Abstract
The concomitant phenomenon of contemporary society's development is the radical transformation of information and communication processes, the disruption of traditional social ties and an increase in distrust. This situation also influences the role of libraries in society, with particular impact on public libraries.
Public libraries fulfil their traditional cultural function by providing access to information, but they also perform an increasingly important community role. Thus public libraries can significantly contribute to forming and consolidating trust in the society at the mezzo-level between macro and microsphere, strengthen social cohesion, and consolidate relations between stratified groups of the society at the local level.
An essential condition for fulfilling the community role is a thorough understanding of the position of the public library in the local social network. The approaches used by libraries so far are based on partial, intuitive forms of assessment.
In our study, we prove that the analysis of such networks can be based on a theoretically as well as methodologically rigorous approach. This article outlines the possibilities of using a specific sociological method - Social Network Analysis (SNA) - in the field of library and information science (LIS), specifically to analyze the position of the library in the local community and the community itself as a whole.