A thematic analysis of library association policies on services to persons with disabilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Library association policies and guidelines are important to study because they reflect consensus values of the profession. As such, they can shape the association, itself, and set the tone for the values of its individual members in their professional practice. From the titles alone, these documents proclaim themselves to be guides for the development of individual library policy. Additionally, as library and information science (LIS) graduate education programs are accredited by national associations, LIS schools pay attention to association policies and guidelines to help shape professional and continuing education. In these ways, they have a role in shaping professional ideology around a topic. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The services to persons with disabilities policies from three national-level LIS organizations were analyzed through a thematic analysis. Findings The guidelines speak to a shared understanding of disability and accessibility around the themes of library staff, library policies and library resources and services. While not surprising, additional themes around disability context and legislation show a shared understanding of accessibility that is much broader than what the legislation requires. Originality/value An analysis of guidelines on services to persons with disabilities from the American Library Association (ALA), Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) and Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA) is of interest because of the ways these organizations intersect. The ALA and ALIA have reciprocal agreements so that students in LIS education programs are recognized as equivalents. Second, the ALA accredits library education programs in Canada. Given these intersecting relationships, the guidelines-shared notions of accessibility become of high interest.
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 | 0.048 | 0.073 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".