The public library, a place for citizen training: methodological references of the research process

Abstract

This article describes the methodological referents that served as foundation for the research the public library as key to citizenship formation: its political dimension, in progress. This process has as its axis the understanding of the political dimension of the public library from a qualitative-interpretative approach, and tries to account for the new senses and functions of this institution in the XXI century, immersed in a democratic society that recognizes knowledge and information as essential tools for the exercise of citizenship. Thus, the research interest combined with the research work carried out in the area, while the interpretive analysis of the theoretical stands in the main documents about the public library combined with the study of the Parque Biblioteca España – PBE case, located in the city of Medellín, Colombia, and with qualitative techniques such as document analysis, the participative observation and the interview. This combination of approach, method and techniques allowed an analytic and comprehensive approach to discourses, actions, relations and perceptions that make it possible to read the public library as a tool for citizenship formation. At the end, the paper explains the findings as a function of the social context and the meaning reached by the PBE, as a space of peace and location that makes it possible to exercise the citizenship, also the findings from the analysis and revision of discourses written about the public library, in contrast with one and the same exercise on the texts produced during the participative observation that reveal the homogeneity of the discourse of the actors interviewed.