Beyond Librarianship

One of the often overlooked but perhaps critical functions of the civic knowledge space provided by public libraries and most famously celebrated by German social philosopher Juergen Habermas is the assembly of local, often transient, publications. One such, a free broadsheet published from the local University of Toronto campus, was recently discovered by a Beyond Librarianship supporter in the Mississauga Public Library, near Toronto. It's called Commuting and draws on the ambiguity of its title word's simultaneous reference to proliferating transit behaviours and the reduction of decrees, often criminal sanctions. Commuting asks how do we reconcile current society's consumerism with our resulting desperate need for reduction, most acutely conservation of our natural environment.  From a medieval saint can our salvation come? "Sister Water", one article of several like-minded in Commuting, cites "Canticle of the Sun", a song, legend has it, sung ...

Loanership: a library-like commons model for social and economic management         Loanership is a use and return, rather than consume and discard, economic model that is based on the understanding that all resources, be they natural or manufactured, that are available to us humans, depend on a comprehensive set of societal inputs, and so the resulting outputs are owed   in return to the broad range of societal recipients. The roads we all drive on for our personal destinations are foundational examples. We "borrow" them when we use them. At a moment in history when we are confronted by apocalyptic challenges, environmental and technological, loanership offers an opportunity for doing economics in a sustainable way, without wasteful duplication. Responsibility requires us here to first acknowledge that the above model does not cover all aspects of the economic process. Primarily, and most obviously, loanership addresses distribution/exchange rather than ...