This scoping review examines how methods of public consultation and engagement relating to public library services in England have been evaluated within the existing literature. Whilst public consultation is widely recognised as important for responsive public library service planning and decision-making, there has been little synthesis of the evidence concerning the methods used to engage the public or how those methods have been critically assessed. Using scoping review methodology, searches were undertaken across academic databases, government and policy repositories, and key sector organisations. Literature published from 2009 onwards was screened against predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria. Twenty-three publications, representing 20 distinct bodies of work, were included. Data were extracted on publication characteristics, research approaches, consultation and engagement methods, and forms of methodological evaluation, before being coded and analysed to identify patterns. Discussion methods, particularly interviews and focus groups, together with survey methods, dominated the evidence base, while participatory, creative, and experience-based approaches were comparatively uncommon. Most publications described consultation methods and discussed their advantages and limitations, but comparatively few justified method choice, reported method piloting or testing, or evaluated how methodological challenges were addressed. Consultation methods were rarely the primary focus of investigation, with methodological reflection typically secondary to broader studies of library services or community engagement. The review concludes that there is limited evidence to guide the selection, implementation and evaluation of consultation methods in public library contexts. Future research should move beyond documenting consultation activity towards comparative evaluation of methods to establish which approaches are most appropriate and effective for different consultation objectives, participant groups and decision-making contexts.
This study presents a bibliometric analysis of scholarly publications in Library and Information Science (LIS) originating from North Africa between 2020 and 2025. Focusing on open-access journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the research examines publication growth, authorship patterns, institutional collaboration, and the geographic distribution of contributing scholars. Data were retrieved from and integrated across OpenAlex and DOAJ, with supplementary validation using Scopus, ensuring a comprehensive and transparent dataset. The study encompasses five North African countries-Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. The findings reveal patterns of knowledge production and collaborative networks, while critically examining the structural limitations that constrain LIS scholarly visibility and research capacity in the region. Notably, the analysis uncovers significant disparities in journal production across North African countries, with Egypt accounting for the majority of indexed journals, and documents substantial gaps when compared with European LIS publication output. This research contributes to understanding regional dynamics in LIS research and identifies structural barriers that constrain the dissemination of open-access research across the region. We argue that observed disparities reflect both adaptive strategies to local constraints and systemic inequalities that require targeted policy interventions.
This study examines how external stimuli (e.g., information overload, risk perception) interact with internal emotional states (e.g., health information anxiety and sadness) to trigger health information avoidance (behavioral outcomes/response), with health literacy as a mediator. The study attempts to develop and test a seven-factor measurement model based on the expanded Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework. The findings confirmed that information overload and risk perception significantly increase both health information anxiety and avoidance, and that avoidance directly predicts poor health outcomes. It demonstrates that sadness, often overlooked in favor of anxiety, plays a significant role in driving avoidance. It also identifies health literacy as a critical mediator, suggesting that improving literacy reduces avoidance not directly but by buffering emotional distress. Our study carries several important contributions, for example, it extends prior work by incorporating sadness (beyond anxiety/fear) as a response to overload/risk; it incorporates health literacy as a mediator between stimuli (information overload/risk perception) and organism (information anxiety/sadness). The findings offer actionable insights for university-based interventions aimed at breaking the cycle of information overload, emotional distress, and avoidance.
This study tests a single organising proposition: whether the analytical separability of service quality, information behaviour and information literacy, a foundational assumption of the measurement frameworks being applied, accurately reflects how grassroots library users in Vietnam actually experience access to scientific and technical information (STI). A 43-item instrument, built on 10 theoretically prescribed constructs, was administered to 837 users across 10 purposively selected provinces and analysed through exploratory factor analysis (Principal Axis Factoring, Promax rotation). The 10 constructs converged into three strongly intercorrelated factors ( r = 0.656–0.785) explaining 66.92% of the variance; this structure was independently re-derived through EFA conducted separately on two sample halves and re-confirmed on a holdout half of the same sample ( n = 419), and further corroborated through confirmatory bifactor analysis, in which a dominant general factor (ECV = 0.879; omega-H = 0.959) stood above three specific factors of limited independent weight. Information ability, moreover, did not emerge as a separable personal competency but instead loaded onto factors reflecting either the service environment or information behaviour. The evidence indicates that the separability assumed by the frameworks being applied does not match how grassroots users experience access to information, which instead occurs as a single undifferentiated whole; the finding carries implications for the cross-institutional validity of these measurement frameworks and for the relational understanding of information literacy.
Since 2016, under regulations issued by the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology, metadata for theses, dissertations, and their proposals (TDPs) in Iran’s National Thesis, Dissertation and Proposal Registration System (NTDPRS) have been immediately open access, with full texts released after designated embargo periods. This study investigates Iranian graduate students’ perspectives on these open access policies and practices. Using a survey method, data were collected from 449 graduate students registered in NTDPRS via an online questionnaire. Nonparametric binomial tests were used to evaluate Likert-scale items and dichotomous (yes/no) preferences to identify statistically significant support for various open access components. More than half of the respondents supported enhancing open access (OA) to metadata and full texts of TDPs. They particularly supported OA to metadata in English, international dissemination of full texts via global repositories, and immediate access to full texts after registration. As the first study of Iranian graduate students’ perspectives toward OA to TDPs, the findings apply to improving related systems and policies in Iran. Its findings offer novel insights for refining national repository systems and policy frameworks, contributing to open science development in the Global South.
