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The purpose of this article is to determine the types of collaborative activities public youth services and school librarians in rural locations engage in and to ascertain whether there are methods that youth service librarians believe can be employed to improve collaborative activities with public school librarians.

A mixed method design was implemented with an online self-administered survey. The survey contained open and closed-ended questions.

The findings indicate that many public librarians serving youth in rural locations find it important to collaborate with school librarians. Yet, they struggle to build strong collaborative relationships. Factors such as time, a lack of school librarian administrative support, and a lack of understanding about the roles of school librarians and public librarians, are collaborative barriers.

The study was limited to a purposive sample of 80 public librarians serving youth in rural areas in the United States.

Librarianship training programs can help school librarians and youth services librarians learn how to form collaborative partnerships through mentorship programs, requiring pre-service school and youth services librarians to collaborate on projects, and educating them about the similarities in their goals. School and public librarians can also benefit from training to teach them how to build community partnerships.

The results provide evidence that public librarians serving youth in rural areas favor building stronger collaborative relationships with school librarians. Building these relationships can improve the quality of education for youth in these locations. This article also includes proposed strategies for improving these relationships.

Gunungkidul Public Library in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, provides not only reading materials, but also a place to develop the community to produce various products to sell. The librarians in Gunungkidul have been holding various training sessions for the community – from how to make food and beverages to online marketing and preserving and reviving tradition and culture in their community. The librarians train the community to practice making various local products in the library and then the community and the librarians make and sell the products in the library and other places, including online markets. The products they make vary from cassava crackers to herbal medicine and from batik clothes to t-shirts. They also revived traditional choirs that had never been conducted for years. The librarians sometimes also invite experts or any skillful persons to train the community. Within the last two years, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the training programs were moved to some rural libraries. The librarians hold the training in rural libraries instead of the county library in order to avoid the crowd during the pandemic. Luckily the moving from the county public library to rural libraries has made more people engage in the library activities. The communities are enthusiastic to take part as they do not need to go too far away from their homes and they feel excited to learn and practice making products in the library as they can have more income.

This chapter analyzes major trends in rural public libraries, beginning with a discussion of changes in service offerings since the advent of the Internet. These outlets are now better able to help patrons with their employment, education, and civic engagement needs than they have been at any point in the past. However, rural public libraries still lag behind their peers in broadband speeds, technological infrastructure, and various forms of service and training offerings that use these technologies. The difference in public offerings is not only due to problems of technology, but also limited funding for staff, aging and small buildings, and a lack of state and regional support to allow these libraries to achieve economies of scale. As libraries nationwide shift to focus more on public programming and digital offerings, these factors will be barriers to rural outlets keeping up with modern trends in the field.

This study uses Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and Digital Inclusion Survey data to analyze trends among rural public libraries. The authors returned to the original data sets from these studies to find nuance between types of rural outlets, primarily dividing this information based on libraries’ distances from more densely populated areas. These statistical data are supplemented through qualitative interviews with professionals in the rural library field. Key findings include:

• Rural public libraries have made major strides in improving broadband quality and increasing related service offerings since the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s.

• Rural libraries still lag behind those in more populated areas in terms of technical infrastructure and training offerings, and this becomes more acute among those located farther from population centers.

• As the public library field places a greater emphasis on public programs, rural libraries’ small and aging buildings will likely be a barrier to them keeping up with their peers.

• The lack of regional consortia and strong state libraries in some parts of the country limits rural libraries’ abilities to achieve economies of scale and negatively impacts the range of services they can offer their patrons.

Rural public libraries have made major strides in improving broadband quality and increasing related service offerings since the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s.

Rural libraries still lag behind those in more populated areas in terms of technical infrastructure and training offerings, and this becomes more acute among those located farther from population centers.

As the public library field places a greater emphasis on public programs, rural libraries’ small and aging buildings will likely be a barrier to them keeping up with their peers.

The lack of regional consortia and strong state libraries in some parts of the country limits rural libraries’ abilities to achieve economies of scale and negatively impacts the range of services they can offer their patrons.

Rural libraries have often been combined together in statistical analyses of their service offerings. This chapter shows nuance between these outlets, demonstrating that libraries that are distant and remote from population centers face more difficulties than those on the fringes of cities and suburbs. Likewise, while much of the advocacy surrounding rural libraries has focused on the need for improved broadband and technological infrastructure, this study moves on to study how building infrastructure, low staff funding, and a lack of mechanisms for collaboration will hinder libraries’ abilities to keep up with modern changes in the field.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential or actual role of rural libraries in preserving indigenous knowledge (IK) of the rural residents in South Khorasan province.

The study, based on a qualitative research, was carried out by employing the grounded theory method. Data were collected by semi-structured interviews from the research sample population which included 20 rural males, 10 rural females, 8 librarians and 3 well-informed regional IK specialists. The validity of the research was confirmed by peer evaluation, compounded by detailed thorough explanations and external reviewers’ reaffirmations.

The rural residents of the South Khorasan villages across the province, after having realized the vitality of carrying out this project, were fully motivated and cooperative to provide indigenous knowledge. On the basis of the results from the rural libraries, due to being the solitary knowledge center in the area, these libraries could actively participate in preserving the knowledge and contribute toward the documentation of the indigenous knowledge. This required motivating librarians and increasing their professional, technical, research and verbal skills. The results of the study indicated that, even if the rural libraries of the South Khorasan province did not participate in documentation, preservation, and promotion of the IK and opt for the present form of non-participation, due to their inherent nature, they could become a focal point and play an indispensable role in achieving the objectives by aiding and leading the process at country level and become a focal point for the new generations of rural inhabitants to enlighten themselves and become fully aware of the value of the ancestral knowledge.

Hitherto, none of the researchers in Iran has covered the role of the libraries in general and rural libraries in particular in preserving the indigenous knowledge.

Nigeria is a developing country where the majority of the population live in rural areas. The majority of these rural dwellers are either non‐literate or semi‐literate. The need to involve them in the national development process cannot be overemphasized. This can be achieved through the identification of the information needs of rural dwellers and the provision of innovative rural public library services to improve their level of literacy and education and to enhance their ability to use practical information relevant to their daily lives.

This study is a part of the doctoral dissertation that proposes concrete measures to improve health-care information outreach program for rural health-care professionals in primary and secondary health care in Punjab, Pakistan. This study aims to report on the barriers to accessing and using online health-care information from rural settings of the Punjab province of Pakistan.

A cross-sectional survey was conducted in primary and secondary health-care settings in the Punjab province of Pakistan. The study’s population consisted of the rural primary care physicians (PCPs), who were geographically dispersed across 2,873 different remote health-care settings across Punjab. These practice settings included 2,455 basic health units, 293 rural health centers, 89 tehsil headquarter hospitals and 36 district headquarter hospitals.

Limited internet access, non-availability of required equipment and lack of training facilities were identified as the main barriers. PCPs’ gender, previous enrollment in post-graduation programs and type of health-care facility were significant factors in the perceived barriers related to both “non-availability of required equipment” and “inadequate training facilities on the use of information resources”.

The findings of the study hold some important practical implications for different stakeholders. This study identifies and addresses the barriers to accessing and using health-care information for PCPs in rural settings. The success of the health-care information outreach program in Punjab, Pakistan, should rely on the eradication of these barriers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first large-scale study in Pakistan that assesses the barriers and proposes ways to overcome these barriers to effectively access and use health-care information.

In 2005, a qualitative study was undertaken to explore the educational events, personal experiences, and job circumstances that a selected group of non-MLS library directors working in small Texas communities believed were significant in contributing to their professional development. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 17 female library directors working in Texas communities with populations of 25,000 or less using open-ended questions, and interviews were recorded and transcribed for later analysis. Four major topic areas relating to the professionalization of non-MLS library directors were identified from the data: (1) job satisfaction, including library work as spiritual salvation, librarianship and the ethic of caring, making a difference in the community, and pride in professional identity; (2) professional development, including hiring narratives, continuing education and lifelong learning, mentoring and professional development, and the importance of the MLS degree; (3) challenges facing small community library directors, including gender-based discrimination, resistance from local governing officials, and geographic isolation; and (4) guidelines for success, including understanding the community, becoming part of the community, making the library the heart of the community, business and managerial skills, and people and customer service skills.

This chapter explores differences in fringe, distant, and remote rural public library assets for asset-based community development (ABCD) and the relationships of those assets to geographic regions, governance structures, and demographics.

The author analyzes 2013 data from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and U.S. Department of Agriculture using nonparametric statistics and data mining random forest supervised classification algorithms.

There are statistically significant differences between fringe, distant, and remote library assets. Unexpectedly, median per capita outlets (along with service hours and staff) increase as distances from urban areas increase. The Southeast region ranks high in unemployment and poverty and low in median household income, which aligns with the Southeast’s low median per capita library expenditures, staff, hours, inventory, and programs. However, the Southeast’s relatively high percentage of rural libraries with at least one staff member with a Master of Library and Information Science promises future asset growth in those libraries. State and federal contributions to Alaska libraries propelled the remote Far West to the number one ranking in median per capita staff, inventory, and programs.

This study is based on IMLS library system-wide data and does not include rural library branches operated by nonrural central libraries.

State and federal contributions to rural libraries increase economic, cultural, and social capital creation in the most remote communities. On a per capita basis, economic capital from state and federal agencies assists small, remote rural libraries in providing infrastructure and services that are more closely aligned with libraries in more populated areas and increases library assets available for ABCD initiatives in otherwise underserved communities.

Even the smallest rural library can contribute to ABCD initiatives by connecting their communities to outside resources and creating new economic, cultural, and social assets.

Analyzing rural public library assets within their geographic, political, and demographic contexts highlights their potential contributions to ABCD initiatives.

The problems of a wider distribution of literature to all classes, ranging as they do from the most highly elaborated systems of organised libraries, to the sending out of boxes of books to rural communities, are matters for discussion well within the scope of a professional library journal; and as our attitude towards the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust Conference appears to have dissatisfied some of our regular correspondents, we wish it to bo understood that we think it wise to encourage both educationists and librarians, extremist or otherwise, to say what they have to say in our columns, so that our readers may judge impartially as to the merits of their respective arguments. It is from this standpoint that we have great pleasure in publishing Colonel Mitchell's reply to “Notes on the Conference by a Borough Librarian.” As Secretary of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, Colonel Mitchell's views are of importance and should be read by librarians and educationists alike with keen interest.