Volume 56, Issue 2

This study considers how selected New Zealand public libraries engage in public consultation as part of collection development policy formulation by investigating the consultative methods used by a sample of library managers during the formulation and application of their collection development policies. Five public libraries in the North Island of New Zealand participated in the investigation. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with each of the study participants. The collection development policy documents from each library provided additional sources of data. The data were analysed according to a set of coding themes developed for the project. The results indicate that New Zealand public libraries practising responsive collection management demonstrate the following characteristics: (1) the collection development policy has been formulated as a result of research into client needs and wants; (2) this research uses a variety of community consultation and data analysis techniques; and (3) research into community and customer needs is ongoing. The investigation also shows that managers employ a limited range of consultation techniques, which needs to be broadened in order to collect more robust data about client and community needs. Furthermore, public library collection development policies, where they actually exist, are dated, outmoded and little used. The study suggests that public library managers should make greater use of library surveys and focus groups as a means of collecting consultative data from their clients. It also suggests that managers can create more robust, consultation-based collection development policies using community needs analysis techniques as an integral part of the process.

The community information needs of the urban Israeli population were studied using a telephone survey of 304 residents of a medium-sized city in central Israel and interviews with community officials in the city's social system. The purpose of the study was to identify the information needs of the urban community and its preferences, in order to establish the first formal public library's information centre in Israel. Approximately 60% of the problems cited by the subjects are concentrated in five categories: neighbourhood matters; studies; transportation; government matters; and entertainment, leisure and recreation. In most of the categories the percentage of local topics exceeds the percentage of general topics (i.e. topics not necessarily related to the community where the subjects live). Of all the problems (1,067) raised by the subjects, the percentage consulting dedicated information sources was 41.2%, and the percentage consulting general information sources was 29.6%. The findings of the survey show that the subjects clearly prefer information channels that offer personal contact (e.g. by telephone or face-to-face meeting with professionals). In contrast to the findings of many other studies, informal personal contacts (e.g. family members, friends) was ranked last place. In the interviews, community officials admitted that they receive numerous requests for information or assistance in solving problems on a wide range of topics that are not in their sphere of activity. The analysis of the data from both methods indicated a lack of sufficient and accessible information sources and underscored the importance of public libraries as major community information centres. Following the results of this study, the first official community information centre in Israel is currently being established by the librarians at the public library in the city where the data were collected.

This study investigates the information needs and information seeking behaviours of SME (small and medium-sized enterprises) managers in Botswana's manufacturing industry, using a self-administered questionnaire. The respondents were largely male (171 or 79%) while only (45 or 21%) were female. The key findings of the study indicate that: (1) SME managers consider customer and competition information to be the most important types of information to their firms; (2) SME managers devote a significant amount of time to active information-seeking and on average spend approximately five hours per week seeking information; (3) SME managers spend time seeking customer and competition information; (4) they use both personal (e.g. customers, business associates) and impersonal sources (newspapers, broadcast media and government publications); (5) information source selection is largely determined by accessibility and ease of use; and (6) managers use information for making important decisions and performing their routine activities. Several recommendations are made for future research in information behaviour of managers and mainstream user studies. Replication of this study with a different sample of firms would be highly useful.

This article analyzes the most used scholarly electronic journals at a multi-disciplinary research institute in India, the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). Analysis of the top thirty journals at IISc shows that two-thirds of these journals be long to non-profit/society publishers and one-third to for-profit/commercial publishers. There is a remarkable difference between the prices that for-profit/commercial publishers charge libraries for scholarly journals and the prices that non-profit/society publishers and university presses charge. This price difference does not appear to reflect a difference in quality as measured by the number of recorded citations to a journal/impact factor and use of journal.

The post-1978 economic reform in China created a new political economy, which, in turn, yielded sweeping effects on nearly all public institutions. While the transformation of the Chinese health care and education sectors has been fairly extensively explored and reported in the English literature, few studies have offered a thorough analysis of the change of public libraries. This paper attempts to fill the gap. After a brief introduction of the institutional framework of the Chinese public library system, the rest of the paper is devoted to examining the change of the system in the past quarter century with reference to the broad political economy of the post-1978 era. This analysis shows that although the new political economy has brought about considerable improvement to library infrastructure and management, it has also adversely affected public library development through the central government's reduction of subsidies for local needs, local governments' pragmatic approach to economic growth, the absence of effective monitoring over local governments' commitment to public library provision and the erosion of the public service ethos by the market ideology.