Assessing libraries' community roles

proof of concept

Helena Lipkova

Tomáš Diviak

Adela Jarolimkova

Barbora Drobikova

Hana Landova

pp. 83-93

in: Serap Kurbanolu, Joumana Boustany, Esther Grassian, Diane Mizrachi, Loriene Roy (eds), Information literacy in everyday life, Berlin, Springer, 2019

Abstract

An essential condition for a public library's fulfilling its community role is a thorough understanding of its position in the local social network. The approaches used by libraries so far are based on partial, intuitive forms of assessment. In our study, we prove that the analysis of such networks can be based on a theoretically, as well as methodologically, rigorous approach. This article outlines the possibilities of using - Social Network Analysis (SNA) - in the field of library and information science (LIS). The main contribution of this study is the pilot verification of SNA in a local library in a small-town environment, in this case the town of Sedlčany located in Central Bohemia (population: 7,000). The SNA was applied using basic descriptive measures within the sociocentric approach and subsequently compared to the results of the subjective, intuitive self-assessment of the egocentric network by the library staff.