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By 2030, one in six people in the world will be aged 60 years or over. As the average age of population increases, governments are increasingly called upon to implement policies to address the needs and interests of older people, including those related to housing, employment, health care, social protection, and other forms of intergenerational solidarity. Public libraries, as trusted community hubs, have the opportunity to serve as an environment for reflection and dialogue on age and aging. In this chapter, the authors reflect on the broader contexts and social trends that are shaping older adults’ engagement with public libraries and identify those older adults-focused public library practices that align with specific UN Sustainable Development Goals: Goal 3: Good Health and Well-Being, Goal 4: Quality Education, Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth, Goal 10: Reduce Inequalities, and Goal 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions. While public libraries are already meeting many facets of UN Sustainable Development Goals, to ensure that libraries can responsively meet older adults’ changing needs and expectations, the authors conclude with suggestions to enhance public libraries’ cross-sector coordination for maximum reach and impact on older patrons’ everyday lives.

Institutional ethnography is a method of inquiry that brings attention to people’s everyday work while simultaneously highlighting broader sites of administration and governance that may be organising that work. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the integration of institutional ethnography in health information practice research represents an important shift in the way that Library and Information Science professionals and researchers study and understand these practices.

This paper first explores the key tenets and conceptual underpinnings of Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography, illuminating the importance of moving between translocal and the local contexts and identifying ruling relations. Drawing from a library and information science study that combined interviews and textual analyses to examine the social organisation of family caregivers’ health-related information work, the paper then explores the affordances of starting in the local particularities and then moving outwards to the translocal.

The paper concludes with an overall assessment of what institutional ethnography can contribute to investigations of health information practices. By pushing from the local to the translocal, institutional ethnography enables a questioning of existing library and information science conceptualisations of context and of reappraising the everyday-life information seeking work/non-work dichotomy. Ultimately, in considering both the local and the translocal, institutional ethnography casts a wider net on understanding individuals’ health information practices.

With only two retrieved studies that combine institutional ethnography with the study of health information practices, this paper offers health information practice researchers a new method of inquiry in which to reframe the application of methods used.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest that a closer consideration of the notion of work and, more specifically, information work as a sensitizing concept in Library and Information Science (LIS) can offer a helpful way to differently consider how people interact and engage with information and can complement a parallel focus on practices, behaviours and activities.

Starting with the advent of the concept of information work in Corbin and Strauss’ work, the paper then summarizes how information work has evolved and taken shape in LIS research and discourse, both within and outside of health-related information contexts.

The paper argues that information work affords a lens that can acknowledge the multiple levels of effort and multiple processes (cognitive, physical or social-behavioural) related to information activities. This paper outlines six affordances that the use of information work within LIS scholarship imparts: acknowledges the conceptual, mental and affective; brings attention to the invisibility of particular information activities and their constituents; opens up and distinguishes the many different lines of work; destabilizes hierarchies between professionals and non-professionals; emphasizes goals relating to information activities and their underlying pursuits; and questions work/non-work dichotomies established in existing LIS models.

This paper is a first in bringing together the many iterations of information work research in LIS. In doing so, this paper serves as a prompt for other LIS scholars to take up, challenge the existing borders of, and thus advance the concept of information work.

This paper examines promotional practices Netflix employs via Twitter and its automated recommendation system in order to deepen our understanding of how streaming services contribute to sociotechnical inequities under capitalism.

Tweets from two Netflix Twitter accounts as well as material features of Netflix's recommendation system were qualitatively analyzed using inductive analysis and the constant comparative method in order to explore dimensions of Netflix's promotional practices.

Twitter accounts and the recommendation system profit off people's labor to promote content, and such labor allows Netflix to create and refine classification practices wherein both people and content are categorized in inequitable ways. Labor and classification feed into Netflix's production of culture via appropriation on Twitter and algorithmic decision-making within both the recommendation system and broader AI-driven production practices.

Assemblages that include algorithmic recommendation systems are imbued with structural inequities and therefore unable to be fixed by merely diversifying cultural industries or retooling algorithms on streaming platforms. It is necessary to understand systemic injustices within these systems so that we may imagine and enact just alternatives.

Findings demonstrate that via surveillance tactics that exploit people's labor for promotional gains, enforce normative classification schemes, and culminate in normative cultural productions, Netflix engenders practices that regulate bodies and culture in ways that exemplify interconnections between people, machines, and social institutions. These interconnections further reflect and result in material inequities that crystalize within sociotechnical processes.