Suchergebnisse

Notions of access have become pervasive in how we currently speak about libraries and their democratic character, as well as in the ways in which we have come to speak about emerging media technologies and, in both cases, access has very clearly come to mean making things available. Although access as it relates to the library is a relatively recent phenomenon, libraries and access have nearly become synonymous. Yet the presumption of access often obscures lingering problems of inaccessibility to various services and spaces for particular classes of people. This article will examine and document the ways in which the normative priority of "access" has been architecturally materialized within the contemporary library. Through a close analysis of Montreal's Grande Bibliothèque and the institution's trajectory from conception to building, this article will explore how architecture has, in part, defined and delimited what sort of institutional public space the Grande Bibliothèque creates. Concepts employed within the preliminary conceptual design phase of the project, such as openness, access, freedom, and publicness, took on new, contradictory meanings when the library materialized, to reveal issues surrounding restriction, control, inaccessibility, and surveillance. I want to lay stress on the process of design and how its various agencies shaped a particular institutional incarnation of the library.

Through an analysis of one of North America's earliest Carnegie libraries, located in Vancouver, the aim of this article is to question increasingly antiquated discourses of the urban public library as a static cultural institution in order to ascertain how contemporary urban libraries are both representative and generative media institutions that are increasingly central to marginalized urban communities. Marginalized communities, such as those living in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, are often overlooked as contributing to the cultural fabric of a city. The Carnegie Library is a site in which precarious, often pre-defined publics, whose members already suffer from established forms of discrimination and exclusion, come together to form a new iteration of the scene (Straw, 2004). I will argue that marginalization, when integrated into a semi-public space and institution such as the Carnegie Community Centre, creates a generative scene that holds the potential of fostering nascent forms of both cultural and political association and education amongst marginalized groups themselves. As a result, the contemporary urban public library emerges as a responsive medium of communication in its own right that is shaped by its siting across distinct urban environments. ; Non UBC ; Reviewed ; Researcher