Public libraries are heavily affected by political and policy-making processes that shape the funding, activities, and roles of libraries in society, with the explosion of information policy decisions in the past two decades significantly increasing the responsibilities of libraries while also increasing limitations on their activities. Research…

This report is the third in a set of three reports from the project, "Issues in Library Research: Proposals for the 1990s," which was launched in September 1986 to investigate library and information science issues in order to assess the current state of the profession and identify a research agenda to lead into the next decade. This…

Recent government initiatives to combat social exclusion within the United Kingdom have served to place librarians and libraries as prominent players in the movement to providing information over a wider social context. For example, The Peoples Network is a government initiative to connect all public libraries to the information superhighway by…

As networked digital information proliferates and modern society's need to have access to information irrespective of location rises, the education needed for the digerati, defined loosely as the digital intelligentsia, the whole class of "expert" digital information professionals, becomes an important area about which all information…

In 1962, Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell began distributing and discussing a draft paper in which he introduced the concept of the "post-industrial" or "information" society. This idea has been the subject of intense and often insightful analysis by proponents and critics from a vast range of disciplinary sites. Until now, the…