Four Passages to Information Use Related Phenomena in Bachelor Theses at the Finnish Universities of Applied Sciences

Peer reviewe

The Death and Life of English Public Libraries: Infrastructural practices and value in a time of crisis

This thesis examines the changing identity, spaces and fortunes of English public libraries in the context of 21st-century austerity and neoliberal reform of local government services. It interrogates what we can understand the practices and values of public libraries to mean at a time when the very notions and forms of what is ‘public’ and what is ‘a library’ are up for grabs. Since their inception in the mid-nineteenth century, public libraries developed with a mission to enable social change through providing free and equal access to learning resources and knowledge spaces for all. This thesis asks how far public libraries can maintain this foundational identity as institutional agents of social change, while simultaneously being forced to change their organisational forms in present conditions of crisis. It reveals what is getting both lost and gained through this double valency of change and articulates how reading library crises at the local level sheds light on a wider national condition of crisis. Based on multi-sited ethnography and interviews in London and Birmingham between 2013-2017, it examines what kinds of publics, values, and arguments for public value are produced and contested in these different library contexts. An analysis of the social and infrastructural relations between ‘local’ and ‘central’ forms of power and (counter)publics connects the case studies. A temporal skein also threads the cases together, using a conjunctural analysis approach to trace how historical moments of social and political change are embedded within emergent organisational and cultural transformations in the unfolding present. Scholarship on the practices of public libraries is scarce in sociology. This thesis bridges this gap and develops existing knowledge with a lively ethnographic imagination, addressing the urgent need to articulate and make visible the multi-dimensional value of these quickly-disappearing public infrastructures. By exposing the practices that make and un-make the public library, the thesis argues that the state of the country’s libraries can be read as a critical diagnostic barometer for the life and death of municipal England. It also argues that the public library’s future survival as an enabler of social change depends upon mobilising political conversations across sectors and academic disciplines with a view to bridging activist and professional practice

Special Libraries, Summer 1987

Volume 78, Issue 3https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1987/1002/thumbnail.jp

Special Libraries, Summer 1987

Volume 78, Issue 3https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1987/1002/thumbnail.jp

THE ACADEMIC LIBRARY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: A Q-STUDY OF LIBRARIAN ATTITUDES

This study took place on the campus of a Hispanic-serving institution, and used Q methodology to assess the attitudes and perceptions of academic librarians toward a social justice role for the university library. Among librarians and others in higher education, there is a great deal of confusion around social justice as a concept because over the past forty years, it has often been subsumed under, or diverted by the neoliberal discourse of multicultural education, which conflates social justice with providing equal opportunities for under-represented students primarily as a means of enabling them to obtain jobs and become consumers in our neoliberal capitalist society. Unfortunately, this perspective dovetails neatly with the positivist traditions of the library profession, which also eschews political involvement and exhorts librarians to remain neutral in the services and collections they provide. Within this discourse, universities and their libraries are stripped of their political and social potential for addressing the structural problems and inequalities which circumscribe the lives of the very students they purport to serve. The results of this study indicate that many librarians believe that their profession’s ethos of neutrality renders the debate over social justice within the library moot. These librarians equate social justice as equivalent to giving equal access to materials that promote the advancement of marginalized groups, and to those that encourage the continuation of the status quo or opposition to equality. Only a small number of librarians envision themselves as well positioned to promote social justice by empowering students to use the resources currently available within the library. Despite the different viewpoints represented by the factors uncovered in this study, there did emerge areas of consensus from which library leaders can mediate conversations aimed at uncovering and evaluating the principles, practices, and attitudes within the library that arise from the dominant White worldview and hinder the library’s ability to serve all students equitably. Conversations about topics such as those implicated in this study, including institutional racism, diversity, social justice, and White privilege are not always comfortable conversations, but they are required if the library is to enact the changes necessary to allow it to serve all students more effectively and more justly. These discussions are especially needed at this time, when academic librarians as a profession remain 86 percent White, while many of our campuses are becoming increasingly racially diverse. If the library is to retain its place as the center of social and political discourse within the university, it is critical that it fully represent and respect the perspectives of non-dominant groups and recognize alternative epistemologies. Breaking with the positivist traditions of the library will allow opportunities for librarians to authentically connect with more of our students, which is particularly needed at Hispanic-serving institutions

Towards an information provision strategy for university libraries in Ghana : the relevance of recent developments in the United Kingdom to the needs of libraries in Ghana.

The study explores the factors that affect the development of a strategic planning process aimed at improving the university libraries in Ghana's capacity to deliver information services effectively and efficiently. Since the structure of universities in Ghana is derived from that of universities in the United Kingdom, the project of necessity includes a consideration of current perceptions to the strategy process in some university libraries in the United Kingdom. The study adopts a multiple case study approach, exploiting the advantages of the use of a combination of varied data collection techniques. The methodology combines the interpretative and positivist methods using 5 case studies in Ghana and 5 in the United Kingdom in order to enhance representativeness. The data was collected from some major stakeholders and a sample of library staff in the universities in Ghana and the heads and deputies of library services in the case study libraries in the United Kingdom. The major findings are that: the major stakeholders and the library staff in the Ghanaian university libraries do not have a single, agreed articulated mission for their libraries; a multiplicity of strategic visions were found to be the subject of disagreement between decision makers and the library staff; the university libraries in Ghana lack the required resources-financial, human, and physical that could give them the strategic capability to provide effective services; the magnitude of the resource-performance relationship in the United Kingdom case studies was found to be strikingly greater than that of the Ghanaian case study institutions; the management style of the university libraries in Ghana is the autocratic type with a top down strategic decision making process and an obsession for control and discipline; the United Kingdom libraries have a relatively more stable political and economic environments than the Ghanaian university libraries whose decision makers are faced with highly unstable political and economic issues. It is argued that in view of these 'pitfalls' in the planning process in the university libraries in Ghana, the process as it is currently applied in the United Kingdom university libraries will not translate to Ghana. The study therefore suggests a new approach to strategy formulation in Ghanaian university libraries. It proposes a flexible strategic management concept which suits the dynamism of the macro and micro environments of the libraries where continual change is unlikely to make once-and-for-all adjustments an appropriate form of managing change. The libraries ought to be capable of inflicting as well as responding to unanticipated changes

College and Research Libraries 37 (5) September 1976

published or submitted for publicatio

Library buildings around the world

"Library Buildings around the World" is a survey based on researches of several years. The objective was to gather library buildings on an international level starting with 1990

BOBCATSSS 2016 : Information, Libraries, Democracy. Proceedings & Abstracts

Actes du congrès BOBCATSSS 2016 qui s\u27est déroulé à Lyon du 27 au 29 janvier 2016 sur le thème : Information, bibliothèques, démocratie