Library-themed conference at UWE today. (Organised by John Vincent of The Network) Working-over some by-now-familiar themes on the state of play as regards libraries and social inclusion (whoops, regime change means we're probably meant to call it something else now), along with some examples of practices that supported this: particularly the Partners in Literacy project (under the aupices of the National Literacy Trust) that Lucy Kitchener presented.

A sub theme of today's conversations seems to be the work of enlarging the discourse of 'what libraries do'. We tend – as library workers – not to take the credit we should for what we enable or bring about. Although the communities we serve are the ones who are actually producing the outputs we should be looking at, we just don't see it that way. We are a vital support for culture in its widest sense: stuff people do together. Of course there are certain specialisms that tend to be where libraries excel in this area, but managing knowledge (would 'cultural access' be a better, if somewhat ungainly, term?) is what gives people the access they need in so many more ways than just simple search.

I see our work as something like RNA – without it the good stuff (DNA) just couldn't do its work, and its our job to facilitate that.

We had a good worry about what The Big Society will mean to all this. As readers (if there are any!) of my recent posts will know, I believe that the service we offer to networks and communities is valuable and worth investing in: I also don't think that it's easy. If libraries in the digital age didn't exist, we'd have to invent them. We might erroneously think that we can do without them, but were they to disappear, they'd be followed by something else that took up the same cultural niche. What's worrying is that this might happen, but the institutions that replace libraries might not have the same sense of social duty attached to their remit. That would be a loss, and would be to disarticulate some of the links between literacy, society and fairness.

What we need to do is to reconnect the beginning and end of what we do. Libraries can offer more than just the means to search; we can offer the understanding that will help people to do so, and the local value and expertise that can help zero in on resources. Goohle knows that the story is important: this is why they tried out Search Stories, and regardless of what we make of that, the story is the thing. I think there is no better way to get a handle on what the service offered is. Of course, Google have it easy. Their service is a box with a button on it. But, y'know, there's more.

I also think that there is a facet of the bog society. localism, that might have some interesting aspects that I don't completely disagree with (this too was a topic under general discussion). I can see its value to possible partners too, though: if libraries are a kind of cultural clearinghouse for local communities, they might have value to trade in terms of shared value in the Michael Porter/business-speak sense. If businesses seek cultural partners that are part of their 'cluster' or community, it could be that libraries have a lot to offer. As I have mentioned before, this could be a deal with the devil, (which is why one examines the contract very carefully), but it chimes neatly with other parts of the conference where we talked at length about how to make partnerships with other organisations/stakeholders successful.

So pretty good stuff. Wish I had a bit more experience to throw into these things, though, as the work I do is always on the fringes, always kind of almost under the auspices of what De Certeau calls la perruque.