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As social infrastructures, public libraries are increasingly recognised as providing more than access to books and information; librarians’ work is importantly centred around practices of care. However, the ways in which they provide care is poorly researched, let alone conceptualised. This paper explores how this important part of librarians’ daily work is practiced through the lens of infrastructuring.

The paper first theoretically discusses the concepts of social infrastructuring, care and tinkering. Then, it turns to ethnographic research conducted in the public library networks of three European cities: Vienna (Austria), Rotterdam (the Netherlands) and Malmö (Sweden). The paper comprises empirical materials from all three countries and unpacks 16 librarians’ daily working routines of care through participant observations.

The empirical analysis resulted in three modes of social infrastructuring in public libraries: (1) maintaining, (2) building connections and (3) drawing boundaries. Practices of care are prominent in each of these infrastructuring modes: librarians infrastructure the library with and via their care practices. Whilst care practices are difficult to quantify and verbalise, they are valuable for library patrons. By using the concept of tinkering, the article conceptualises librarians’ infrastructuring enactments as crucial community-building aspects of libraries.

By focusing on the enactment of social infrastructuring, the paper goes beyond a descriptive approach to understanding public libraries as important social infrastructures. Rather, the paper unpacks how libraries come into being as infrastructuring agencies by highlighting what librarians do and say. Our international study articulates the importance of care practices in public libraries across different national contexts.

Although there is a growing body of work on immigrants' information behavior, little is known about the pre-arrival information experiences of immigrants who consult formal information sources such as immigration agents. Drawn from a larger study on the information behavior of immigrants, this paper mainly reports the semi-structured interview findings on the pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants who used formal information sources with discussion on how that affected their post-arrival settlement into Canada.

The study used a mixed method approach with semi-structured interviews (n = 60) and surveys (n = 205) with participants who arrived in Canada between the years of 1971 and 2017. Data were collected from May 2017 to February 2018.

Although the overall scope of the original study is much larger, this paper features findings on the pre-arrival information experiences derived mainly from an analysis of interview data. This study provides insights into the pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants consulting formal information sources such as immigration firms, individual immigration consultants and more formal government agencies. The author introduces a new concept of “information crafting” by exploring the negative consequences of selective information sharing by immigration consultants/agents in newcomers' settlements in Canada, primarily positive information about life in Canada, sometimes with exaggeration and falsification. The interview participants shared story after the story of the settlement challenges they faced after arriving in Canada and how the expectations they built through the information received from immigration consultants and government agencies did not match after arrival. This study emphasizes the importance of providing comprehensive information about life in Canada to potential newcomers so that they can make informed decisions even before they apply.

The findings of this study have theoretical and practical implications for policy and research. This study provides insights into the complicated culturally situated pre-arrival information experiences of Bangladeshi immigrants. Moreover, the study findings encourage researchers in various disciplines, including psychology, migration studies and geography, to delve more deeply into newcomers' information experiences using an informational lens to examine the information newcomers receive from diverse sources and their effects on their post-arrival settlement in a new country. The study challenges the general assumptions that formal information sources are always reputable, useful, and comprehensive, and it provides some future directions for research that seeks to understand the culturally situated information behavior of diverse immigrant groups.

The purpose of the paper is to produce new knowledge about the positions that public libraries both take and are given in the conflicts over politics and identity that play out in contemporary cultural and library policy debates. Using conflicts over drag story hour at public libraries as case, the study seeks to contribute to an emerging body of research that delves into the challenges that public libraries as promoters of democracy are confronting in the conflictual political landscape of today.

The paper presents an analysis of debates reported in news articles concerning Drag story hour events held at Swedish public libraries. Utilizing the analytical lenses of discourse theory and plural agonistics, the analysis serves to make visible the lines of conflicts drawn in these debates – particularly focusing on the intersection of different meanings ascribed to the notion of the reading child, and how fear is constructed and used as an othering devise in these conflicts.

Different imaginings of the reading child and the construction and imagination of fear and safety shapes the Drag story hour debates. The controversies can be understood as a challenge to the previous hegemony regarding the direction and goals of Swedish cultural and library policy and the pluralistic democratic society these policies are meant to promote.

The paper offers new insights into the consequences of the revival of radical right politics, populism and societal polarization, and the different responses from public libraries.

The purpose of this study is to determine which metadata schemas are used in the museums and university collections of the main universities in Spain and other European countries. Although libraries and archives are also university memory institutions (according to a Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums perspective), their collections are not included in this study because their metadata systems are highly standardized and their inclusion would, therefore, skew our understanding of the diverse realities that the study aims to capture.

The analysis has three components. The first is a bibliographic review based on Web of Science. The second is a direct survey of the individuals responsible for university collections to understand their internal work and documentation systems. Finally, the results obtained are complemented by an analysis of collective university heritage portals in Europe.

The results of this study confirmed the hypothesis that isolation and a lack of resources are still major issues in many cases. Increasing digitalization and the desire to participate in content aggregation systems are forcing change, although the responsibility for that change at universities is still vague.

Universities, particularly those with a long history, have an important heritage whose parts are often scattered or hidden. Although many contemporary academic publications have focused on the dissemination of university collections, this study focuses on the representation of information based on the conviction that good metadata are essential for dissemination.

In this article, the author discusses works from the French Documentation Movement in the 1940s and 1950s with regard to how it formulates bibliographic classification systems as documents. Significant writings by Suzanne Briet, Éric de Grolier and Robert Pagès are analyzed in the light of current document-theoretical concepts and discussions.

Conceptual analysis.

The French Documentation Movement provided a rich intellectual environment in the late 1940s and early 1950s, resulting in original works on documents and the ways these may be represented bibliographically. These works display a variety of approaches from object-oriented description to notational concept-synthesis, and definitions of classification systems as isomorph documents at the center of politically informed critique of modern society.

The article brings together historical and conceptual elements in the analysis which have not previously been combined in Library and Information Science literature. In the analysis, the article discusses significant contributions to classification and document theory that hitherto have eluded attention from the wider international Library and Information Science research community. Through this, the article contributes to the currently ongoing conceptual discussion on documents and documentality.

The purpose of this study is to investigate artificial intelligence (AI) as enabler of future library services, with consideration to how prepared are librarians in African university libraries.

This study applied the interpretive content/document analysis of literature harvested from different databases of Scopus and Web of Science. AI could be used to perform daily routines in circulation, serial, reference and selective dissemination of information among others. It could also be applied to the provision of innovative services of recognition of library activities such as answering research quarries, cataloguing and classification of library materials and management of library system software of different databases within the library systems.

It could be deduced from the study that AI would continue to serve as a panacea to future library services irrespective of its geographical context. Due to the evolving nature of knowledge growth, AI having its roots in the field of engineering has been found useful to support future library services. The support accrued from library service delivery in the library profession has made librarians continue to interact with other intelligent machines that can demonstrate human behaviour even though they are not real human beings. The behaviour of machines and AI where human beings play a significant role has brought many renovations in the management of complex tasks of processing, communication, knowledge representation, decision making and suggestions, on potentials of diverse work operations.

The understanding that the present paper portrays in the context of future library services is that there is no way the AI could function without a human interaction perspective when drawing an analogy from computer science, information science and information systems fields of study.

The interest of users across their background would be strengthen if AI advances transformed the handling complex tasks of processing, communication, knowledge representation, decision-making and giving suggestions, among other things. The possibilities of diverse work operations from empirical evidence of studies consulted in recent times gave the authors the impetus to consider AI as the enabler of future library services.

The increasing demands from library patrons have prompted librarians to adapt their methods of delivering services. These emerging technologies have also brought about shifts in approaches to teaching and learning. Consequently, the recent surge in digital technology-driven service innovations has ushered in a fresh paradigm for education and research. In response to these changes, librarians are actively seeking novel and innovative technologies to enhance user experiences within their libraries. They serve as catalysts for introducing modern and advanced technologies, consistently adapting to contemporary tools that enhance their offerings.

This study aims to review recent advances towards the implementation of ANN and NLP applications during the budgeting phase of the construction process. During this phase, construction companies must assess the scope of each task and map the client’s expectations to an internal database of tasks, resources and costs. Quantity surveyors carry out this assessment manually with little to no computer aid, within very austere time constraints, even though these results determine the company’s bid quality and are contractually binding.

This paper seeks to compile applications of machine learning (ML) and natural language processing in the architectural engineering and construction sector to find which methodologies can assist this assessment. The paper carries out a systematic literature review, following the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses guidelines, to survey the main scientific contributions within the topic of text classification (TC) for budgeting in construction.

This work concludes that it is necessary to develop data sets that represent the variety of tasks in construction, achieve higher accuracy algorithms, widen the scope of their application and reduce the need for expert validation of the results. Although full automation is not within reach in the short term, TC algorithms can provide helpful support tools.

Given the increasing interest in ML for construction and recent developments, the findings disclosed in this paper contribute to the body of knowledge, provide a more automated perspective on budgeting in construction and break ground for further implementation of text-based ML in budgeting for construction.

This paper offers a definition of the core of information science, which encompasses most research in the field. The definition provides a unique identity for information science and positions it in the disciplinary universe.

After motivating the objective, a definition of the core and an explanation of its key aspects are provided. The definition is related to other definitions of information science before controversial discourse aspects are briefly addressed: discipline vs. field, science vs. humanities, library vs. information science and application vs. theory. Interdisciplinarity as an often-assumed foundation of information science is challenged.

Information science is concerned with how information is manifested across space and time. Information is manifested to facilitate and support the representation, access, documentation and preservation of ideas, activities, or practices, and to enable different types of interactions. Research and professional practice encompass the infrastructures – institutions and technology –and phenomena and practices around manifested information across space and time as its core contribution to the scholarly landscape. Information science collaborates with other disciplines to work on complex information problems that need multi- and interdisciplinary approaches to address them.

The paper argues that new information problems may change the core of the field, but throughout its existence, the discipline has remained quite stable in its central focus, yet proved to be highly adaptive to the tremendous changes in the forms, practices, institutions and technologies around and for manifested information.

This paper focuses on image-to-text manuscript processing through Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), a Machine Learning (ML) approach enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI). With HTR now achieving high levels of accuracy, we consider its potential impact on our near-future information environment and knowledge of the past.

In undertaking a more constructivist analysis, we identified gaps in the current literature through a Grounded Theory Method (GTM). This guided an iterative process of concept mapping through writing sprints in workshop settings. We identified, explored and confirmed themes through group discussion and a further interrogation of relevant literature, until reaching saturation.

Catalogued as part of our GTM, 120 published texts underpin this paper. We found that HTR facilitates accurate transcription and dataset cleaning, while facilitating access to a variety of historical material. HTR contributes to a virtuous cycle of dataset production and can inform the development of online cataloguing. However, current limitations include dependency on digitisation pipelines, potential archival history omission and entrenchment of bias. We also cite near-future HTR considerations. These include encouraging open access, integrating advanced AI processes and metadata extraction; legal and moral issues surrounding copyright and data ethics; crediting individuals’ transcription contributions and HTR’s environmental costs.

Our research produces a set of best practice recommendations for researchers, data providers and memory institutions, surrounding HTR use. This forms an initial, though not comprehensive, blueprint for directing future HTR research. In pursuing this, the narrative that HTR’s speed and efficiency will simply transform scholarship in archives is deconstructed.

This study aims to conduct performance and clustering analyses with the help of Digital Government Reference Library (DGRL) v16.6 database examining the role of emerging technologies (ETs) in public services delivery.

VOSviewer and SciMAT techniques were used for clustering and mapping the use of ETs in the public services delivery. Collecting documents from the DGRL v16.6 database, the paper uses text mining analysis for identifying key terms and trends in e-Government research regarding ETs and public services.

The analysis indicates that all ETs are strongly linked to each other, except for blockchain technologies (due to its disruptive nature), which indicate that ETs can be, therefore, seen as accumulative knowledge. In addition, on the whole, findings identify four stages in the evolution of ETs and their application to public services: the “electronic administration” stage, the “technological baseline” stage, the “managerial” stage and the “disruptive technological” stage.

The output of the present research will help to orient policymakers in the implementation and use of ETs, evaluating the influence of these technologies on public services.

The research helps researchers to track research trends and uncover new paths on ETs and its implementation in public services.

Recent research has focused on the need of implementing ETs for improving public services, which could help cities to improve the citizens’ quality of life in urban areas. This paper contributes to expanding the knowledge about ETs and its implementation in public services, identifying trends and networks in the research about these issues.