In the words of the users : the role of the urban public library as place
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public libraries play a multitude of roles in communities including supporting the intellectual, social, cultural and community needs of the local citizenry. Because of these multiple roles, relationships between libraries and community are complex. Examining users perceptions of the library as place is one way of beginning to understand this complexity and to generate a description of the web of relationships that libraries have with their communities. This study asks two questions: How do users describe the roles of urban public libraries as places in their lives? What does this tell us about the role of these spaces in the community? A multiple case study design was used to examine users’ reflections on their use and experience of three urban public libraries in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Users were asked to fill out questionnaires concerning their use and experience of the public library. 217 completed questionnaires were collected. This information was then analysed, using quantitative and qualitative methods, to determine what roles the library as place was playing in users lives and in the community. Interviews with library staff concerning users use of library spaces were also conducted. Out of this analysis theories describing the role of the urban public library as place were developed. This research provides an indication of the extent to which libraries are successfully fulfilling their various community roles, of opportunities for improvement and for adaptation of services to the needs of users, and of suggestions for further avenues of research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Qualitative | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Qualitative | low |
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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
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".