Spaces of Encounter: Community and the Public Library

In our increasingly globalized world, the space of the public library is changing. This poster sheds light on and discusses two different sorts of negotiations of space and how they relate to the public library. The first is the concept of the low-intensive meeting place, in which people are exposed to ideas and values different from their own. The second is the idea of Third Space, where people encounter a culture and redefine themselves in relation to the discourse of the space. Taken together, these two models suggest how public library users relate to the space of the library and how librarians can understand and manage the construction of the symbolic library space to benefit the diverse communities that they serve