Paul Gabriele Weston

Inclusion is a cultural achievement that must be pursued from childhood: Some reflections on how libraries can
play a role in this task

The Section for Library Services to People with Special Needs (LSN) provides an international forum for the discussion of ideas, sharing of experiences and development of tools designed to promote and improve the effectiveness of library and information services to special needs groups.

This Section is one of IFLA's oldest sections dating back to 1931 when its mission was to promote professional library services to people in hospitals. Due to a range of disabilities that often were secondary to the cause of hospitalization, some patients required special materials. Very soon it became evident that the Committee needed to become advocates for those in the community who cannot make use of conventional library resources.

LSN now targets a wide range of groups, including people who are in hospitals, nursing homes, and other care facilities; people in prisons; people who are experiencing homelessness; people with physical disabilities; people who are deaf, hard of hearing, or deafblind; people with dyslexia; and people with cognitive and mental disabilities.

As each of these groups has features that demand specific forms of attention, the first concern is to identify the practices and skills required to ensure that everyone has access to the resources needed to improve their level of knowledge, to live independently their own existence and to relate to their community. It is a goal that all institutions such as libraries, archives and museums, are required to foster. But accessibility and inclusion are not synonymous because if accessibility implies meeting a series of so-called technical requirements, inclusion is a cultural achievement, which can only start from the knowledge that there are no special people or categories, normal people and different people, but that we are all special, in the sense that it is precisely our diversity and our limitations that make us part of the same community, the community of human beings.

Accepting this change of paradigm, moving from the logic of the ego to that of the us, as Pope Francis defines it, is the necessary condition for the culture of encounter not to give way to that of confrontation, so that human society does not bend to the logic of the rejection of the most vulnerable: the poor, the sick, the elderly, the "unproductive".