Pamela J. McKenzie

Public libraries operate according to a set of goals, high-level “purposes or activities for which public libraries exist or are said to exist” (Vincent 1984, 396). The goals ascribed to the public...

Public libraries have long been understood as cornerstones of democratic life, learning, and community engagement. In recent years, however, their social role has become newly visible as communitie...

Purpose: This article explores the varied ways that individuals create and use calendars, planners and other cognitive artifacts to document the multiple temporalities that make up their everyday lives. It reveals the hidden documentary time work required to synchronize, coordinate or entrain their activities to those of others.Design/methodology/approach: We interviewed 47 Canadian participants in their homes, workplaces or other locations and photographed their documents. We analyzed qualitatively; first thematically to identify mentions of times, and then relationally to reveal how documentary time work was situated within participants' broader contexts.Findings: Participants' documents revealed a wide variety of temporalities, some embedded in the templates they used, and others added by document creators and users. Participants' documentary time work involved creating and using a variety of tools and strategies to reconcile and manage multiple temporalities and indexical time concepts that held multiple meanings. Their work employed both standard “off the shelf” and individualized “do-it-yourself” approaches.Originality/value: This article combines several concepts of invisible work (document work, time work, articulation work) to show both how individuals engage in documentary time work and how that work is situated within broader social and temporal contexts and standards.

This article reports on an exploratory study that examined bilingual/multilingual university students’ perspectives on how language affects their information searching and use. The study also examined instruction librarians’ perspectives on information literacy instruction in general and their approaches in providing information literacy instruction to international students and English as a Second Language (ESL) students. A qualitative research approach using focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews was used in the study. Nineteen (19) international and ESL students participated in the discussions while 8 instruction librarians were interviewed. Fifty-six (56%) of the students were aware of information literacy instruction as a service that was offered by the University library but only 37% had used this service. Only one of the librarians had had a significant encounter where language issues closely intersected with information literacy instruction. This study makes a connection between language and information literacy and reports on perspectives from both librarians and students’ point of view. While proposing a possible working definition of Multilingual Information Literacy (MLIL), the study makes the case for MLIL as a necessary skill for the twenty-first century. The study also proposes ways in which Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals could be involved in promoting and enhancing multilingual information literacy and further suggests Specialized Information Literacy Instruction (SILI) and Personalized Information Literacy Instruction (PILI) as suitable models for providing instruction to Limited English Proficient (LEP) users.

In this article I use a discursive approach and the concept of the ‘category entitlement’ to analyse the ways that contributors to a public Internet discussion of the value of the public library make cases for different user characteristics and behaviour as ‘worthy’ or ‘problematic’, and use these characteristics to discuss and debate the kinds of individuals and the kinds of behaviour that properly belong to each category. Contributors to the discussion represented users in three categories: a fluid ‘everyone’, which included people represented as being disadvantaged and in legitimate need of the library’s resources, expertise, and support; the user in-formation, whose worthy variant takes advantage of the library’s offerings to achieve success in economic, cultural, and civic domains and whose problematic variant fails to do so; and the visceral user who may meet bodily needs or engage in pleasurable non-purposive activities and who is deemed worthy or problematic based on their behaviour in the library space. Despite public libraries’ growing emphasis on serving the whole user, these public comments prioritise users who exercise their mind to develop into worthy members of a community and who meet behavioural expectations consistent with quiet intellectual activity.

This short paper examines social interaction (e.g. asking colleagues for help in the lunchroom) as an informative experience, a way to understand oneself and situation. The process of coming to an understanding is frequently hidden, but may be brought to light by examining the experiences of individuals undergoing a transition – a change that requires them to redefine their sense of self and situation. Using exemplars from previous research and drawing on Lave and Wenger's (1991) theory of situated learning, this paper explores the importance of social interaction to information practices. The role of social interaction will be discussed, including: information seeking to become part of a community, and social interaction as a source of information and as a site for information comparison (a type of information use) to situate oneself in a new environment. The paper proposes making social interaction a focus of study to better understand how individuals use information to change perception about and situate themselves.

This paper challenges the existing dichotomy between “everyday” and “workplace” information practices and uses an expansive understanding of work to make visible the often invisible and unpaid forms of work required to make everyday life possible. After an overview of existing understandings and applications of work within LIS, two studies that take up the information work of caring for a family member living with a chronic illness demonstrate that everyday life information practices transcend domestic and organizational contexts. The unpredictability of a chronic illness leads caregivers to undertake numerous and simultaneous lines of work in their everyday and every night lives, including information, document, affective, avoidance, and articulation work, among others. We argue that using the notion of work is a strategy to acknowledge, name, and count those everyday life information practices that are so commonplace they risk becoming unnoticed.

Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography (IE) is an ontology of the social that conceptualises ‘life as usual’ as the ongoing coordination of people’s actions across diverse sites. Popular in the health sciences and human service professions as a research strategy for understanding and explicating problematics of everyday life, it is slowly gaining traction as a critical research approach for library and information science (LIS). This article introduces IE and provides an overview of its central tenets. It outlines ways in which institutional ethnographers identify research problematics and collect and analyse data. The article concludes with three illustrations of how institutional ethnography has been used to map the linkages among activities and institutional processes, ultimately revealing how it can contribute to a critical understanding of library and information science practices and scholarship.

Information Science researchers have been relatively slow to consider the role of the body in understanding the relationship between people, information and technology. This panel will discuss how a consideration of the body can enrich information researchers' understanding of the complex relationship between people, information and technologies, old and new. Each panel member will briefly describe their own theoretical and methodological approach and how they have informed their understanding. This will be followed by a moderated discussion between the panel and audience members.