces. A cursory search online shows thousands of accounts of antagonism, vitriol, and even violence prompted by disputes which began when a disabled person asked an able person to exit a designated disabled parking space. For many, it seems, expecting them to pass by such parks so others can experience the mobility they take for granted is too much. In this paper, I examine a number of protest performances in public space in which activist present actions – for example, placing wheelchairs in every regular parking space in a precinct – to give bystanders, passersby and spectators, as well as antagonistic fellow social performers, a sense of what socially produced immobility feels like. I examine responses to such protest performances, and what they say about the potential social, political and ethical impacts of such protests, in terms of their potential to produce new attitudes to mobility, alternative mobility, and access to alternative modes of mobility.

Public internet access revisited

In recent years the Australian government has dedicated considerable project funds to establish public Internet access points in rural and regional communities. Drawing on data from a major Australian study of the social and economic impact of new technologies on rural areas, this paper explores some of the difficulties rural communities have faced in setting up public access points and sustaining them beyond their project funding. Of particular concern is the way that economic sustainability has been positioned as a measure of the success of such ventures. Government funding has been allocated on the basis of these rural public access points becoming economically self-sustaining. This is problematic on a number of counts. It is therefore argued that these public access points should be reconceptualised as essential community infrastructure like schools and libraries, rather than potential economic enterprises. Author Keywords: Author Keywords: Internet; Public access; Sustainability; Digital divide; Rural Australia