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By examining types of literacies taught by public libraries and the modes through which these programs were offered, this study aims to explore how public libraries might integrate data literacy training for the general public into existing library educational programs.

This study examined programs offered in 30 US public libraries during 2019 and 2020 to better understand types of literacy education announced to the public through library website listings and Facebook Events pages.

While public libraries offered educational programs in literacy areas ranging from basic reading and writing to technology, vocational skills, health literacy and more, data literacy training was not widely offered. However, this study identified many already-existing programs highly compatible for integrating with data literacy training.

This study offered new insights into both the literacies taught in public library programs as well as ways for public libraries to integrate data literacy training into existing educational programming, in order to better provide data literacy education for the general public.

The purpose of this research is to comprehensively describe the legitimacy of the public library in the 21st century.

The research involved a comprehensive literature review using the Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) database with keywords “Library” and “Legitimacy”, combined with citation searches and additional collections. In total, we analysed 159 research articles primarily from the 21st century, with some comparative analysis of pre-2,000 works. The final phase of the research investigated libraries’ legitimisation efforts across various dimensions, examining how they employ rhetoric and theories to maintain legitimacy amidst challenging circumstances.

Through this research process, five dimensions of public library legitimacy emerged; (1) Democracy, (2) Culture and History, (3) Communication and Education, (4) Economy and (5) Librarianship, with the most diverse literature being related to democracy, and its subsections intellectual freedom, neutrality, the public sphere, social justice and social capital.

The outcome of our results indicates that the evolving legitimacy of the public library in the 21st century has become multifaceted, compared to the elements of legitimacy in the 20th century. Contemporary public libraries can continue to utilise the dimensions of legitimacy identified in this study and can reconstruct their legitimacy accordingly.

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.

This paper states the application of co-design methods in building a national virtual library in a metaverse environment with an interest in digital transformation.

A case study of a national digital library and data obtained through a co-design approach is applied.

The study findings demonstrate the usage of the co-design approach in incorporating the different stances of the library stakeholders and discuss the potential services that can be transferred to a digital infrastructure.

This study contributes by sharing methodological insights on applying co-design methods to build a national virtual library with different library stakeholders. The study also shares empirical findings on the insights and practical recommendations for building a national metaverse library that reflects the needs and aspirations of its stakeholders.

For over 25 years, the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) has significantly influenced the US sustainable construction through its leadership in energy and environmental design (LEED) certification program. This study aims to delve into how Baton Rouge, Louisiana, fares in green building adoption relative to other US capital cities and regions.

The study leverages statistical and geospatial analyses of data sourced from the USGBC, among other databases. It scrutinizes Baton Rouge’s LEED criteria performance using the mean percent weighted criteria to pinpoint the LEED criteria most readily achieved. Moreover, unique metrics, such as the certified green building per capita (CGBC), were formulated to facilitate a comparative analysis of green building adoption across various regions.

Baton Rouge’s CGBC stands at 0.31% (C+), markedly trailing behind the frontrunner, Santa Fe, New Mexico, leading at 3.89% (A+) and in LEED building per capita too. Despite the notable concentration of certified green buildings (CGBs) within Baton Rouge, the city’s green building development appears to be in its infancy. Innovation and design was identified as the most attainable LEED benchmark in Baton Rouge. Additionally, socioeconomic factors, including education and income per capita, were associated with a mild to moderate positive correlation (0.25 = r = 0.36) with the adoption of green building practices across the capitals, while sociocultural infrastructure exhibited a strong positive correlation (r = 0.99).

This study is beneficial to policymakers, urban planners and developers for sustainable urban development and a reference point for subsequent postoccupancy evaluations of CGBs in Baton Rouge and beyond.

This study pioneers the comprehensive analysis of green building adoption rates and probable influencing factors in capital cities in the contiguous US using distinct metrics.

The challenges to healthcare caused by the COVID-19 pandemic forced hospital librarians to develop their abilities to cope with change and crises, both on a social level and an organisational level. The aim of this study is to contribute to knowledge about how hospital librarians developed library services during the pandemic and how these changes contributed to building information resilience in the healthcare organisation. This paper also seeks to explore how resilience theory, and specifically the concept information resilience, can be used within library and information science (in LIS) to investigate resilience in the library sector.

Nine semi-structured interviews with librarians were conducted at four different hospital libraries in four different regions in Sweden between March and May 2022. The empirical material was analysed through an interaction between the tzheoretical perspective and the empirical material through a thematic analysis. In each theme, specific resilience resources are identified and analysed as components of the information resilience developed by hospital librarians.

The results show that hospital librarians contribute to several different information resilience resources, which support information resilience in the healthcare organisation. Three aspects characterize the qualities of resilience resources: access, flexibility, and collaboration. The findings suggest that the framework for analysing information resilience used in this study is well suited for studying the resilience of libraries from both organisational and informational aspects.

The analysis of information resilience on an organisational level presents a novel way to study resilience in the library sector.

The health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic affected worldwide communities and public social spaces. Mandatory at-home isolation for 2 years, followed by libraries reopening after demanded security adjustments, changed Brazilian public libraries’ workplace dynamics, which now rely mainly on labor and engagement via social networks. Remarkably, a hybrid quality emerged and became the norm in everyday professional practices, generating a new ethos in the epistemic construction of the field of public librarianship. In this chapter, the authors aim to review the concept of the public library and its workplace dynamics after the changes triggered by a new post-pandemic environment, searching for answers to the following question: Have Brazilian public libraries become more or less inhabited as the result of the pandemic crisis? Applying a social and descriptive approach to examine the idea that bonding relationships with public social spaces contribute to building groups’ and communities’ identity, enhancing their history, relations, and memory, the authors debate if public libraries are anthropological inhabited places or non-places, proposing a perspective that connects the public library to the development of the individual and helps to understand space-time appropriation, focusing on identity construction. Exploring this framework, the authors identify the need to review the concept of the public library to represent its contemporaneous aspects of time, space, and collectivity and to include the many creative, affective, and symbolic dimensions embodied by all the individuals the library serves, based on the new experiences driven by disuse or resumption of use due to the pandemic.

This descriptive case study offers an overview of the Free Library of Philadelphia’s (Pennsylvania, USA) response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its challenges. The study details how staff at the Free Library pivoted to create and deliver virtual programs during the pandemic. The timing of that pivot invoked successes and challenges to determine how the Free Library could remain flexible and relevant post-pandemic. The chapter briefly examines how library administrators attempted to address the needs of their racially diverse staff in an equitable and inclusive way in light of increased racial tensions that arose in Philadelphia during the pandemic. The chapter also notes a few of the Free Library’s best efforts to equip front-line librarians to be aspirational, creative, and, at times, grassroots in how they served the public during and beyond the pandemic. Finally, this descriptive case study will share some of the Free Library’s lessons learned and best practices developed during the pandemic.

This paper seeks to establish design quality indicators (DQIs) that can be utilized for assessing the design of community centers, with an emphasis on the technical, functional, and behavioral performance domains.

A comprehensive literature review resulted in identifying 79 DQIs for community centers. A three round Delphi evaluation approach was utilized to rate the importance of the DQIs through their relative importance index (RII) values. The assessment of the DQIs involved a diverse group of stakeholders including facilities managers, architects/engineers (A/Es), community centers’ staff, and regular visitors of community centers.

The majority of the established DQIs were considered to be either “Very Important” or “Important”.

The established DQIs can be utilized to identify best practices in the design of community centers and benchmark the performance of different community centers.

The design quality of community centers could significantly impact the community's quality of life and user experience. The development of DQIs provides for enhanced accountability and improved service delivery for the communities they serve. This enables community centers to be more effective, efficient, and responsive to the needs of the users they support.

This study aims to assess the digital literacy of African library and information science (LIS) professionals. Digital literacy skills are required in the digital library environment.

Relevant literature was reviewed on this topic; previous study questionnaires, various university LIS curriculum, content analysis and job advertising were used for preparing the survey questionnaire. This study used an ex post facto research design. Purposive sampling was adopted in this study, and data were collected from Google form by sharing the research questionnaire by hyperlink which was undertaken from March 15, 2022 to May 24, 2022. The data were collected by a structured questionnaire. A four-point Likert scale was used to measure how library professionals acquired digital literacy skills. Content analysis of more than 500 job vacancies over the past three years (2018–2022) of library job advertisements was taken randomly.

This study’s findings show that the majority of the good at basic level of digital literacy skills at the same time have less in advanced digital literacy skills. The finding of this study shows the majority of them have to upgrade and learn about advanced digital literacy skills.

This study recommends adopting a new syllabus and updating a LIS curriculum based on the library’s technological development. Furthermore, this study’s potential result suggests more practical classes instead of theoretical study and it is useful to the library schools, associations, MOOC providers and lifelong learners.

This study is conducted with 102 African library professionals from 13 countries. This study discusses futuristic digital literacy skills and basic literacy skills. This study is beneficial to those who are preparing a new curriculum in LIS fields.