School Library Provision in the Republic of Ireland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The provision of state funded school libraries is a common feature of education systems in developed countries internationally. Despite this, the Irish Department of Education funds demonstration libraries in only 30 out of the 730 post-primary (for students aged 12-18) schools nationally. Outside of these, school library provision in Ireland is under researched and very little is known about library facilities, resources, management, and use of the library by the school community. In order to shed some light on the current situation, this study explores, for the first time, school library provision in one province in the West of Ireland (Connacht) in which there are 102 post-primary schools. Of these, only 55 schools confirmed that they have a library and 29 of these participated in the study. The key research questions are as follows: Are there school libraries in post-primary schools in Connacht? Where school libraries exist in this region, how are these resourced, managed and used by the school community? The findings indicate that despite the commitment of individual teachers and schools, the lack of a national school library policy and the lack of funding is very much in evidence in terms of the resources provided for school libraries and their use by teachers and students. The study argues that current school library provision in the majority of schools surveyed, is more analogous to school library provision in developing countries, and that the findings from this region may reflect the situation in post-primary schools nationally.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".