Purpose – Librarians and the library profession keep repeating that libraries contribute greatly to generating social capital by “building community”. However, little evidence of this has been presented. This paper aims to be a first step towards correcting this situation by asking whether...

Purpose The research was undertaken to explore the role of the UK public library as a public sphere and the ways in which this role relates to the epistemic, community and political functions of public libraries. Design/methodology/approach A longitudinal, multi-location focus group approach was...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evidence and better understand adolescent information behaviours in disadvantaged and disengaged circumstances, and explore issues of social integration. Design/methodology/approach – Interdisciplinary theoretical framework bringing together theories...

Purpose Studies on the information behaviour of immigrants including refugees across the globe show a significant dependency of immigrants on their informal networks for meeting various settlement and everyday life information needs. Although there are quite a few studies in LIS that globally...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to describe the full picture of how public libraries contribute to overcoming social division through their resources, programming and services. Design/methodology/approach A systematic literature review and analysis was conducted. Literature was collected...

This paper reports the results of a study funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board which sought to investigate links between Web search strategies and retrieval effectiveness. A total of 68 students, enrolled on masters programmes in librarianship, information management and information...

The Web is an important medium for scholarly communication of various types, perhaps eventually to replace entirely some traditional mechanisms such as print journals. Yet the Web analogy of citations, hyperlinks, are much more varied in use and existing citation techniques are difficult to...