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

Abstract

LIBRARY TRENDS, Vol. 69, No. 4, 2021 (“Researching Practice/Practicing Research: The Public Library in Partnership with Academia,” edited by Joyce M. Latham and Noah Lenstra), pp. 717–24. © 2021 The Board of Trustees, University of Illinois 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: