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Constructing academic library learning spaces involves ad hoc groups of agents often with fuzzy inter-relationships. Librarians and their user communities are initially hailed within these groups as prime-movers in realizing projects. Librarians bring to the table contagious ideas generated from their own profession in the hope of securing appropriate funding and planning pre-requisites. All other agents, be they internal community representatives or external architects, assist them in making sense of each other’s standpoints to co-create dynamic learning spaces in “commons consent”. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Using the community culture in The Chinese University of Hong Kong as existed in 2012 as a case study, this paper examines the reality of this process in terms of a new library for learning, teaching and research.

Can librarians hold sway over the priorities of other individual agents, particularly architects, to gain consent to build their initial concept of the commons which they are vigorously promoting as professionally valid and educationally potent? In the co-creation of a building, individual preferences and organizational power structures in ad hoc groups drawn from the university’s distinct cultural environment fuel compromise and even tension around the librarians’ and architects’ original visions.

Many other case studies of library building learning commons projects would be useful to add to these findings in sensemaking, co-creation and community cultures.

Assists library managers in their management of large buildings projects.

An original case study of a major Asian academic library learning commons project which involves sensemaking, co-creation and community cultures ideas imported from construction science.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the factors influencing customers’ willingness to participate in virtual brand community’s value co-creation and help companies better operating the virtual brand community.

Based on social cognitive theory and the features of the virtual brand community, this paper constructed a model of factors influencing customers’ willingness to participate in virtual brand community’s value co-creation. Then this paper quantitatively analyzed the mediating effect and the moderating effect.

The empirical analysis came to the following conclusions: first, in virtual brand communities, customers’ willingness to participate in value co-creation would be influenced by subject factors, environment factors, brand factors and perceived value factor. Second, customer involvement is an important moderator. The more involved the customer is, the more he/she will rely on the virtual brand community. Particularly, customer involvement has a positive moderating effect on the influence of subject factors, while it has a negative moderating effect on the influence of community experience and community trust. Third, perceived value plays a significant mediating role between subject factors and customers’ willingness to participate in value co-creation.

The results of this study can help companies better understand the influence of external factors like environment and brand so that they can better operate the virtual brand community and encourage customers to contribute to the development of the community and the brand.

Most of the existing studies focused on the formation of virtual brand communities and customers’ participation behaviors, but there is limited research focusing on what contributes to customers’ participation in value co-creation of virtual brand communities. This study, therefore, attempts to bridge the research gap.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a new way for knowledge services of the digital library which can transform knowledge resources into real social value.

The “Internet of Knowledge” approach was proposed for the first time as an intentional means to organize “Too Big” and scattered knowledge resources into high-efficiency fuels for driving purposeful knowledge works.

It is a new methodology and insight proposed for building digital libraries which stresses on active and diligent services with linked and shared resources rather than resource ownership.

The proposed knowledge organization is based on domain-specific body of knowledge. The engagement of domain experts is the key success factor.

The whole design framework has been adopted in constructing the new Zhoushan Ocean Digital Library to support sustainable development of marine economy.

The proposed knowledge cloud services will be pave a knowledge superhighway to help millions Chinese professionals stepping toward the technology peak.

From collection to connection has been a buzzword in the library world for more than a decade. This catchy phrase indicates that users are seen not only as borrowers, but as active participants. The aim of this paper is to investigate and analyse three questions in relation to user participation in public libraries in a Nordic perspective. How can participation in public libraries be characterised? Why should libraries deal with user participation? What kinds of different user participation can be identified in public libraries?

The paper uses a selection of theoretical approaches and practical examples to obtain a varied understanding of user participation in public libraries. Research fields outside library and information science have developed a wide range of theoretical approaches on user participation. Examples from cultural policy, museum studies and participatory culture are selected to get a deeper understanding on participation in public libraries. The practical examples are chosen to illustrate the richness of different kinds of user participation in libraries.

There are six forms of active participation in libraries: volunteer programmes, interactive displays, workshops, co-creation, user-driven innovation and book clubs.

This paper is an overall synthesis of theoretical and practical aspects of user participation in public libraries. Furthermore, the paper challenges the deeply rooted assumption that participation in libraries takes place almost exclusively within digital contexts.

Publicly owned libraries deliver a fundamental public service, fostering the citizens' access to knowledge. However, little is known about the factors underpinning the public libraries' organizational attractiveness. The article aims to shed light on this issue, investigating how the public libraries' service offering contributes to increasing their attractiveness.

Secondary data were collected from the national census study of libraries carried out in 2019 by the Italian Institute of Statistics (ISTAT). More than 4,500 publicly owned libraries established in Italy were involved in the analysis. A linear regression model was designed to examine the implications of public libraries' service offering on the number of people who visited them in 2019. The units of analysis were grouped in three clusters based on their organizational size.

Small-sized libraries' attractiveness relied on loan services (LS) and catalogs' integration, as well as on the availability of spaces for promoting social exchanges (SE) and interactions. The same was true for medium-sized libraries, whose attractiveness was also fostered by digitization. Large-sized libraries' ability to attract users was primarily affected by LS and by the provision of people-centered cultural services (CS).

Publicly owned libraries should arrange tailored strategies to increase their attractiveness. Small-sized and medium-sized libraries should exploit community-oriented initiatives to establish a co-creating dialog with users. Conversely, large-sized entities should advance the users' access to conventional services and implement people-centered cultural activities, recontextualizing their exchange with users in the digital domain to enhance service quality.

The article originally investigates the factors affecting the attractiveness of publicly owned libraries, providing intriguing insights to managers and practitioners.

In the co-creation process from a network perspective, service is produced, designed, and evaluated entirely by the actors with dynamic roles and with less participation by the firm's employees in the service process. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical model that represents environmental stimuli and value perceptions that contribute to service co-creation behaviour in an online network.

A total of 36 semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of two online programming communities – GitHub and Stack Overflow co-creators, with the data analysed using thematic analysis. The stimulus-organism-response model guided the development of the final model.

Social influence and trust are influential in actor value perceptions, including primary and network value, the interplay of which leads actors to co-production, supportive, and administrative behaviour. Environmental factors do not directly drive actors; rather it is the value that initiates and drives actors, which, by extension, initiates and drives the co-creation of services.

The service co-creation behaviour model provides a basis for future research in the co-creation and co-destruction context to model behaviours within the online network organisation setting and thereby enable improvement of such systems. This model can be operationalised in a network environment through design features.

This paper provides a rich understanding of environmental stimuli and value perception factors that contribute to the co-creation of services, and identifies different types of behaviours in dynamic online networks. This paper presents a new model of different types of behaviours emerging from actor participation in the co-creation process.

Mobile augmented reality (MAR) is one of the advanced three-dimensional (3D) representation tools that has been recently utilized in the construction industry. This paper aims to assess a user’s involvement levels through MAR application that has been experimented against traditional involvement techniques through an existing facility, plan re-designing scenario.

Through reviewing related literature studies in the MAR field, an application has been developed that can superimpose real design alternatives on paper-based markers, allowing for flexible wall positioning, interior and exterior wall material application. As such, an enhanced user involvement experience is created. To measure user involvement levels, the application is experimented with 33 participants having the British University in Egypt’s library building as a case study, followed by survey questionnaires to gather and evaluate user responses.

The results of the analyzed data using SPSS indicated that MAR showed a positive impact on enhancing user involvement and better understanding of design projects. It also allowed users to produce different design alternatives in comparison to the traditional involvement approaches where users showed low design interaction and understanding.

The interactive features of the proposed application facilitate implementing ideas in design of construction projects that require user involvement.

The research examines the simultaneous processes of value co-creation and value co-destruction in the implementation of a mobile banking application in rural Colombia. Rural communities experience digital and financial deficits and often become the object of technology-based initiatives. In the town, vulnerable female heads of household received a government subsidy through a mobile app, becoming an experimental group for this government–private bank collaboration. In an effort to create the first cashless society in Colombia, the bank engaged the entire town and local government to create a service ecosystem, constituted by operant resources.

This study uses a qualitative, ethnographic approach to investigate the experiences of stakeholders in engaging with a mobile banking app. The empirical data is drawn from 34 interviews, representing different layers of this service ecosystem. The study identified and analysed actor engagement behaviours that occurred in the micro-, meso-, macro- and meta-layers of this ecosystem that shaped the perception and usage of mobile payments and digital money for rural consumers.

The study found that simultaneous manifestations of the co-creation and co-destruction of value present in different layers ultimately diminished the value proposition for this digital money system. We shed light on how actor engagement transitions across different layers of the ecosystem and that negative interactions in the meta-layer of the ecosystem can affect perceptions of value in the micro-layer.

This study has contributed to the service literature by integrating epistemological cultural theory into value co-creation and co-destruction construct. In doing so, we provide a broader context for understanding how actor engagement can negatively impact on the value creation process and offer a meaningful contribution to the development of midrange theory of the value creation process.

With the continuous development of Internet technology, virtual brand communities (VBCs) have increasingly become essential fronts for enterprises and consumers to carry out professional communication and the leading platform for consumers and other consumers to engage in social and brand discussion. Meanwhile, numerous scholars began to pay attention to VBCs as their research topic. However, there is no systematic understanding of the existing literature on the VBCs research. Therefore, this study aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic review of VBCs research over the past twenty years.

Based on HistCite and CiteSpace software, descriptive statistics and bibliometric analysis were conducted in this study. Specifically, by adopting research cooperation network analysis, co-citation analysis of literature, cluster analysis and co-word analysis, the authors analyzed 1,157 articles on VBCs in the Web of Science database from 2000 to 2020.

This study summarizes the research of VBCs from three aspects. First, the general characteristics of VBCs literature are analyzed. Second, knowledge bases, research contents, theoretical foundations and theoretical contributions of VBCs are dug and integrated into a knowledge framework. Third, the evolution and trend of VBCs research topics are visualized and analyzed in two phases (from 2005 to 2012 and from 2013 to 2020).

This study describes the research status, knowledge structure and famous topics of VBCs research over the past twenty years. Further, the research topics for VBCs have maintained continuity in the last twenty years. Furthermore, the research topics have also been evolving with the development of network technology and changes in the external environment. These results also provide valuable clues about this field's future directions and practical implications.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss emerging practices in open evaluation, namely, the concept of co-evaluation and how research on evaluation developed within information science can contribute to enhance stakeholders and citizens’ involvement in open science.

A meta-evaluative and transdisciplinary approach – directed toward the intersection between information science, evaluation, competences management, sustainability transitions management and participatory methodologies – provided the basis for the identification and subsequent reflection on the levels of stakeholder participation embedded into ISO 16439’s (2014) methods for assessing the impact of libraries and on the domains and competences to be mobilized for (co)evaluation. The contributions of Engaged 2020 Action Catalogue, as well as several taxonomies of evaluator competences and the Council of Europe’s (2016) conceptual model of competences for a democratic culture were particularly relevant for this (re)construction process.

Two results of the line of research carried out since 2012 at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (Portugal) can significantly contribute to improve stakeholders’ participation in Open Science: ISO 16439’s systematization of methods and procedures for assessing the impact of libraries and the (co-)evaluation competency framework.

This paper presents the transdisciplinary concept of co-evaluation and examines the current epistemological challenges to science by analyzing the general tendency to openness through the lens of research on evaluation and participatory methods developed within information science.