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Few issues in recent times have so provoked debate and dissention within the library field as has the concept of fees for user services. The issue has aroused the passions of our profession precisely because its roots and implications extend far beyond the confines of just one service discipline. Its reflection is mirrored in national debates about the proper spheres of the public and private sectors—in matters of information generation and distribution, certainly, but in a host of other social ramifications as well, amounting virtually to a debate about the most basic values which we have long assumed to constitute the very framework of our democratic and humanistic society.

This article reports the outcomes of a study on communication support, commissioned to develop a borough‐wide strategy in 2003 by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.The research stems from a recognition of communication as a key to successful delivery of public services and enhancement of a multicultural community.The focus is on ‘communication’ (rather than ‘language’), since it captures issues beyond the exchange of information through words: interpersonal interactions and relationships, techniques and modes of organising information exchange. Language is a key component within the broad ambit of communication mechanism and skills. Hence interpretation and translation are perceived as models of communications support alongside advocacy, integrated team, multilingual professional team, family/friends and minors, supported language, symbols and signs, and Plain English.While engaging in the debate and highlighting some of the broader issues concerning communication support services, the focus is on the following main issues:• policy frameworks and guiding principles in communication support• methods and techniques for needs assessment, monitoring and evaluation of communication support• communication support provision in Tower Hamlets including quantifying need, actual state of provision and users' perceptions.Probably among the first of its kind, the strategy draws on existing knowledge and good practice to develop a common framework for public services in Tower Hamlets. It is believed that it will serve a pioneering role in co‐ordinated existing and developing coherent approaches to communication support.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the financing and provision of basic public services in China. The main issue addressed is how to reform the public finance system to achieve quality and fairness in the provision of basic public services.

Based on an historical analysis of the functional transformation of the public finance system in China and on an empirical analysis of the current public finance system and the public service provision system, a comprehensive understanding was gained about the relationship between the financing and provision of basic public services.

The paper argues that there is a close relationship between the provision of basic public services and the functional changes made to the public finance system. Based on a systematic retrospective study of the Chinese Government’s efforts to improve basic public services over the last three decades, this paper offers policy suggestions on further public finance restructuring that would support better service provision.

By analyzing issues in the public service provision system, this paper contributes to the debate about the efficiency improvement made to governmental functions in China.

This article provides a case study on changes to an academic library's public services policies in order to support a community undergoing the ramifications of a natural disaster.

This paper describes a case study on how the Meriam Library at California State University, Chico responded to the 2018 Camp Fire by making changes to public services policies. A literature review of disaster response and planning materials is included.

This case study demonstrates the need for flexibility in public services policies when experiencing natural disasters, and provides examples of how academic libraries can respond to natural disasters in order to support surrounding communities. Many library disaster response plans and literature do not include information on continuity of public services, or how public services policies can/should be temporarily altered in response to a disaster.

This article provides practical examples of how an academic library can implement changes to support a local community experiencing a disaster.

The public services response by Meriam Library offers lessons in supporting a community in the wake of a natural disaster. While articles detailing library responses to natural disasters are fairly ubiquitous, these primarily focus on salvaging collections. Few resources exist on how an academic library can ensure continuity of public services to support communities experiencing the aftermath of natural disasters, and this article is a contribution to that area of research.

This paper presents recently published resources on library instruction and information literacy, providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering various library types, study populations and research contexts.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations, reports and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2020.

The paper provides a brief description of all 440 sources and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians, researchers and anyone interested in a quick and comprehensive reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically test two opposing theoretical hypotheses from research literature: low quality of public education boosts support for public education; and low quality of public education weakens support for public education.

The authors use microdata from 27 post-communist countries over a period of five years. This study uses two outcome variables in order to capture the level of support for public education: the willingness to elevate investments in public education to an important policy priority; and the willingness to pay more taxes to improve public healthcare. A series of logistic regressions is used to find how the outcome variable is influenced by six dimensions of the quality of the public education system.

The main finding is that a lower quality of public education strengthens the willingness of citizens to make investments into public education by: making it a political priority for the government; and through a professed increased willingness to pay more taxes towards improving public education. These findings remain valid for both years of investigation and for both EU and non-EU samples. In contrast, the authors could not find support for the hypothesis that postulates that a lower quality of public education will reduce support for public education.

The main implication of these findings is that despite the increases in availability of private schooling opportunities, the citizens of post-communist countries have not abandoned their support for public education. Even if citizens of post-communist countries believe that public education is no longer of an appropriately high quality, they continue to support the provision of resources to it in order to improve on the current situation.

The current low quality of public education can be seen as providing an impetus for encouraging support for public education.

In terms of policy-making, the findings demonstrate the opportunity to shore up public support for further reforms in public- education in post-communist countries.

The current education policy research literature is silent about the direction of the effect of low quality public education on the willingness to provide support for public education. Against this background, this is the first study which empirically tested whether quality of public education affect willingness to support it. Covering a period of five years, the authors test the above-postulated hypotheses using a diverse sample of 27 post-communist countries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate if public provision of employment support services to youth leads to reduced informality and increased wages in transition economies.

The author uses the school-to-work transition data sets of the International Labor Organization for seven transition economies of Southeast Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States. The author focuses on two econometric issues: the selectivity into informal employment and the endogeneity of the public employment support service provision with respect to informal employment and wages. The authors achieves identification by employing internal regressors which are uncorrelated with the product of heteroskedastic errors, a-la Lewbel (2012), as the author could not prove the external validity of the commonly used external instruments in similar contexts.

Results suggest that the public provision of employment support services matters for relegating informal employment, but not for wages, in general. Placement in education or training programs is most powerful in reducing informal employment among the four different employment support services, while only advice for job search works positively for wages probably through enabling better match.

Increasing budget allocations, varying the array of public employment support measures, enhanced targeting, and advancement of the profiling system may significantly contribute to strengthening the public employment support service effect on youth employment in transition economies.

The paper brings a couple of novelties to the current literature. First, it is among the early papers dealing with the issue of informality, public employment support service and labor market prospects of youth in general in a rigorous manner. Second, it fills an important gap for transition economies which were less researched due to the long-lasting transition process as well due to data scarcity. Third, it utilizes the recently collected School-to-Work Transition Surveys (SWTS). Finally, and likely most importantly, it thoroughly addresses the issues of selectivity bias and endogeneity of PESS by utilizing a recent approach of Lewbel (2012) whereby internally generated variables are used as instruments. Hence, the paper accounts for the endogeneity stemming from unobservables in a novel manner, contrary to the common approaches in the literature based either on propensity score matching addressing selectivity on observables only, or relying on commonly used instruments in the labor market literature – mainly regional employment variables – whose external validity is easily disputed.

This paper considers the potential of social media for developing public services. The paper approaches social media as a context that can provide information that might otherwise be unattainable. The focus of analysis is on a special hard-to-reach group of marginalized youths who appear to have isolated themselves from society.

The authors answer the question: How can the experiences of socially withdrawn youth as shared on social media be used to enrich the knowledge base relating to the initiation phase of co-creation of public services? The data retrieved from the Finnish discussion forum are analyzed using the combination of unsupervised machine learning and discourse analysis.

The paper contributes by outlining a method that can be applied to identify expertise-by-experience from digital stories shared by marginalized youths. To overcome the challenges of making socially withdrawn youths real contributors to the co-creation of public services, this paper suggests several theoretical and managerial implications.

Co-creation assumes an interactive and dynamic relationship where value is created at the nexus of interaction. However, the evidence base for successful co-creation, particularly with digital technology, is limited. This paper fills the gap by providing findings from a case study that investigated how social media discussions can be a stimulus to enrich the knowledge base of the co-creation of public services.

Some libraries and information services are quite definitely user‐centred; some think they are but are not always; some seem to be designed for librarians rather than users. The purpose of this monograph is to encourage the development of libraries to meet the perceived needs of users — I hope it will be found useful by librarians and information workers as well as by students.