Behind Closed Doors: The Hidden Intellectual Work and Images of Librarianship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Unlike many professionals, much of the intellectual work of librarians takes place behind closed doors, hidden from those who actually use the resulting service. Research on user perceptions of collection development work in public libraries, (the Who Decides? study), revealed that collection development is a hidden intellectual responsibility. Brief interviews were conducted with 106 adults in twoCanadian public libraries. Only 40% identified library staff as being responsible for collection development. Others suggested a variety of decision makers, including users and “ the public” , committees of community leaders, government officials, publishers, and pre-existing lists. Most respondents indicated that they were guessing. They frequently used mental models to generate answers. The authors contend that at least part of the misunderstanding of librarians and their work may be attributed to its hidden nature. Why the public does not know that librarians select materials is considered along with the implications of these findings with respect to the image of librarians, and the staffing and funding of libraries.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".