KEVIN HARRIS

Biography: Kevin Harris has worked for Community Development Foundation, a national agency supported by the Active Communities Directorate of the UK Home Office, since 1986. He served on the Social Exclusion Unit's Policy Action Team on ‘Access to ICT' and chaired one of its sub-groups, also carrying out research at local level. Kevin has worked closely with community sector projects using online technologies and has served on a range of policy groups and working parties, including the DCMS task group on social inclusion and public libraries. He was previously a British Library Research Fellow and has worked in public libraries, as an information consultant, and as an academic researcher. He is co-author of a recent report to MLA on public libraries and community cohesion, and is currently working on issues to do with neighbourhood relations, social capital, and citizen participation. He also runs the neighbourhood weblog, http://neighbourhoods.typepad.com/neighbourhoods/

Title: Living in the Dark Ages?

Summary: This presentation will look at the ways in which neighbours communicate with each other and to debate today's lack of readily available occasions for interaction and common repositories for local community memory.  Resources for the accumulation of local experience - including informal gathering places as well as formal records - make an essential contribution to community cohesion.  But with an impoverished public realm, and lacking the dense overlapping social ties of previous cultures, we may be living in a 'dark age' of neighbourhood communication and community information.  I therefore want to ask: how real is the promise of the network society, what place is there for remote communication among and between local people, and what contribution can local libraries make?