The release of the Ontario Ministry of Culture’s Third Generation Public Libraries in January 2009 provided this researcher with an ideal opportunity to apply critical theory to an analysis of provincial planning documents from the 1950s. The focus of critical research and a key source of evidence is discourse. Thus the language we use to talk about our profession, our work, our institutions, and our users can tell us a lot about social struggles over what it means to be a public service within today’s political and economic landscape. 

Although calls for the reinvention of the public library and the public librarian date from the mid-1970s, it wasn’t until the release in 1990 of One Place to Look: The Ontario Public Library Strategic Plan that the marketization of our discourse began in earnest. Fast forward to 2010. Today, the customer identity is firmly embedded within a public library discourse that effectively mirrors the vocabulary of the corporate sector.