8 LAM Professionals and the Public Sphere

Abstract

The role of archives, libraries and museums is changing. During the last decades all three professional fields are witnessing profound paradigm changes. At least on a programmatic and theoretical level, New Librarianship, NewMuseology and New Archival Thinking are being developed (see for example Buschman 2003; Lankes 2011; Vergo 1989; McCall and Gray 2013; Ross 2015; Simon 2010; Huvila 2008; MacNeil and Eastwood 2017; Theimer 2018). In the light of digitalization and other global developments all three institutions revisit their role as platforms, increased participatory interaction with their potential communities and their effective mission in the society. The transformations in the digital society seem to foster similar changes in the three fields which are not only digital and not only technology triggered (Rasmussen 2019). They emphasise new roles beyond the mere information collection and dissemination function for all three of these institutions (Smiraglia 2014). In addition to the traditional roles of preserving and promoting the cultural heritage and being arenas for learning, there is an increased focus upon their role asmeeting places and arenas underpinning the public sphere with the mission of sustaining democratic values in societies (see for the field of libraries Buschman 2018; Hobohm 2019; Rivana Eckerdal 2017; Widdersheim and Koizumi 2016). How do professionals in the respective LAM fields perceive the challenges related to this new focus on their role asmeeting places and arenas for promoting the public sphere? We will investigate this question in this paper. Two trends are of particular importance regarding the topic of our research. One trend can be termed the social turn, Söderholm and Nolin’s (2015) assertion that we are in the middle of what they call the third community wave, the start of which dates from the turn of the century and continues to the present day. Klinenberg’s perspective on libraries as important parts of the social infrastructure can