Modern Public Library Research Articles

Developing public library managers as leaders

PurposeThe paper's aim is to present findings of the recent evaluation of the Leading Modern Public Libraries development programme with reference to the management versus leadership dynamic. The programme provided a strategic intervention to address a perceived weakness in leadership development within the public library sector in England.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on recent examples from the literature, the theoretical differences between the concepts of management and leadership are discussed and used to inform consideration of the programme's effectiveness. Evaluation methods included participant observation, interviews, focus groups and a questionnaire survey, each administered at various stages of the programme with a representative sample of programme participants. Verbatim quotations from evaluation respondents are included in the analysis.FindingsThe research reveals that the programme has had a positive impact in enabling and developing leadership capacity within the sector, particularly in terms of developing participants' confidence and other interpersonal traits associated with effective leadership, including creativity and risk taking. Perceived benefits and limitations of the public library context in which the course was delivered have also been identified.Practical implicationsImportant considerations on the transition from effective management to leadership, and the identification, support and development of future leaders within organisations are presented, with implications for current public library leaders, trainers and facilitators within the field.Originality/valueThe paper shows that the programme and its evaluation represent a strategic development initiative on an unprecedented scale in the public library sector.

A study on how the application of ubiquitous technology has caused spatial changes in modern public libraries

A study on how the application of ubiquitous technology has caused spatial changes in modern public libraries

Conceptual Principles of the Planning of Modern Public Libraries

Over the last decades scientific progress has inspired not only major technological but most of the social and cultural changes as well. The information society of new quality has been developed. It could be characterised by the rapid growth of the amount and variety of information, development of the conception of information as a commodity, formation of knowledge and information industry, development of the information and communication technology, the impact of information and its technologies on all spheres of life including the nature of learning and work as well as on the style of everyday life.

ELFNI (Electronic Libraries for Northern Ireland project): an overview

The Electronic Libraries for Northern Ireland project (ELFNI) was established to procure on behalf of the five Northern Ireland Education and Library Boards (NIELBs) robust systems that would support and enable the delivery of electronic information services to the Northern Ireland (NI) community and to enable the NIELBs to deliver cost effective, efficient and modern public library and information services. Following a period of discussion and negotiation a Public Finance Initiative (PFI) contract was signed in early 2002 between Amey BPO Services and the five Education and Library boards for the ELFNI project. Amey BPO will lead a consortium which will be responsible for delivering a range of services to all public libraries in Northern Ireland for the next ten years, which includes the installation of the People’s Network, a single library management system, a libraries’ portal, video‐conferencing facilities and corporate e‐mail for all staff. This paper provides a background to the development of this project, details of the technological solution, information on the monitoring procedures, a description of the expected benefits from the ELFNI system and concludes with an assessment of PFI funding for public libraries.

The development and present state of library services to children in Japan

Provides a general description of the movement for library services for children and children’s libraries, together with the modern public library movement in post‐war Japan. The Bunko as a home library, or a community‐based small library, is quite characteristic of Japan. The Bunko movement played an important role in improving the reading environment of children and the library service for children. The Chusho‐report (1963) and Shimin‐no‐Toshokan (1970) changed the concept of the public library in Japan. They contributed to an increase in reading facilities for children and the establishment of new public libraries. Children’s libraries at the national, public and private level are also described.

Adults Only? Children and Children's Books in British Circulating Libraries, 1748-1848

The question of whether circulating libraries in their late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century heyday catered for children has not received any sustained investigation. This is regrettable because the question has a bearing on our understanding of both circulating libraries and children's literature. Were circulating libraries designed for the use of the whole family, or constructed as places of purely adult resort, reserved for putatively sophisticated, "adult" literary pursuits? Were the circulating libraries the direct forebears of the modern public lending libraries, which include a children's section almost as a sine qua non and which allow children to become members in their own right? And did circulating libraries play as significant a role in the development of children's literature as in the rise of the novel? After all, these two literary forms developed virtually in parallel, both rising from mid-eighteenth-century foundations to become securely established by 1800. The prima facie evidence is mixed. Pictorial representations often depict family groups using circulating libraries. Naturally, these groups frequently include children. 1 Their use of circulating libraries is substantiated by some of the criticism of these institutions. Robert Wodrow, in his famous lament about the corrupting effect of Allan Ramsay's Edinburgh library, regrets [End Page 19] that "young boyes" were among those reading the library's "villainous profane and obscene books and playes." 2 Another fairly representative adversary deplored the fact that "the young of both sexes too frequently suffer a depravation of morals as well as of taste, from the indiscriminate reading of common circulating libraries." 3 Exactly how old these "young" people were must remain a matter of speculation, and these critics may have been indulging in a little hyperbole so as to deepen their invective. In any case, Wodrow and his allies were inveighing against children gaining access to adult books. Whether children would have been able to find a literature of their own in circulating libraries initially seems doubtful. Certainly, that curious pamphlet The Use of Circulating Libraries Considered; with Instructions for Opening and Conducting a Library, either upon a Large or a Small Plan (1797), which exists in a solitary copy in the Bodleian Library, suggests not. Here, divinity, biography, anecdotes, travel, poetry, plays, science, and novels all found a place among the fifteen hundred volumes recommended for a reasonable circulating library, but there was no suggestion that children's books should accompany them. 4 The standard historians of libraries tend to agree. Hilda M. Hamlyn and Devendra P. Varma, still the main sources on circulating libraries, do not mention children's books. 5 Alec Ellis, in his history Library Services for Young People in England and Wales, states simply, "Very few library facilities were available to most children prior to 1850." 6 The judgment of F. J. Harvey Darton, the founder of children's literary history, remains largely unchallenged: even the libraries established after the Public Library Act of 1850, he wrote, "played nothing like the part where children's books are concerned that . . . the circulating libraries did for adult books." 7 This is a judgment initially confirmed by the most obvious source, the surviving catalogues of the libraries. Of more than fifty catalogues of separate circulating libraries, dating from 1748 to 1848, that were consulted, only a very few include more than a handful of children's books. As a rule, the catalogues contain less than one percent children's literature, although various methodological problems preclude a definitive figure. There is, for example, the problem of spotting children's titles that may lurk among as many as ten thousand often uncategorized titles in a single catalogue, and to recognize every one, it would also be necessary to know the title of every children's book published in the century after 1748. Furthermore, there was a substantial crossover between adult and juvenile books. Many novels, as James Raven has acknowledged, are "close kin" to...

The Usual Delay: Public Libraries in Nineteenth Century Germany

The title of my paper — The Usual Delay — requires some explanation. It refers to the notion that the development of a modern public library system in the nineteenth century in Germany was delayed for about one generation compared to Great Britain and the USA. This delay was the result of political, social and economic factors.

The city library and scholarly research

European public libraries frequently have to reconcile the continuance of a traditional scholarly role with the provision of modern public library services. In Britain the great city libraries share this dilemma. Official policy has not offered useful solutions to the problems of two decades of financial pressures, social change and the demands of information technology. The case study of Leeds Library and Information Services shows how one city library has begun to devise strategies that involve improving access to research stock, making hard decisions about the continuance of some research collections, and providing enhanced networked access to outside resources, as part of an overall policy based on the assessment of user needs and preferences.

Performance information for Scottish public library authorities

Discusses the difficulties in trying to assess performance levels of public libraries and argues that indicators can only provide a useful tool for public librarians if the limitations of comparative analysis are recognized. Performance measurement has in the past suffered from a crude political concern with measurement and league tables. The Accounts Commission for Scotland has published its first “result” for Scottish Council Services and has been refreshingly honest about the limitations of these traditional performance indicators, arguing that while they are an important element of decision making in the policy process, they can never be a totally comprehensive or decisive factor. Suggests that authorities could seek to assist in developing a more representative set of indicators for the modern public library service.

Book Boat Service in the Archipelago of Stockholm

The archipelago of Stockholm has 30,000 islands and skerries, but there are only permanent residents on some of them. The county library of Stockholm started the book boat service in 1953. Ever since that time, the population of the archipelago gets books and other media twice a year from the floating library. Even program activities have been carried out. The book boat is of great positive value for children and adults because they can in this way take part in the modern public library. The book boat has an important function as extraordinarily good public relations for the library's services and has the effect of promoting reading not only in the archipelago but elsewhere.

The Future of Reference and Information Service in the Public Library

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Future of Reference and Information Service in the Public LibraryThomas ChildersThomas Childers Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Library Quarterly Volume 48, Number 4Oct., 1978Proceedings of the Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference of the Graduate Library School, April 10-11, 1978. The Public Library: Circumstance and Prospects Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/600836 Views: 6Total views on this site Copyright 1978 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Comment

RECENTLY I picked up a copy of NEW LIBRARY WORLD and browsed through it, detecting, or so I thought, a certain bias in its editorial approach towards the public librarian, and mentally discounted most of what I read until, emerging through the advertisements, I came to ‘The Shallow End’. Recognising yet another example of Parkinson's law (journalism expands to fill the space available) and style, I nevertheless, as they graphically say, ‘read on’. It was quickly borne in on me that the feelings expressed by the noxious Thrasher in the March and June issues were, with some modification and emendation, precisely what I uneasily felt in regard to the rôle of modern public library in this country. Both articles raise some very serious points and I thought I might expose some of my jaundiced qualms to the judicious discussion of others more nearly concerned.

The Library World Volume 16 Issue 9

IN the death of Mr. JAMES DUFF BROWN, the library profession loses one of its most striking personalities and librarianship its most powerful influence for progress. Any attempt at present to estimate the extent of his influence upon the modern public library must necessarily be inadequate, because not only are some of the movements he started only beginning to gather force, but his retiring nature made him refrain from labelling many things as his own. With the possible reservation that he was unable to do himself justice on the platform, he was the ideal born public librarian. As an organiser and teacher of librarianship, as a keen and discerning student and critic of tendencies, methods and results, and as an expounder of professional knowledge through the medium of the written page, he was without an equal. Like all pioneers and men of strong opinions, he did not make only friends ; but he had world‐wide friendships, and he forced the attention and respect of all library workers. On another page of this issue an old friend and one‐time colleague of his gives a brief outline of his life and works, and we need not do the same again here. But as his successors in the editorship of THE LIBRARY WORLD, which he founded and edited until a year or two ago, we cannot refrain from adding our tribute to his memory. Representing the best type of efficiency and progress in librarianship, he was a real friend and teacher, and his death leaves a sad gap in our ranks.