Participatory Service Reflection
Participatory Culture Is it possible to challenge one of the foundational assumptions of information science: that libraries are for users? As I read through the readings for this module (and the previous), I was again stuck with this foundational assumption: to quote Schneider (2006), “The user is the sun”. I want to challenge that idea (not necessarily to throw it away) to ask what happens if we don’t start from that premise? Or to turn the question around: how does that belief shape what we do? If we want to disrupt and “think like a start-up” then maybe we can consider the idea that something else is the sun (I’m not at all harkening back to some glorious time in the past when the librarian was the sun . . . or whatever the previous metaphor was), but how does our thinking, actions and design change if we think of multiple suns (or demote everything to a planet) and make democracy or freedom or literacy or language is power or chocolate as the sun? Or even, what if participa
