Communities

Communities

Quote from Wiki: “The term community has two distinct commutative meanings: 1) Community can refer to a usually small, social unit of any size that shares common values. The term can also refer to the national community or international community, and 2) in biology, a community is a group of interacting living organisms sharing a populated environment.”



So I am thinking what would be the community for a library. For a public library, I think it’s a community sharing a populated environment. For academic library or other types of library, it might be a unit that shares common values. In a community, people have common intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs or risks. And due to the advent of the Internet, the concept of community has less geographical limitation for digital libraries such as JSTOR. As people can now gather virtually in any online community and share common interests regardless of physical location just by simply clicking the button.



And libraries vary from each other based on their communities. I mean, a public library is a more general library than an academic library which has a community formed by scholars and knowledge professionals. A library would also adjust itself to meet its community’s needs. I was doing the Rapid Response 2 for IST 511 class, analyzing why there was a gender gap in salary. And I thought the community could be a main reason for that as well. An academic library might get a large amount of funding than a public library.

Picture of Communities. Retrieved from http://www.igorinjo.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/CommunityManager.jpg