Edinburgh Napier University

  This work is concerned with the role of the public library in England and Scotland in the twenty-first century. The findings derive from the analysis of empirical data collected in 24 focus groups over a period of four years between 2014 and 2018.

The main contribution of the thesis is that it extends understandings of the significant part that the public library plays as a ‘public sphere’, achieved through the fulfilment of three fundamental roles: (1) epistemic; (2) community; and (3) political. This is manifest in the provision of secure, neutral spaces where social, human and transactional capital is exchanged. The contribution is significant because previous research in Information Society Studies has presented public libraries merely as peripheral players in the public sphere. In this prior work the focus has fallen on the epistemic function of public libraries in furnishing access to information: there is little acknowledgement of the generation of social, human and transactional capital amongst active public library users. Similarly, in the Library and Information Studies (LIS) literature, the role of the library as a public sphere is under-played at the expense of attention paid to value, impact and performance measurement - currently in respect of societal outcomes and, in the past, by usage.

A further contribution of the thesis is to methodologies in LIS research. The empirical study demonstrates the value of the implementation of a flexible, multi-locational, longitudinal, focus group method to explore perceptions of public libraries held by active users. This approach may be transferable to other library sectors.