Introduction

This chapter focuses upon a problem with public libraries that only an academic library can fix. This problem originates in a view of public library collection development as simply a response to user demand. Where this becomes the prevailing wisdom, as it has in the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia, the result is often that quality materials, such as publications by university presses, are shunned by selectors. For readers who would ordinarily choose this material the remedies to such a state of affairs are few and far between. One remedy is for the disenfranchised reader of quality materials to use the services of an academic library. While this is certainly an option for readers who live close to an academic library, and in much of the developed world it seems that academic libraries do open their doors to these community borrowers, questions arise as to why the academic library should take on the responsibility for catering to these community borrowers.

What has occurred in our conception of the public library that quality materials are, largely, no longer acquired? In this chapter, a sociology-of-knowledge perspective is used to look for explanations of this phenomenon, but more so to provide a way forward based on the understanding that in many cases ‘the horse has bolted’ with regard to public library collection quality and what remains is to model a new social future for public–academic library partnership that can bring fluidity to citizens’ conceptions of what ‘my library’ means in order to ensure that important works are available to all, and not only the select few.

The explanation that seems to best fit the problem is that public librarians take this course in support of an ideological commitment to reading. Within their professional context, reading any material is preferable to a potential user not reading. In terms of the social practice, what seems clear here is how public librarians have appropriated ‘routines and interpretations’ relating to democratic access to resources and have reinterpreted and reinvented routines as a form of knowledge that they ‘feed back into the field of action’ – discourses on reading and civic participation, epistemology and the like (Reichertz 2013, p. 4).