2022/02/04 by Philip Hider, Jane Garner, Simon Wakeling +1 · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Organizational Strategy and Culture #Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies #Religion, Society, and Development
paper · doi:10.1080/01930826.2022.2026120
openalex publication_date 2022/02/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
To understand the roles that Australian public libraries are aiming to play in their communities, mission statements from a sample of fifty public library networks were extracted from their corporate documents and subjected to both quantitative and qualitative content analysis. The five broader roles most commonly articulated were to facilitate learning and discovery, to increase social connectedness, to provide spaces and places, to provide access to information and resources, and to facilitate inclusion and celebrate diversity. Overall, the mission of Australian public libraries focuses more on learning and community building than on their traditional function of information access provision.