Retooling the public library as social infrastructure: a Dutch illustration

Public libraries are more than information providers; they increasingly serve as key social infrastructures. Financial pressures, decreasing membership and digitalisation require libraries to reinvent themselves as primarily spaces of an encounter. This paper focuses on the retooling of small public libraries in the Netherlands as social infrastructure and the formal and informal library practices (‘infrastructuring’) that are required for the library to function as space of encounter. The paper reports on an in-depth, single-case study based on 15 years of volunteering, participant observations, repeated interviews with staff and informal conversations with patrons. By examining the multi-purposed features of a single site, we illustrate how the library, as an exemplary public space, is being retooled by both staff and patrons. While encounters mostly seem to occur within rather than between groups, there are many meaningful acts of kindness between different people. Though the library is undeniably a social infrastructure, the paper also shows how difficult it is to document, let alone practice this social function.