Abstract

VARGAS-HERNANDEZ, Diana; SAENZ DIAZ, Doris Edith  and  ROJAS ROJAS, Lizeth Rocío. The public library in the social imaginary of the user: the case of the Municipal Public Library of Duitama, Boyacá, Colombia. Rev. colomb. soc. [online]. 2021, vol.44, n.1, pp.237-260.  Epub Nov 22, 2021. ISSN 0120-159X.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rcs.v44n1.87881.

History has shown us the change of meanings, senses, and uses that public libraries have had, as well as the expansion to diverse municipalities in Colombia. However, it needs processes that reactivate it in the social sphere from studies that glimpse a symbiotic relationship, library-user. A particular case refers to the Zenón Solano Ricaurte Public Library in Duitama, an educational space that, since its recognition as a public entity in 1997, was intended to serve as a recreational tool in the teaching-learning processes. How-ever, and beyond the obvious problems it presents, the public library has gone through a series of transformations as a door to free access to knowledge, as a repository of past ideas for present and future generations, and as a promoter of new cultural alternatives for the entertainment and permanence of its users, thus promoting a kind of resistance to encourage its use and keep it from falling into oblivion.

This research with a hermeneutic approach, and descriptive scope, collected through semi-structured interviews and focus groups the social imaginary built by the user around his or her relationship with the library in question. An imaginary that contributed to the understanding of this space from the individual and collective dimension of the practices of use that surround: the first, by aiming at the consolidation of the self in terms of the resignification of identity based on the affective bond with the library as a space that is travelled, visited, inhabited; and the second, as part of the improvement of interpersonal relations and collaborative dynamics between users of the place. In this way, the proposed reflections have been given from the perceptive processes that configure it not from its historicity but from its symbolic validity as a territory that promotes cultural practices. In the same way, it conceives the citizen as a social being who cohabits with the environment in search of achieving his personal development objectives.

Descriptors: Colombia, cultural user, identity, public library.

Keywords : cultural user; imaginary; meaning; public libraries; social system.

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