Health Intermediaries? Positioning the Public Library in e-Health Discourse

Abstract

Much existing policy and literature on public libraries and health information seeking is framed, implicitly at least, within ‘e-health’ discourse, which understands health information as empowering and the internet as a tool for accessing that information. In this discourse, public libraries are understood as key intermediaries of health information, offering both specialist services in information retrieval and free access to the internet for consumer-citizens who are active and responsible information seekers. Through an exploration of the practices involved in supporting health information-seeking practices in the public library context,1 this chapter analyses how understanding e-health discourse can help us make sense of the specific sociotechnical configuration set up in the public library to support these practices. The analysis draws on the circuit of culture model (du Gay et al., 1997) to explore and understand how the public library is represented in e-health discourse; what identities or ‘subject positions’ are produced for both library staff and users within this discourse and the relationship between production and consumption activities, what we might think of as the mediating processes involved in e-health practices in the public library.