The great public libraries debate - do bricks and mortar still matter? A case study of Canada Water Library, Southwark, London examining current attitudes to a modern library space.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study aimed to examine in depth a newly-built modern public library to gain insight into attitudes to and perceptions of a modern library space in 2014. It used as a starting point a previous study carried out in 2005 and published by Black (2011) which gathered Mass Observation Archive data on public perceptions of public library buildings at the start of the 21st century. This study aimed to evaluate attitudes a decade on to determine if physical public library spaces still matter. A single case study methodology was used to add detail to the extant general literature on public libraries and provide insight into current attitudes to a purpose-built library in the heart of a community and how it meets users' needs and expectations. A printed questionnaire looking at the library's location, design and use of space was handed out to a sample of users. The results show that the physical library is still important to users who are proud of how it looks and the contribution it makes to their local community and area. The findings also show that the case study library is meeting the needs of its diverse user groups very well by providing access to resources, support, IT and space.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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; 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".