The paper draws on two independent research projects conducted in Bremen, Germany, and Vienna, Austria. In Bremen, Peterson carried out 23 guided interviews with library visitors between 2020 and 2021 in the central library and two branch libraries, recruiting participants through notices and through the library teams themselves, with the aim of a mix of ages, genders and social and migration backgrounds. In Vienna, Hamm conducted two years of participant observation in a main library and a branch between 2022 and 2025, accompanied three librarians through entire working weeks, and joined Färber and a social designer in running four zine workshops with staff, administrators and visitors, supplemented by nine interviews with library managers and city officials. Both projects combined participant observation, informal conversations, qualitative interviews and document analysis in a focused ethnographic approach.

The theoretical stakes are higher than the quiet subject matter might suggest. The authors deliberately avoid essentialized notions of community, a term that carries troubling historical baggage in the German-speaking world, where its ideological prominence during the Nazi era lent it exclusionary and racist connotations that persist today. Instead they build on Talja Blokland’s understanding of community as a culture of urban practice, and specifically on her concept of familiar publicness: repeated fleeting encounters and lasting engagements create a context in which symbols can be produced and understood, and in which accumulated experiential knowledge can generate a feeling of community. Belonging in this sense is not tied to social identity but to a kind of ease, an absence of any necessity to strain or actively intervene.

What the Bremen interviews reveal is how strongly visitors themselves articulate this ease as a collective achievement. Many described the library not primarily through its functions but through a feeling of belonging bound to repeated co-presence and shared rules of behavior. One visitor spoke of the common good, for which everyone has to give up a little something. Another described a collectivity she was not always entirely happy with, but to which one perhaps has to adapt somewhat. Others emphasized a loose, indirect feeling of community arising from shared interests, something rather unconscious that connects people without requiring constant conversation.

This vocabulary of adaptation points to the core mechanism the researchers identify: self-regulation as a form of care. One visitor explained that in the library one learns not always to think me, me, me, but also to pay attention to the we. When she meets friends in the library and things get loud, the group deliberately seeks out noisy corners where their volume is no problem for others. Reading the built space correctly, knowing which areas suit which behavior, becomes a prerequisite both for pursuing one’s own use and for sustaining a feeling of belonging. Another visitor framed rule-following as mutual responsibility: he keeps the rules so that he can find his way, so that he is accepted, and so that he can convey that same feeling to others, while stressing that he remains free to decide what he wants to do there, as long as his behavior remains compatible with the implicit expectations, because only that way does it work here.

Crucially, visitors interpret this order as inclusive rather than coercive. One interviewee insisted that the rules have nothing to do with your passport, your origin or your library card; they apply to everyone, and the control is not personal but for the place, so that everyone can be here, for the community. This perceived even-handedness helps visitors reframe frustration: when others behave in borderline ways, many respondents attribute it to individual circumstances, such as someone with severe psychological problems or someone under the influence of alcohol, rather than to a breakdown of the social order. Transgressors are often tolerated rather than expelled, with librarians seen as stepping in discreetly so that things do not get out of hand.

Yet the responsibility for maintaining this order is strikingly unequal. Visitors largely accept that explicit rule communication and conflict management belong to the staff. One visitor said she does not address misbehaving strangers herself, preferring to watch rather than get into an argument, because that is perhaps better coming from the staff, which she saw as their mandate or task. The researchers read this division of labor as central to the logic of library etiquette: visitors embody the etiquette habitually in their own conduct, while assigning librarians the job of making that order visible, securing it and enforcing it in cases of conflict. Community thus appears not as a given social structure but as the outcome of everyday, often invisible processes of coordination in which care work is distributed unevenly across actors.

On the staff side, the Vienna material shows how librarians produce, moderate and stabilize togetherness as a professional ethic. Programmatically, community is addressed explicitly: Austria’s 2024 federal library development plan states that libraries strengthen the local community and that a community forms in the library for all that recognizes differences and is open to the new. Yet in everyday practice librarians are notably reserved about the word itself. Asked directly about community, two branch librarians agreed only when prompted with the idea of many small communities in the library, describing people with different needs, some wanting quiet, others being loud, and characterizing their work as a constant weighing up, a matter of keeping the balance. Librarians describe their professional stance as a reliable, restrained presence, a kind of being-there, and frame their friendliness as the private part of professional work, aimed at creating a pleasant climate.

The guiding maxim of this flexible regulation, repeated in varied forms, is whatever does not disturb is allowed. House rules technically restrict drinks, phone calls and food, but librarians handle the coffee machine, eating and mobile phones pragmatically as long as no one is disturbed, viewing everything from the human side. Even conflict is folded into this relational order. When a group of teenage boys entered a small branch, raised the noise level and moved chairs around, a colleague admonished them firmly but kindly; later the researcher observed the same boys standing around the dishwasher as a staff member showed them how to load it correctly. Rule enforcement was transformed into instruction and social inclusion, signaling that the boys were welcome while demonstrating practically how the ground rule works. Similar indirect steering appears in micro-practices, such as requiring tea bags and sugar to be collected at the desk to ensure considerate use of the tea kitchen.

The authors conclude that libraries are sites of a specific urban socialization in which people try out and rehearse community. The etiquette works because care is distributed: visitors practice consideration as long as their sense of comfort holds, and transfer responsibility for the etiquette to librarians precisely when comfort would require active effort, which Blokland’s definition of feeling at ease explicitly excludes. This ambivalence has costs. The researchers note that the idealization of libraries’ community-building potential also produces subtle exclusions, and they ask what feeling at ease means for those who use the library without a membership card, sleep there or warm up inside, and for city residents who never enter at all. How open library etiquette remains in any given case, they argue, depends on the negotiable conceptions of democratic urban society available at that place, making the quiet library not a refuge from politics but one of its most delicate everyday stages.

Subject of Research: How library etiquette and distributed care practices produce community in public libraries

Article Title: Öffentliche Büchereien als Orte von Gemeinschaft? Wie Bücherei-Etikette die Sorge für das Miteinander verteilt

Article References: Peterson, M., Färber, A., & Hamm, M. (2026). Öffentliche Büchereien als Orte von Gemeinschaft? Wie Bücherei-Etikette die Sorge für das Miteinander verteilt. Geographica Helvetica, 81(3), 407-419. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-407-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-407-2026

Keywords: public libraries, community, library etiquette, care practices, urban sociality, ethnography, Bremen, Vienna, social infrastructure, belonging, librarians, urban studies

The largest of the new awards, valued at $620,095, places Chen in the principal investigator’s seat for a project titled “Public Library Services for Older Adults in the AI Era: Status, Gaps, Solutions, and Recommendations.” Chen will collaborate with Ping Li of the City University of New York’s Queens College on an effort to strengthen public library services for older adults, a population that often faces the steepest barriers when new technologies arrive. The project will work directly with four public library systems in Illinois, New York, and Washington, DC, grounding its findings in the operational realities of institutions that serve millions of patrons. Rather than treating older adults as an afterthought in technology adoption, the research aims to develop new service models designed explicitly for this group in an era when artificial intelligence increasingly mediates access to information.

The deliverables planned for the project read like a practical roadmap for library systems nationwide. The team intends to produce practical guidelines for developing programs and services focused on older adults, training materials for librarians who must now field questions about AI tools they may never have used themselves, and literacy courses that teach older adults how to navigate AI-mediated information environments. The project will also generate evidence-based recommendations intended to inform library policy and practice, closing the loop between research findings and the institutional decisions that determine whether older patrons benefit from or are excluded by technological change. Both of Chen’s funded projects begin in September 2026 and are expected to run through August 2029, a three-year horizon that allows for iterative design, testing, and refinement across the partner library systems.

Chen’s second award, on which she serves as co-principal investigator, tackles a different frontier of the same technological shift. “ORAL-AI: High Efficacy Content Representation and User Engagement of Oral Digital Collections with Multimodal LLMs” is led by Haihua Chen of the University of North Texas and received $490,396. The project confronts a genuine technical problem: multimodal large language models—systems that can process combinations of text, audio, and images—are being promoted as tools for searching and summarizing archival collections, yet their limitations in the delicate context of oral history remain poorly understood. Oral histories are not ordinary documents. They carry the voices, cadences, and memories of individual narrators, often recounting events of profound historical significance, and errors introduced by an AI system can distort testimony in ways that violate archival integrity.

The ORAL-AI team plans to evaluate those limitations systematically and then build the infrastructure that responsible AI-assisted access requires. Central to the effort is a structured benchmark dataset, which will allow researchers to measure how well multimodal models actually perform on oral history materials rather than relying on anecdotal impressions. The project will also develop a modular, open-source framework supporting three capabilities: cross-modal retrieval, which lets users find relevant passages across different media types; evidence-grounded question answering, which ties the system’s answers back to specific source material instead of allowing free-form generation; and narrative summarization, which condenses long testimonies while preserving their meaning. The research team will collaborate with the Densho Digital Repository and other nationally significant oral collections, ensuring that the framework is tested against real archives with real stakes rather than synthetic test data.

While Chen’s projects probe the intersection of AI and adult services, Sara Schwebel is directing a grant that reaches younger audiences through the material culture of the book itself. Schwebel, professor and director of the Center for Children’s Books, is principal investigator for “Reading the Revolution: Telling the Story of the Nation’s Founding to America’s Youth,” a one-year project valued at nearly $100,000. The project takes an exhibit-and-field-trip model as its organizing structure and brings together an unusually rich set of campus and community partners: the University of Illinois Library, Skeuomorph Press & BookLab, and the Champaign County Forest Preserve. At a moment when public understanding of American history is intensely contested, the project bets on a time-tested method—putting young people in direct contact with historical artifacts and the books that have carried the founding story to each new generation.

The interpretive and digital exhibit at the heart of the project will draw on the University of Illinois library’s remarkable collections, including the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music, and the Social Sciences, Health, and Education Library’s School Collection. That last holding is particularly significant for the project’s aims, since the School Collection documents how children’s literature has transmitted national history to young readers across decades of changing pedagogy and politics. To complement the physical and digital exhibit, the project will create a digital collection and a readers’ advisory guide prepared by the editorial board of The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, one of the field’s most respected review journals. Supplemental materials will be developed by Center for Children’s Books staff together with a “Reading the Revolution” Scholars Council drawn from other colleges and universities, giving the project scholarly depth beyond a single campus.

The programming built around the exhibit is designed to reach multiple audiences simultaneously. Plans include American history-themed storytimes for young children, school-aged library programming, field trips for middle school students throughout the region, and professional development workshops for area librarians and teachers—the adults who will carry the project’s resources into classrooms and libraries long after the grant period ends. Coordination of this ambitious slate falls to Center for Children’s Books Assistant Director Suzan Alteri, Associate Professor Ryan Cordell, doctoral student Owen Monroe, and additional graduate students, a staffing model that doubles as training for the next generation of youth services and digital humanities professionals.

The fourth grant shifts the focus to the librarians themselves. Kahyun Choi serves as a consultant on “Asset-Based AI Toolkit: Leveraging Librarian Cultural Wealth for AI Literacy,” a three-year, $455,066 project led by Hee Rin Lee of Michigan State University. The project’s premise is a deliberate inversion of the deficit framing that often surrounds professional development: instead of asking what librarians lack in their understanding of artificial intelligence, it asks what assets they already possess—what the project calls librarian cultural wealth—and how those strengths can be recognized and leveraged to build and sustain AI literacy programs. The concrete output is a web-based interactive toolkit that librarians can use to identify their own capabilities and translate them into programming for their communities.

Choi’s role in the project draws directly on her distinctive research profile. As an expert in AI for music and poetry within the field of library science, she will provide subject-matter expertise, curate supplementary resources, and offer iterative feedback as the toolkit is developed. Her involvement is not new to this line of inquiry: the toolkit project builds on the team’s earlier IMLS-funded AI literacy work, which produced a program for public libraries with Choi as co-principal investigator. That continuity matters, because AI literacy is not a one-time curriculum but a moving target—each new generation of models changes what patrons need to know and what librarians need to teach.

Taken together, the four National Leadership Grants sketch a portrait of where library and information science research is heading. The projects share a conviction that intelligent technologies will not simply be absorbed by libraries and archives on their own terms; they must be studied, benchmarked, and shaped by the professionals who steward the nation’s information resources. They also share a methodological commitment to partnership—with public library systems in three jurisdictions, with a nationally significant oral history repository, with campus special collections and a community forest preserve, and with peer institutions across the country. Whether the subject is an older adult learning to question an AI chatbot, a researcher probing whether a language model can faithfully summarize a survivor’s testimony, a middle schooler encountering the Revolution through a rare book, or a librarian discovering that her existing expertise is the foundation for teaching AI literacy, the Illinois-led projects treat information institutions not as casualties of technological change but as the places where that change can be made humane, accurate, and broadly accessible.

Subject of Research: IMLS-funded information science research on AI in libraries, oral history archives, children's literature, and librarian AI literacy

Article Title: IMLS grants support information science projects from Illinois researchers

Article References: IMLS grants support information science projects from Illinois researchers. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: IMLS, information science, artificial intelligence, public libraries, older adults, oral history, multimodal large language models, children's literature, AI literacy, digital exhibits, University of Illinois, library services