Margo Gustina and Meg Backus have been talking about communities, power, and librarianship for years. After COVID-19 disrupted a collaborative project and laid bare challenges to libraries acting in support of their community members and their workers, they shifted their focus into making Libraries in Community Systems research.

They wanted to research ways in which libraries, in their role as network convenors or builders, increased people’s capacity for collective action in the face of disruption. They wanted to help policy makers and deciders to see the value for libraries to act in this role–a role that helps the individual to transfer a skill into a lever, a private ability into a capability to own one’s own power and destiny.

And so, like any study of action, this is also a study of power. Once can imagine community networks as resource pathways–this is a comfortable place for libraries because it speaks in the language of access. But what of the power to influence the direction of those resources? The power to add to or remove nodes from a network? The communication style and mechanism of organization and individual linkages? The nature of the agreements each party enters into?

When holding these general questions of power, leverage, and action in relation to librarianship from a project design and management perspective, each had a list of information sufficient to answer them, which we did not have. What follows is our establishment list of sufficient knowledge required nested within question-steps. As a set, these form the backbone of Libraries in Community Systems project design. In the section below, each question is accompanied by a set of actions the team took to gather data and create new understandings.

• • What is the definition, function, and value of a public library within its community?
  • How are the library, community, and networks measured?
  • Is there a story of place that can reveal individual capabilities or community capacities?
  • How do we make new understandings of library and community co-production of capabilities valuable to decision makers?

Libraries in Community Systems is a project designed to help us learn from a diverse set of sources: stories, cooperative mapping and design, games, semi-structured interviews, perspective and statistical surveys, and mechanical measurements. Many of these methods were employed to answer each of the questions in the project. The specifics of our approach can be found nested under each of our questions below.

Grounding all approaches taken in Libraries in Community Systems are theories of individual value and collective power. This is the thread that ties each of the following theoretic frames together: every living thing and system has inherent value and the power of each is derived within relational systems. Further, that our work as researchers is to describe realities as seen and experienced by people living in contexts, in a way that honors the aspirations and insights of those people.

Social constructionism is a sociology theory which posits that not only do we create knowledge, together through conversation and experience, but that we create reality. In other words, the reality of our lives is a construct of social realities of the past, our experiences in this context, and our behaviors, conversations, and relationships which create our shared future. In Berger & Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966), they lay out the practical reasons for the distinction. In Libraries in Community Systems, our research question is about how public libraries function within a community to produce (with its community) social wellbeing. That our question focuses on what is generated from the relationship between people and their commonly held institution (the library), requires that we look beyond “knowledge creation” to the capabilities that such creation could induce for the individual and the collective.

The theoretical background for each of these is different but they share a normative approach to listening, honoring experiences, and allowing for insights to emerge from those experiences as read. The phases of research where each was incorporated into Libraries in Community Systems is different for each.

Appreciative Inquiry, as a practice of discovery, “involves the systematic discovery of what gives ‘life’ to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms” (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2000). This method is explicitly strength-based, with the purpose of using what works now to help groups of people create a future that works even better. While Libraries in Community Systems uses this perspective to honor the hard work of practitioners, and to design research plans that intentionally bring them together to create shared visions within the context of diverse assets, we don’t use it to analyze the myriad data collected in the research. Emergent community visions are for librarians and community partners to chart a path with, not for external researchers to dictate.

Making meaning from phenomena (events, experiences, stories) can look different depending on the theoretical underpinning of the method. For instance, it might be that the focus is on collecting many many stories of a specific kind of event (“What is your experience of libraries?”) and findings are presented from the shared themes, or ways in which the stories were the same. It might be, though, that we think the discoveries are to be made in the differences between stories. Both approaches are considered phenomenological approaches to interviews. For our step-by-step approach to analyzing interviews with library workers and their invited community members, we followed Clark Moustakas (1994). Our general thematic findings were derived with his method, but our way of lifting the idiosyncrasies of personal experience as a source of rich understanding follows Scott Campbell’s Existential Phenomenological Research methods (2022).

Famine survivor, economist, and lifelong advocate for human dignity, Amartya Sen, put forward the idea that there exists something that makes life worth living, that isn’t captured in either our material circumstances (“goods”) or the feeling we get from goods (“utility”), called “capability” in his lecture, “Equality of What” (1979; CW: Sen uses ableist and derogatory terms to describe an individual with mobility impairments as his central case in this essay). Sen continued to build on his theories of capability for decades which Martha Nussbaum attempted to operationalize for research and policy in her Creating Capabilities: the human development approach (2011). The thinking and research thread forms the foundation of both Institute of Museum and Library Services studies of public libraries and social wellbeing (2017, 2021). And Libraries in Community Systems! 

Across the methods and theories listed here, there is an emphasis on contexts creating realities and individual stories, in turn, creating contexts. These relationships are social and in Social-Ecological Systems theory, contexts are inclusive of realities that fall outside human to human relationships. You probably intuit the truth of this. Even though we might feel this truth all the way down to our toes, incorporating it into research can be clumsy or difficult. How do we account for the breeze (or wildfire smoke) before we entered an interview room? Libraries in Community Systems researchers weren’t wildly successful in this, but the theory of research area was returned to in every step of the project. (A paper that illuminates why socio-ecological systems as a frame for understanding community wellbeing and resilience is “Culturally Grounded Indicators of Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems” (2017).)

Libraries in Community Systems leverages partnership and shared decision making to accomplish ambitious goals. To learn more about the individuals working on this project, visit the People page. The project is administered and supported by Northern New York Library Network staff, including Meg Backus and Chuck Henry giving web support. The multidisciplinary research team is composed of contractors, structured with Margo Gustina conducting overall project management as well as quantitative research design. Ozy Aloziem designs qualitative research with implementation support from Blake Andrew.

The three person team works directly with sixteen library workers to gather information and create meaning out of what we hear. Without these partners, and the research they are conducting with their own communities, the project couldn’t be completed. 

Advisors to this project are engaged, critical friends of the work. This is not a support board – they use their extensive expertise and creative intelligence to make our designs, methods, analysis, and interpretations richer and more effective. In addition to our formal advisors, we have been privileged to have a rich network of thinking partners including Ben Haggard of Regenesis Group, Mike Norton of Reinvestment Fund, David Lankes of University of Texas-Austin, and the Economics Department of University of New Mexico.

We are grateful to have formal partnerships with state library agencies of Alaska, Georgia, New York, and Texas. And also for the support we’ve received from California, Florida, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Washington.