ABSTRACT
Culturally, the Conservatives sought to balance social fragmentation and individualism with a renewal of the faith in national cohesion and traditional family values. Such 'Thatcherism', as it became known, devastated many of Britain's industrial communities, and, because of the social dislocation it caused, for a time seemed to threaten the very notion of 'community' as social solidarity. This chapter explores these questions through an analysis of three key facets of the community librarianship of this period: the development of services to unemployed people, community information services, and 'multicultural' library services. The public library response was in general far from radical, although worthy and perhaps symptomatic of the welfare professionalism of a passing age. Fundamentally, community information came to be seen as the 'fourth right of citizenship' in a burgeoning 'information' society. Such 'multiculturalism', in tune with the liberal orthodoxies of the time, replaced assimilation as the goal of much of British public policy.
