Library Experience Matters! Touchpoints to Community Engagement

ABSTRACT

This article explores the concept of service branding in the context of libraries and information organizations. We discuss community perceptions of library brand value from the librarian's perspectives in the context of public and academic libraries. Librarians’ thoughts and viewpoints in improving the community's library experience are also discussed. The findings highlight the importance of improving the library's visibility, creating appealing ambience, and developing a strategic branding plan in order to provide robust, compelling, and meaningful experiences for their community.     

The Information Age

A FEW GOOD MEN FROM UNIVAC by David E. Lundstrom (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987—$19.95)

DYNAMICS OF INFORMATION MANAGEMENT: CONCEPTS AND ISSUES edited by Indu B. Singh and Vic M. Mishra (Norwood, N j: Ablex Publishing, 1987—$37.50)

HIGH-TECH SOCIETY: THE STORY OF THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY REVOLUTION by Tom Forester (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987—$19.95)

THE IDEOLOGY OF THE INFORMATION AGE edited by Jennifer Daryl Slack and Fred Fejes (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1987—$37.50)

INNOVATION IN ELECTRONIC MAIL by Peter Vervest (Amsterdam and New York: Elsevier Science/North Holland, 1987—$61.00)     

Further Attempts to Balance Liberal Virtues with Claims for Cultural Identity within Traditional Non-liberal Communities. A reply to Neil Burtonwood

In a recent paper, Neil Burtonwood (Educational Studies, 24(3), pp. 295–304, 1998) argued that 'recent attempts to balance the claims for political citizenship in a liberal democracy (liberalism) with the claims of cultural identity within traditional non-liberal communities...' (p. 295) are bound to fail; because 'liberalism cannot be neutral between ... cultures that value individual autonomy and those that do not', any 'attempts at reconciling' those two perspectives 'are bound to fail' (p. 303). His claim is that whatever position we begin from, there are real difficulties in achieving a reconciliation between the two perspectives, which he sees as exclusive. He refers to my papers (Singh, Educational Review, 47(1), pp. 11-24, 1995; Educational Studies, 23(2), pp. 169-184, 1997) where discussion method has been suggested as a means of reconciling the two positions. I still favour this method. This paper agrees with Burtonwood that liberalism is non-neutral in relation to liberal virtues such as equality and respect for persons, and no groups including liberal ones, should be privileged with respect to non-interference from the state. Although the paper acknowledges the value of 'Popperian critical method', it sees this method as very limited in respect of settling conflicts arising from comprehensive or world-views. Liberals and liberal societies have long realised this and have made attempts to accommodate cultural practices of traditional groups. Although the two positions exclude each other at a deep level, at a more mundane, every-day level, they share much that is common to both, which makes intercultural understandings possible. Education must capitalise on this and take us beyond a single framework. The difficulty is, of course, what do we do and how can we assess the situation, when frameworks themselves clash? The paper argues for dialogue, tolerance and accommodation within limits, set by respect for persons. This is not to ask liberalism to give up what is foundational to liberalism, as Burtonwood suggests, but to reinforce liberalism itself, as we show below.     

Diversity,Disadvantage and Differential Outcomes: An analysis of Samoan students' narratives of schooling

Social justice discourses, particularly those attentive to the politics of difference, suggest that the perspectives of least-advantaged groups need to be taken into account when endeavouring to realise social justice in education for these groups. In this paper, we analyse narratives on schooling produced by one cohort of least-advantaged students, namely, Samoan students attending state-designated disadvantaged secondary schools in Queensland, Australia. Specifically, the narratives of educational disadvantage provided by Samoan students are analysed. The focus is on 'the what' (the knowledge to be transmitted) and 'the how' (the teacher–student relations) of pedagogy in state-designated disadvantaged schools. Attention is paid to the contradictory and ambivalent discourses inherent in these narratives, particularly in terms of realising socially just pedagogic practices and outcomes.