Digital Skills for Digital Librarians Evaluation

June 21, 2021

How can web literacy trainings be used in libraries to meet the evolving needs of the communities they serve? How can these trainings be adapted and scaled to better help library staff, libraries, and the communities they serve?

Public Libraries as Platforms for Civic Engagement

May 4, 2021

What role should the world’s public libraries have in civic engagement? In recent years, traditional media have weakened, the civic space has become increasingly divisive, and society has become ever more divided socially, economically and politically, yet public libraries have stood strong. They have long fulfilled a vital need for communal spaces where people can…

The use of participatory mapping in ethnobiological research, biocultural conservation, and community empowerment: a case study from the Peruvian Amazon

April 29, 2021

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Volunteer geographic information in the Global South: barriers to local implementation of mapping projects across Africa

The world is awash in data—by 2020 it is expected that there will be approximately 40 trillion gigabytes of data in existence, with that number doubling every 2 to 3 years. However, data production is not equal in all places—the global data landscape remains heavily concentrated on English-speaking, urban, and relatively affluent locations within the…

Data challenges for public libraries: African perspectives and the social context of knowledge

This article sheds light on the collection and use of data by libraries in sixteen countries across Africa. It highlights the challenges that librarians and library organizations face in gathering, analyzing, and presenting data of various types for self-advocacy. In this study, qualitative data from a meeting of library representatives was analyzed to identify main…

Public Libraries and Development Across Sub-Saharan Africa: Overcoming a Problem of Perception

Public libraries and development organizations share many common goals that make them strong potential partners in the Global South. In spite of these commonalities, libraries are often overlooked as development partners. This is unfortunate because these partnerships could allow librarians to more fully and effectively participate in the development of their communities. This paper explores…

From access to information to access to each other: Why libraries should develop innovation spaces

We will argue that libraries, in optimizing how they deploy computer and internet technology for people to meet their information needs, have unknowingly overlooked and even inhibited the use of computers for the purposes of creativity and innovation. Specifically, we suggest that there is a vast and unmet demand for physical environments, built around the…

Global Impact Study surveys: Methodologies and implementation

This working paper describes the methodology for the Global Impact Study’s five-country surveys of public access ICT venue operators, users and non-users. The surveys collected detailed information about the conditions of public access to ICTs, characteristics of public access users, patterns of usage, as well as information on non-users. Local research teams in Bangladesh, Brazil,…

Mobile Information Literacy: Building Digital and Information Literacy Skills for Mobile-first and Mobile-centric Populations through Public Libraries

For billions of people coming online around the world – many in Africa – mobile phones (and increasingly smartphones) is their point of entry to the internet. This is true in both developed and developing countries. However, the user experience on a smartphone is very different from that on a PC or a feature phone….

Using Open Data to Inform Public Library Branch Services

November 9, 2020

This article describes the curation and use of open demographic data to inform public library services. A case study of census data curated for the Seattle Public Library (SPL) system is described. To understand the information needs of library branches, a set of SPL regional managers were interviewed, a set of use cases were created,…