Outcomes are a consequential yet understudied component in information behavior research. It remains unclear how vulnerable populations experience and prioritize different outcome types. Focusing on sexual and gender minorities, an exploratory mixed methods design was adopted to investigate LGBTQ university students’ information seeking and sharing outcomes. Data were collected through participant diaries, interviews, and an online survey. In total, 97 LGBTQ university students from 45 institutions in the United States participated in one or both study phases. Qualitative analysis identified five major outcome types across individual, interpersonal, and communal levels: affective, cognitive, practical, relational, and communal outcomes. Survey results showed that participants prioritized communal and practical outcomes over affective and relational outcomes. Moreover, participants prioritized outcomes based on their lived contexts and considerations of immediate personal utility versus longer-term collective impact. Practical implications are discussed for supporting balanced personal, relational, and communal outcomes in community-based information environments.
Integrating gender perspectives into higher education curricula is widely recognized as essential for inclusive and socially responsive teaching, yet implementation remains uneven across disciplines and institutional contexts. This study examines how gender perspectives are incorporated into Library and Information Science (LIS) teaching across six European countries. A cross-sectional survey of 115 academic staff collected sociodemographic and professional information, perceptions of institutional support and barriers, and qualitative reflections. Quantitative analysis identified a three-factor institutional support model—formal commitment, policy implementation and expertise, and student and faculty engagement—with no significant differences by gender or country. Qualitative thematic analysis revealed four themes: the educational value of gender perspectives, curricular integration, institutional enablers (training, resources, workload recognition), and resistance or controversy. Findings suggest that formal commitments alone are insufficient and must be supported by concrete institutional mechanisms. The study provides comparative evidence and practical recommendations for embedding gender perspectives sustainably in LIS curricula.
Academic libraries face escalating pressure to respond to technological change, shifting institutional expectations, and new workforce demands, yet research on how leadership responses remains fragmented. A scoping review and bibliometric analysis of academic library leadership scholarship published from 2015 to 2024 in Scopus, following the JBI framework and PRISMA-ScR guidelines. The final dataset included 128 documents. Publications increased during 2020–2021, with the United States as the leading contributor. Keyword co-occurrence analysis revealed six themes, grouped into three broader domains: organizational, people-centered, and adaptive leadership. Most studies were practice-based or descriptive, and few used explicit theoretical frameworks, with transformational leadership most common. The findings show that although leadership scholarship in academic libraries has grown, it remains limited in scale, narrowly grounded in theory, and uneven across global contexts. The review highlights the need for more diverse conceptual models, greater methodological rigor, and expanded research in underrepresented regions.
The integration of artificial intelligence into academic libraries transforms information intermediation from a solo activity to a hybrid human-machine process. To understand this shift, a multilevel model was developed to examine how librarian guidance intensity and perceived AI cognitive authority influence creative outcomes in student teams. Data were collected from 30 teams (90 individuals) participating in a mathematical modeling competition using a three-wave design. Multilevel structural equation modeling results indicated that at the team level, librarian guidance intensity positively predicted solution novelty, a relationship mediated by information integration capability. At the individual level, perceived AI cognitive authority negatively predicted creative confidence through the mechanism of increased cognitive load. Crucially, a cross-level interaction effect was found: intensive librarian guidance buffered the positive relationship between perceived AI authority and cognitive load, thereby mitigating the psychological burden of human-AI negotiation. These findings offer an evidence-based framework for designing AI-augmented library services that balance objective performance gains with the preservation of individual creative agency.
Researchers browsing open scholarly resources on Gallica, the digital platform of the French national library, need to tinker with its dysfunctional search engine in order to make discoveries. While discovering unknown, yet relevant scientific resources is of paramount importance for knowledge making, little is known about how researchers deploy specific informational practices on, usually ill-equipped, digital scholarly platforms to turn search engines, designed for findability, into discovery engines. By crossing semi-directed interviews with log analysis, multiple “regimes of engagement” with Gallica were identified. Building on pragmatic sociology, the regime of unstructured exploration as a strategy for users to venture into the “noise” and make discoveries was studied and showed the inherent tension between findability and discoverability, heightened by the hegemony of general search engine. This mixed-methods ethnography of discovery practices on a digital library can help design specific tools and scientific policies.
