Infomediaries and Community Engagement are Key

In the previous chapter, the authors looked at users of public access venues: the majority are young, educationed, and from loweror middle-income backgrounds. Given this user population, the next question was, how do libraries, telecenters, and cybercafés meet the information needs of their users? Three steps are required to serve a population’s information needs: (1) understand the culture fo the use population, (2) include decision-makers who understand the user population, and (3) take advantage of direct input from the user population from project inception. Direct input from users enables them to access information and involves them in solving their information needs in ways that are personally relevant (Bridges.org, 2009). The operators of public access venues play a key role in understanding and meeting the information needs of the local population. A review of the 25 countries studied revealed that public access venues most successful at meeting local information needs of underserved communities often contained one or both of two important features: strong infomediaries and/or strong community engagement. The term infomediary is used in a similar way to gatekeepers (Metoyer-Duran, 1993), key informants (Schilderman, 2002), lay-information mediaries (Abrahamson & Fisher, 2007), or boundary spanners (Mason, 2003). These authors use the term to refer to a liaison or broker between an individual, or group of persons, and another group. They prefer infomediary to emphasize the role of brokering or transferring information in a culturally appropriate manner by taking into account the norms of each group of people with whom the infomediaries connect. Community engagement, on the other hand, is the ability of community members to work together to achieve shared goals. The authors draw from Bieber et al. (2007), who describe “enabling communities” as those that “enable participants to work effectively towards conducting both collective and individual activities and toward achieving collaboratively identified goals.” DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-771-5.ch003