Public Libraries

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Opposite ends of the Tay: Collaboration between the NHS and Public Libraries in Tayside (Scotland)

Opposite Ends of the Tay explores a growing collaboration between NHS Tayside and public libraries to strengthen information literacy and support preventative, person‑centred healthcare. Set against stark health inequalities in Scotland, it argues that libraries are vital community infrastructure for enabling people to find, judge and use health information safely.

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Translation

Training Librarians for Crisis Communication: Why Virtual Reality Might Be the Answer

When you step into your local public library on a typical afternoon, you might see children and their families gathered for story time, a retiree reading in a corner, or a student hunched over a laptop. But, just as often, librarians encounter a very different scene: a patron in crisis. Public libraries have increasingly become places where people facing houselessness, mental health crises, or other personal struggles turn for help.

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Translation

Studying Exploratory Search in Public Digital Libraries: Collaboration & Partnerships

Most search interfaces currently used in public digital libraries have been influenced by design patterns based on web search, even though the complexity of the information seeking process when searching within a public library can be far greater than web search. Web search interfaces work extremely well for lookup search tasks, but they struggle to support complex search, especially those related to exploratory search.

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