Researching Practice/Practicing Research: The Public Library in Partnership with Academia

In 2012, Canadian public librarian Pam Ryan wrote about “the grim reality of low public librarian research and publication rates” (5). Woods and Booth (2013) provide some quantitative backing to this claim: among all types of practitioner research in librarianship, public librarian research is the least common. Only 0.6 percent of articles in their sample came from public librarians, behind 5.4 percent from school librarians. Adkins (2019) notes this problem emerges from multiple sources, including the fact that “the publication venues for research on public librarianship are relatively few, and the people writing in this area are relatively small in number” (211). It may also be “due in part to the municipal and fragmented nature of the public library. As most public libraries are products of their communities, they each have a unique story about their beginnings and their challenges” (230). Regardless of the reasons why, public librarians compose only 14 percent of the authors in her dataset of prolific voices in the public library literature, meaning that the voices of public librarians are underrepresented even within the small research literature on public libraries.

How can we reverse this anemic record? One starting place is attending to the questions public librarians partnering with academic researchers raise. From the perspective of public librarians, the questions that animate the six articles featured in this special issue include the following:

• • How do patrons feel about fines?

• • How does one rebuild the public library profession after armed conflict?

• • How could librarians engage marginalized populations that don’t trust institutions?

• • How may libraries effectively support the digital literacy needs of patrons?

• • How could community members be included in the library design process?

• • What are the lived experiences of public librarians as first responders to disasters?

• • How do public librarians practice research?

• • How do academics research public library practices?

This special issue spotlights the need to address the concerns and modifications of practices that reverberate in the field.

A challenge associated with systematically grappling with these and other practitioner-oriented questions in the LIS research literature relates to some misunderstandings in our academic field about the public library as an institution. Wayne A. Wiegand (2017) has argued that the discipline of LIS is “falling short” of the public library profession’s needs by not including enough research or education on, what he argues, are the three reasons “people have loved their libraries [over time]: (1) the useful information they made accessible, (2) the transformative potential of commonplace reading they circulated and (3) the public spaces they provided” (39).

By assuming that public libraries are solely, or even primarily, about information, the field of LIS has unduly narrowed the scope of study. Evidence of this perception can be found in conversations convened by the American Library Association in 2018 and 2019 that brought together LIS faculty and public library leaders and that demonstrated a perceived growing gap between LIS research/teaching and public library practice (American Library Association 2019).

Just as the field of LIS has been perceived to be drifting away from the needs and concerns of public librarians, scholars in other disciplines have stepped in to fill this rift. For instance, public health scholars analyze summer meal programs in California libraries (De La Cruz, Phan, and Bruce 2020), public health scholars in Pennsylvania examine the preparedness of public librarians to administer Naloxone to reverse opioid overdoses (Lowenstein et al. 2021), and kinesiologists from Ontario demonstrate “the feasibility of teaching staff without specialized training in physical education [including four public librarians] to implement Move 2 Learn” (Bedard, Bremer, and Cairney 2020, 114), an evidence-based intervention designed to improve movement and preliteracy skills in children between one and a half and six years old. These are all examples of novel deployments of public space by public librarians and academic partners. None of them are centrally about information in any way. It is notable that in the United States arguably the most prominent public intellectual on public libraries today is neither an LIS scholar, nor a public librarian, but a sociologist: Eric Klinenberg...