Territory: a central concept for brazilian community libraries

Abstract

It reflects on the role of the concept of “territory” in community libraries and the use of this term as a fundamental concept in the characterization of Brazilian community libraries, highlighting the sociocultural bias and the importance of these spaces for the communities in which they are located. This is an exploratory-descriptive and qualitative study, carried out through bibliographic and documentary research. The bibliographic study was based on specialized literature on Brazilian Information Science and Librarianship, using as sources the Information Science Database (BRAPCI) and the Database of National Research Meetings in Information Science (BENANCIB). The documentary research was based on the analysis of how the National Network of Community Libraries (RNBC) uses the concept of “territory” in its documents that guide the management and operation of community libraries in Brazil, as well as on its website. The results indicate that the term “territory” is widely used by RNBC, but little explored by the scientific literature on Information Science analyzed in bibliographic research. It is concluded that the areas of Information Science and Library Science still need to adopt this concept to reflect the dynamics present in Brazilian community libraries.