A B S T R A C TThis article presents an overview of the Western public library's development into its present form(s) and its shift to the prevailing social perspective. This leads to a discussion of "digital and point-oh libraries" as one of two major strands and "social space and place" as the other. Our main critique is that this development has caused an unfortunate downplay of societal perspectives in favor of a focus on social issues. Another side effect is a growing lack of attention to the potential of physical, on-site collections. By proposing a specific counterexample, we discuss library collections as a community concern and as a step toward bridging the social-societal gap. The potential of a redefined on-site collection is set against the backdrop of public libraries offering nontraditional collections, such as tool-lending libraries.A predominant school of thought in LIS today is what can be framed as the social, in which the library is a locus and an enabler of social processes in the interpersonal sense. This marks a transition in which touchstones such as popular education have given room to other concepts, including communication, sociological influences, and user studies. It is a turn in how library issues are framed: from a societal perspective to a social perspective, from the building of society to the building of relations. There are two major strands currently at the forefront. They overlap in some respects but are also quite distinct. The first strand is concerned with the digital extension of libraries and includes issues spanning from backend collection management to front-end e-reading and social media. Generally the research focuses on either the "digital library" (Borgman 1999;Candela, Castelli, and Pagano 2011) or on the popular "point-oh" perspectives (Carlsson 2012;Kwanya, Stilwell, and Underwood 2013). The second strand focuses on the public library as a worldly located place of social activity. Issues concern the library as a meeting place or as an extension of other environments, such as home or work (Audunson 2005;Johannesson 2009;Skot-Hansen, Rasmussen, and Jochumsen 2013).In both cases, whether enabled by new media or by the idea of a common public space, social dimensions are in focus. The social can also be framed as an emphasis on developing (infra)structure rather than content by focusing on modes of provision, outreach strategies, accessibility, and the architecture of facilities and information.Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, vol. 85, no. 3, pp. 244-260. © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.0024-2519/2015/8503-0002$10.00
244Recently there has been a renewed interest in community engagement (Goulding 2009;Scott 2011;Sung, Hepworth, and Ragsdell 2013). This article is an effort to invigorate a "classical" societal perspective using the notion of community as a merger of societal and social approaches. Among the things we find wanting in discussions emphasizing the social is inquiry into the potential of the public library's alrea...