Library as Infrastructure

Summary:

In this article Shannon Mattern lays out a fascinating historical perspective of the development of physical attributes of a library and how they influence and are influenced by the media that they house.  She starts with Mevil Dewey’s influence on all aspects of the library in terms of not only the organization of materials (like the Dewey Decimal System) but also the physical apparati that we use to access information (like the original card catalog that we used to organize the metadata).  Mevil Dewey, among many things, was an entrepreneur that had his hands in everything and anything that had to do with information, including how we develop it, organize it, access it and distribute it.  

The author, Mattern, continues from this historical perspective toward our present day libraries addressing the question, ' what is the library and what is its purpose?’  We no longer have Mevil Dewey to guide the answers to these questions, but we do have many new players that influence the direction of the library as a concept.  Including David Weinberger, who suggested that the library should consider itself a ‘platform’ for the creation of knowledge.   Mattern has some issues with this concept and instead suggests that the library is not just a “two-dimensional” space for the creation of information but is rather a vastly more complex infrastructure that embodies all information in all of its forms.  

Starting from the assumption that the library is the physical and digital infrastructure of information, Mattern continues to support this concept in addressing two forms of infrastructure (social infrastructure and technological-intellectual infrastructure).  Through this lens she explains the library's role in developing the infrastructures that ultimately influences the community that the library serves.  

Why this article is valuable to me and why I think in may be valuable to you:

As a new student to LIS, I am constantly feeling (and hearing from professors) that the library is struggling to define itself in this information age.  Most (almost all?) information that used to be physically housed in a library is now housed digitally and can be accessed privately.  People used to go to the library for answers, now they can go to their computers.  So, I’m constantly asking, ‘what is the library? And why is it important in this new era?’  I think this article really helped me to understand or to at least have a vision of what the library is in this new world that we now live in.  

Reference:

  Mattern. (2014). Library as Infrastructure. Places (Cambridge, Mass.), 2014. https://doi.org/10.22269/140609