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This paper aims to focus on the role of the community entrepreneur and the process of community entrepreneurship. It seeks to emphasize the social context as critical for gaining access to the resources needed by a community venture and elaborates on the action pattern of the community entrepreneur towards raising critical resources from the environment.

The analysis is based on a longitudinal field study of community entrepreneurs in four Norwegian rural municipalities. The data consists of interviews, observations, and documents.

Community entrepreneurs create local arenas and thereby facilitate cooperative entrepreneurial action, through bridging social capital. The actors are part of these community contexts and are involved in a range of reciprocal relations. Thus, the actors' creative practices toward the community have to run parallel with the resource configuration process.

Future studies may provide a broader empirical platform in different communities, and take part in the process for a longer time period. One may also develop comparative studies focusing on the basic resource platform, the action pattern, and the performance of the different social ventures.

A major finding is that government support should be flexible and develop tools “tailored” to the characteristics of the rural communities. The combined resources of the entrepreneurs, social networks, and more formal institutions create more ambitious results.

The paper contributes to the field of entrepreneurship by studying community entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial ventures. Further, an integration of a resource configuration approach and a practice‐oriented approach gives an increased understanding to the community venture creation process.

The purpose of this literature review is to provide an overview of and insights into a selected bibliography of 102 research publications on libraries – of all types – sustainability and sustainable development, including the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The review procedure is inspired by the hermeneutic literature review method, referring to a circular process of searching, sorting, selecting, acquiring, reading, identifying and refining. The publications are mapped to provide an overview of the research field. Following the research mapping, all publications are categorized as either environmental, economic, social, cultural or holistic according to their usage and understanding of the core concepts of sustainability and sustainable development. Finally, the main rationales behind the core concepts are identified, and their possible implications on the role of libraries and librarians are discussed.

Of the 102 research publications, 45 are categorized as environmental, 9 as economic, 9 as social, 3 as cultural and 36 as holistic. The main rationales identified across these categories are optimization, legitimation, demonstration and transformation. The possible implications behind these rationales are that libraries and librarians should be resourceful, explicit about their motivations, serve as good examples and act as change agents. Increasingly, libraries and librarians are expected to act proactively in relation to the global sustainability agenda.

This literature review provides a unique overview of and insights into an emerging research field, which are needed for future research and discussion about the potentiality of libraries and librarians in solving global sustainability challenges.