The Burden of Being Special: Adding Clarity about Communicating to Researching and Serving Users, Special and Otherwise

Abstract

The idea of adapting and designing services and products to serve “special” needs either for the public good or for commercial purposes is fundamentally an idea anchored in US history. At root, it is a simple idea, albeit expressed in widely varying vocabularies across disciplines and professions. In the parlance of social work, public education, and public librarianship, for example, the idea has been repeatedly advanced over the years as a well-meaning reaching out to meet the needs of subpopulations not readily addressed by available service designs. In the parlance of the commercial sector, the idea has focused on market segmentation, dividing the population into finer and finer subgroups for the purposes of marketing products and services. One of the most recent labels for these activities has been marketing to audience “niches” in which the audience is identified “… as a certain definable market segment with demographic characteristics that make it attractive to advertisers.” (Fejes and Lennon, 2000, p. 37).

Citation

Dervin, B., Reinhard, C.D. and Kerr, Z.Y. (2006), "The Burden of Being Special: Adding Clarity about Communicating to Researching and Serving Users, Special and Otherwise", Nitecki, D.A. and Abels, E.G. (Ed.) Advances in Librarianship (Advances in Librarianship, Vol. 30), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 233-269. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2830(06)30007-4