Prepared by Mahbub E Shobhanee, Heather Scott, and Danilo M. Baylen

1. Exploring the Global Librarianship Literature:
Content, Authors, and Sources
Mahbub E Shobhanee, East West University, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Heather Scott, Cleveland Park Library, Washington D.C., USA
Danilo M. Baylen, University of West Georgia, Georgia, USA
Danilo M. Baylen
University of West Georgia
Carrollton, Georgia, USA
Email: dbaylen1@yahoo.com
Contact Information
Change
The world is changing. Information is power. Survival means having the
ability to understand and adapt to one's environment. Librarians confront
these change, information, and adaptation issues every day to serve their
users' communities. These issues are often not directly happening where
the librarians are but in other parts of the world. Given this, librarians need
to understand how a network of libraries serves diverse users,
communicates in different languages, and meets multiple levels of
information needs functions.
Global Librarianship
There are so many things to know about global librarianship as a practice.
Understanding the field would involve acquiring, processing, retrieving,
and disseminating information through international library cooperation
driven by standards, policies, and procedures.
Purpose
Our group started searching for current literature on global librarianship in
this exploration. We want to know more about global librarianship
practices in other countries (What are global librarianship practices?).
Finally, we are interested in people and places that implement
international librarianship programs and activities (Who writes about
global librarianships? What are their roles? Where are they located?).
Introduction
Finding Gaps
After analyzing the search results, the group identified patterns and gaps.
• Many articles found involved school or medical/health sciences librarianship.
• Found more sources discussing academic libraries than public ones.
• The group had identified geographical gaps since most results were from North
America (i.e., the United States), and a fair number from Europe and Africa.
• The results had limited entries from South America, Asia, and Oceana.
• Some results discussed only one country or an in-country study.
Expanding the Search Process
The group decided to conduct additional search activities with the gaps in
mind.
• A new goal is to find articles from countries or continents lacking (i.e., South
America, Asia, and Oceana, etc.)
• Expanded content search for articles to include those discussing a project that
spanned multiple countries and an in-country example of a project that could
be scaled or used in other countries.
• Look for articles focused on public versus academic libraries or other types.
• Due to the difficulty in finding current sources, the group expanded the search
beyond institutional databases.
• The group decided only to accept peer-reviewed journal articles.
Reviewing Outputs
After the second search, most findings had academic libraries but included
a couple of public library-focused articles. More pieces of a single country or
in-country reports received consideration. However, upon further reading the
full-text copies, the group had to remove several articles since they did not
meet the global librarianship’s definition. The addition of search keywords
for geographic regions produced only a few new results.
Data Collection
Setting Parameters
Once the group decided to do a review of literature on global librarianship
and defined what international librarianship meant, they outlined and set
the parameters for the search activities.
• Identify peer-reviewed articles as the main topic or keyword.
• Limit search published materials from 2015 to the present.
• Assign each group member to find ten articles.
Conducting a Search
Using different search tools, the group members searched university and
public library databases using these guides:
• Search for full-text results or abstracts.
• Collect bibliographic information (author, title, publication year, source,
source type, volume/pages), contexts or countries of origin, including
keywords.
• Save PDF of full-text versions in a Google drive folder for full access later.
Reviewing Outputs
The group found relevant results during their initial search, but half of the
results were books, book chapters, and reports, while the rest were peer-
reviewed journal articles. Other inquiries returned with fewer than ten
articles each, but the outputs were also outside the scope of the peer-
reviewed journal articles. The group found the search more challenging
than expected. They discovered that using "global" as the keyword
returned fewer results. They individually gravitated toward using
"international" instead to expand the search outputs. They also found a
few promising items, but these were either outside the scope (older than
2015) or abstracts for which the group members could not get full texts.
Given the search outputs, the group decided on a change in strategies.
Initial Inquiry
Creating a data set
After four weeks of search activities, the group finalized the articles for
inclusion in the project. The group trimmed the initial list of entries. Many
were outside the scope (i.e., earlier than 2015 or did not fit the global
librarianship's definition) or not peer-reviewed articles—the final data set
comprised thirty-six articles (Figure 1) from twenty-one journals (Figure 4).
Analyzing the Data Set
Once the final data set was reviewed and analyzed, the group started to
outline the narrative (introduction, methods, findings, conclusions, etc.) that
would go into the poster. The group discussed translating the data into
charts or graphics as visuals. The group agreed on having the following
visuals: a word cloud of keywords (Figure 8) from the articles and charts or
graphs showing the publication region, publication year, and what countries
the papers discussed (Figures 6 & 7). Additionally, the group added charts
focusing on each article's first author's homeland (Figure 2) plus publication
region (Figure 5). The group included information on the continent where
the first author came from (Figure 3) to demonstrate potential gaps, trends,
and biases in writing about global librarianship.
Reviewing Outputs
The group put together a draft narrative with charts or graphics from the
data analysis. Several discussions occurred on how best to identify articles
that covered multiple countries. Should the group list them as global, other,
or multiple, or choose the most prominent region or country featured? The
group decided to go with "multiple" for the label. The group also considered
outputs displaying the publications' country, region, or continent. Given that
the data set is relatively small in this exploratory project showing specific
data by region or continent rather than listing each country is more visually
impactful.
Data Analysis and Results
Heather Scott
Cleveland Park Library
Washington, D.C., USA
Email: heather.scott@dc.gov
Mahbub E Shobhanee
East West University
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Email: mahbubshobhanee@gmail.com
Conclusion
After completing the project, the group understood the diversity of global
librarianship as a practice based on demonstrated and shared examples in the
literature. The review of articles found and selected reported a range of
approaches from in-country activities to multiple-country collaborations and
partnerships. As a continent, North America produced almost 28% of
publications on in-country practices compared to others. Europe reported less
than 6% of publications focusing on in-country practices. However, multiple
country practices identified comprised almost 40% of the publications' content
in the data set.
Finally, the group discussed the limitation of results from the exploratory project
given a small number of articles. The group members discussed the next steps
in expanding the work.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
Figure 8