Health Literacy Promotion: Contemporary Conceptualizations and Current Implementations in Canadian Health Librarianship

Research questions: What are the current conceptualizations of health literacy, and what strategies are Canadian health librarians in public, academic, and hospital libraries enacting to put health literacy promotion into practice? Data sources: Serving as the basis of this scoping review, library and information science, health sciences, and interdisciplinary databases were searched using key terms relating to health literacy promotion as it relates to services, programming, or resources used in a variety of library settings. A web searched allowed for the inclusion of grey literature sources. Study selection: Data sources were searched using a combination of subject headings and keywords relating to health literacy and librarians or libraries, which served as the inclusion criteria. Sources were also selected for their Canadian context or content and for health literacy promotion programs or services that took place in academic, public, or hospital library settings. Data extraction: Data sources included journal articles, government publications, library association reports, dissertations, grey literature, reviews, and newspaper articles. Data were extracted from selected Canadian data sources, identifying the type of library in which health literacy promotion-related programs were situated, the program\u27s scope, topics covered, and the resources used or developed. Results: The established link between low health literacy and poor health outcomes allows librarians to play an active role in promoting the quality of life of their patrons. Summaries from research articles and publications from library associations provide descriptions of health literacy promotion efforts in public libraries, followed by an examination of the role librarians play in promoting health literacy skills or knowledge in academic and hospital libraries. Conclusion: Analyses of recent health literacy initiatives and programming, including educational programs, electronic or web resources, and cross-discipline committees reveal the diversity of innovative tactics implemented by librarians to promote health literacy. Health literacy awareness is a tool all librarians can incorporate into their interactions with patrons. Current barriers and sources for future inquiry surrounding health literacy promotion in libraries highlight the need for librarians to promote their skill set as a means to gain inclusion as key players in national action plans concerning health literacy promotion

Informing care: Mapping the social organization of families’ information work in an aging in place climate

Within an institutional ethnography method of inquiry, this dissertation makes visible the information work that permeates the care work of families of people living with dementia who are also aging at home. An institutional ethnography privileges people’s everyday work and acknowledges that local contexts are influenced by translocal, ruling relations. To map out the social organization of family caregivers’ information work, this dissertation details four separate, yet interrelated studies. The first study comprises two sets of interviews: one with 13 family caregivers of older adults to understand their experiences of the information work they do and a second with five paid dementia care staff to identify the decisions and work processes that impact families’ information work. In the second study, I use Arksey and O’Malley’s six stage scoping review framework to understand how academic research frames family caregivers’ information work. I then structure the third study as a methodological critique as I deconstruct the scoping review framework and consider the implications of conducting a scoping review within an institutional ethnography conceptual framework. In the fourth chapter, I use Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to Be?” analytical tool to structure the reading of aging in place policies to examine the degree to which these policies acknowledge the work families do in the home to support an older adult to age at home. Results from the studies reveal a disjuncture between the ways that families experience information in their everyday lives and the ways that information is understood in the remaining articles. Information is mobilized by academic researchers and aging in place policies as an intervention or tool to enable caregivers to support older adults to age in place for as long as possible. Aging in place is ultimately conceived of as an ideological code that socially organizes and structures a particular way of understanding information, one that centers on informing to care. Whereas families view information as inextricably linked to their care work, policies and articles frame information as separate and outside of care

Information World Mapping to Explicate the Information- Care Relationship in Dementia Care

Information world mapping is a helpful data elicitation technique to make visible the hidden work of finding, using and making sense of information. This methods-based paper explores the utility of a mapping exercise both within an institutional ethnographic study and in eliciting informants’ understandings and descriptions of their care-related information work. Eleven family caregivers of community- dwelling older adults living with dementia drew maps of their information worlds. Each map depicts a unique combination of information resources (people, agencies, texts and websites) accessed, relationships that shape the information work in addition to key locations frequented to access information. Given the difficulty in delineating the boundaries of information, the mapping exercise served as a helpful tool for caregivers to make visible the intricacies of their information work, including the barriers encountered and inventive strategies created to access, use and translate information needed to guide and support their care work

Add Info and Stir’: An Institutional Ethnographic Scoping Review of Family Care-Givers’ Information Work

Family care-givers are increasingly expected to find, understand and use information to meet the complex needs of older adults in their care. A significant number of studies, however, continue to report that care-givers’ information needs are unmet. Following Arksey and O’Malley’s scoping review framework, I examined 72 articles for the range and extent of available research on the information work done by family care-givers of community dwelling older adults living with dementia. To untangle the complex relationship between information and care, this scoping review maps out (a) the ways scholarly literature conceptualises the informational components of family care-givers’ work and (b) the degree to which scholarly research acknowledges these components as work. An institutional ethnography inflection enhanced the scoping review framework, enabling the privileging of lived experiences, questioning of assumptions of language used, attending to authors’ positioning and highlighting care-givers’ information work made invisible throughout the processes of academic research

Mind the Gap: Towards the Integration of Critical Gerontology in Public Library Praxis

Aging populations challenge public libraries to adapt their materials, services and programming to maximize the wellbeing and functional capacity of older adults and enhance their social participation and security. For older adult patrons using public library spaces and services, the capacity to which the public library has been able to deliver on these qualities remains unclear. In the past, libraries and library staff have been critiqued for narrowly interpreting the needs of older adults, concentrating on aging as a loss or deficit. To understand the current state of Canadian urban public library services for older adults, publically accessible texts, documents and reports made available on five public library systems’ websites were analyzed. This analysis uncovered certain gaps in adherence to key guidelines in the Canadian Library Association’s Canadian Guidelines on Library and Information Services for Older Adults and revealed a lack of integration of older adults’ own ideas and feedback for their programs and events. The incorporation of a critical gerontology approach throughout the analysis begins to elucidate this study’s findings and calls for the questioning of current conceptualizations of older adults and the library services created for them. Public libraries are uniquely poised to engage with older adults and the addition of a critical gerontology lens in library practice and research will aid in the refocusing of resources and policies to more responsively support older adults’ evolving needs

Communicating with Library Patrons and People with Dementia: Tracing an Ethic of Care in Professional Communication Guidelines

In both library reference work and dementia care, communication between personnel and service recipients can be both complex and complicated. Professionals in both fields have therefore developed protocols and standards to assist personnel in handling these interactions. In this article we detail an exploratory comparative study that used an ethic of care framework to compare prominent guidelines for reference librarians (American Library Association’s Reference and User Services Association’s Guidelines for behavioral performance of reference and information service providers) with guidelines for workers in long-term dementia care settings (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s Guideline on supporting people with dementia and their carers in health and social care). We explored how both sets of guidelines frame the act of communication as a combination of regulated procedure and empathetic discourse to determine how the similarities among and differences between these two guidelines provide useful insights into each other. Our examination was structured using an ethic of care lens, which emphasizes the importance of interpersonal relationships, reciprocity, and empathetic benevolence. Using specific phrases in each set of guidelines that align with and are evidence of Tronto’s (1993a) four moral principles of care, we ultimately discovered, in both sets of Guidelines, an underlying ethic of care: a repeated insistence upon embedding procedures within behaviour that manifests attentiveness, responsibility, responsiveness, and competence

Writing and reading the results: the reporting of research rigour tactics in information behaviour research as evident in the published proceedings of the biennial ISIC conferences, 1996 – 2014

Introduction. This study examined if and how information behaviour researchers include research rigour tactics in reports of their research projects. Method. A content analysis was conducted of the 193 research reports published in the 1996 – 2014 ISIC proceedings. Analysis. Articles were coded for author affiliation, rigour tactics reported, and whether or not enough information was presented to allow readers to assess the quality of the research and replicate the study. Both quantitative (frequencies) and qualitative (excerpts from the articles) data are reported. Results. In total 698 research rigour tactics were reported for an average of 3.6 per paper, a median of 3 per paper and a range of 0 – 20 tactics across all papers. Twenty-six papers (13.5%) included no rigour tactics at all while 8 (4.1%) included ten or more. Only 76 (39.4%) provided enough information for readers to assess the quality of the study, with fewer (n=44; 22.8%) providing enough information to allow for replication of the study. Conclusions. Both quantitative and qualitative empirical work is not being reported in ISIC papers in ways that clearly demonstrate research rigour, nor assure replicability

Palaces for the People: Mapping Public Libraries\u27 Capacity for Social Connection and Inclusion

Public libraries are trusted community hubs that foster connections with individuals of different socioeconomic statuses; ages; ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural backgrounds; and sexual and gender identities. Located in diverse settings, library branches offer resources and programs that meet the specific needs of their communities who are navigating the effects of our increasingly asocial society. Libraries have been shown to cater to individuals contending with higher levels of social isolation and loneliness, as well as increased rates of mental illnesses and antisocial behaviours. The shift to online environments during COVID-19 has exacerbated feelings of disconnection. During these times of change, public libraries facilitate resilience, helping communities withstand and adapt to difficult circumstances. While several individual studies have separately examined libraries’ outreach efforts, what remains unknown is the broader knowledge landscape regarding public library practices, spaces, and activities that collectively create and reinforce social connections in an increasingly asocial society. We examined scholarly literature to answer the following questions to to bridge existing knowledge gaps: How do public libraries help patrons create or maintain connections in their communities? What population groups are included in public library research and in what ways are they differently impacted by public library services, materials, and/or spaces? How are public library virtual programming and services (especially prominent during COVID-19) changing the ways in which patrons engage with public libraries? In what ways does the Canadian public library research landscape compare or differ from that in European and Australasia countries, and what lessons can we glean from these differences?Underlying a majority of the included articles is an acknowledgement that the role of public libraries is changing, from operating as information repositories to now also operating as community hubs. The ways in which public library systems and branches engage with their communities and patrons are therefore also shifting. Focusing in particular on the current state of public library-related research knowledge on issues related to growing feelings of disconnection, isolation and loneliness, articles explored the multiple ways in which public libraries afford connection for and among their patrons. Public libraries draw on their spaces, their staff, their collections and materials, their programs, and relationships with community organizations to bolster feelings of connection. Given the distribution of public libraries across the country, in urban and rural locales and in neighbourhoods of high and low poverty, the ways in which public libraries both connect with and provide connection manifest differently depending on their contexts. Research on this topic is indicative of the many different population groups that public libraries engage with and support on a daily basis. Research focuses on a myriad of population groups, including: children, youth, older adults, parents, unhoused populations, differently abled individuals, immigrants and non-permanent residents, among others. This breadth of population groups, each with their own unique circumstances, needs, and expectations, is indicative of the range of factors and contexts library workers need to consider and incorporate in their programs, collections, arrangement of physical and virtual spaces, and administration. Across published research, public libraries fostered connection through the following means: Encouraging feelings of belonging Creating connections through technology Reinforcing cultural identities Creating safe physical spaces Addressing issues of accessibility Creating new educational programming Creating new recreational/social programmin

Questioning reliability assessments of health information on social media

This narrative review examines assessments of the reliability of online health information retrieved through social media to ascertain whether health information accessed or disseminated through social media should be evaluated differently than other online health information. Several medical, library and information science, and interdisciplinary databases were searched using terms relating to social media, reliability, and health information. While social media’s increasing role in health information consumption is recognized, studies are dominated by investigations of traditional (i.e., non-social media) sites. To more richly assess constructions of reliability when using social media for health information, future research must focus on health consumers’ unique contexts, virtual relationships, and degrees of trust within their social networks