The public library is....; mapping stakeholder perspectives on the values and purposes of the public library

Abstract

We used survey responses and statements of library organizations to create a corpus of items describing the value of public libraries. A sample of public library users and staff from the province of Ontario individually sorted these statements into groups and labelled the groups, and rated each statement with respect to its general importance, its centrality to the mission of the public library, and its uniqueness to the public library. We used GroupWisdom™ software to analyze individual responses into an overall concept map and to identify differences in patterns across different participant groups.

Pam McKenzie

Faculty of Information & Media Studies, Western University

Pam McKenzie is a Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at The University of Western Ontario, trying to remember who she is as a researcher after 10 years as an administrator.

Jacquelyn Burkell

Faculty of Information & Media Studies, Western University

Jacquie Burkell is (Acting) Associate Vice-President (Research) and is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies. She holds a PhD in Psychology (Cognitive Science) from Western and Jacquelyn served as the faculty’s Assistant Dean of Research for seven years and chaired the Associate Deans (Research) group from 2016-2018. Throughout her career, Jacquelyn has served on a wide variety of academic committees, including the 2016 URB Task Force Steering Committee – Support for Research in Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities at Western. A highly collaborative scholar, Jacquelyn is a co-investigator on two SSHRC partnership grants – one examining artificial intelligence in the context of justice, the other focused on youth equality and privacy online. More broadly, her research focuses on the social impact of technology and examines how technological mediation changes social interaction and information behaviour.

Janet Allen

Faculty of Information & Media Studies, Western University

Janet is a PhD student in Library and Information Science at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University.