Beyond Books: Understanding Libraries as Information Sources and Resources Against Poverty

Abstract

This capstone's methodology is primarily based in literature review. To understand how libraries are or are not effectively intervening in poverty, this capstone primarily reviews two types of document. The first type is that which is published from a library's point of view. This takes the form of resources such as articles from the American Libraries Journal, published by the American Library Association. These materials from the library's point of view highlights what services the library sees itself as providing, and how they highlight their perceived interventions into poverty, its causes, and its consequences. I will then contrast these library centered articles with work that looks at libraries in the greater context of community and informational literacy. These lenses will help provide a sense of how accurately a library is actually meeting the needs of a community, or how services fail to reach people. Regardless, these are text based documents that are having a qualitative interpretation done upon them. Each piece of literature is being viewed both on its own and compared to one another, with the pieces existing in conversation to provide the broadest view of the library as an institution within a larger system of community. While this capstone may refer to "the library" in the singular, meaning libraries as an institution, that is somewhat of a misnomer that must be disclaimed. There are a variety of different types of libraries -- from public libraries to academic libraries to specialized archive collections -- but this paper will largely be concerned with public libraries and school libraries, as those are the two assumed to have the most public interaction. [From Methodology section]