Balancing Print and Electronic Collections in Public Libraries: Perspectives for a Changing World
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public libraries are of vital importance to their communities, providing access to information, shelter, services, and serving as an anchor for economic and social growth. As public libraries adapt to an increasingly digital world, they must address the balance of print and electronic materials to ensure that users have access to what they want and need. While public libraries’ print collections are decreasing at a slower rate than those of their academic counterparts, they are also facing increasing pressure to offer materials electronically. Public libraries must address challenges in tracking usage statistics as well as their users’ attitudes towards ebooks and print materials. Resource issues must be addressed, including costs and staffing. An increased desire for flexible space within library branches may also be a consideration impacting print collections. In addressing issues of accessibility, both print and electronic materials may create barriers in some instances while increasing access in others. The closure of many public library spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has introduced new issues, including limitations to access of print materials, new ease of access to online materials, and additional resource limitations as libraries work with limited budgets and staff. While the shift to online services during the COVID-19 pandemic has likely sped up the transition to increasing availability of online resources in public libraries, an appetite for print materials remains.
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 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 | 0.028 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.055 | 0.053 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.026 |
| Research integrity | 0.020 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.002 |
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".