Mind the Gap: Towards the Integration of Critical Gerontology in Public Library Praxis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aging populations challenge public libraries to adapt their materials, services and programming to maximize the wellbeing and functional capacity of older adults and enhance their social participation and security. For older adult patrons using public library spaces and services, the capacity to which the public library has been able to deliver on these qualities remains unclear. In the past, libraries and library staff have been critiqued for narrowly interpreting the needs of older adults, concentrating on aging as a loss or deficit. To understand the current state of Canadian urban public library services for older adults, publically accessible texts, documents and reports made available on five public library systems' websites were analyzed. This analysis uncovered certain gaps in adherence to key guidelines in the Canadian Library Association's Guidelines on Library and Information Services for Older Adults and revealed a lack of integration of older adults' own ideas and feedback for their programs and events. The incorporation of a critical gerontology approach throughout the analysis begins to elucidate this study's findings and calls for the questioning of current conceptualizations of older adults and the library services created for them. Public libraries are uniquely poised to engage with older adults and the addition of a critical gerontology lens in library practice and research will aid in the refocusing of resources and policies to more responsively support older adults' evolving needs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.111 | 0.088 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.101 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.051 | 0.049 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.044 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".