Programs and Strategies for Community Resilience in a Metropolitan Area Public Library: A Case Study

Abstract

This paper reports a case study on community-oriented public library programs in a metropolitan Texan city. A main purpose of the paper is to report the findings from this explorative case study on the relationship of a public library system with its communities from a community resilience perspective. The study is a part of a research project aiming at creating empirically-based knowledge on the role of public libraries in forming community resilience. The description of specific library programs is a basis for further study of the mechanisms contributing to community resilience. Community resilience enables communities to face major environmental change not only in the form of sudden specific disasters but also in meeting the big, slow-moving change processes shaping communities in the long run. This building of what is called generalized resilience in the community resilience literature is what is needed facing the processes of demographic change concerning aging and migration, paradigmatic change in technology, and unpredictable public policies. Communities are different, and this means that different tools and strategies are needed for building community resilience. This fact calls for multiple case studies on the roles of public libraries in the development of communities.