2023, Vol.54, No.3

Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.02

pISSN : 2466-2542
https://journal.kci.go.kr/liss

This article intends to explore both progress and problems in local library policies of South Korea, with emphasis on public libraries. Special concerns are given to analyze the strength and weakness of local library regulations and implementation plans, prepared for the promotion of local public libraries. Also investigated are the structural problems in both current procedures and systems for library policy making. The final discussion includes the customized solutions to make local library policies be healthy and reliable, as well as the analysis on the indigenous factors to make local library policies be weak and defective.

There has been research to understand users’ information behaviors using book circulation data of public libraries. In this study, we examined the subject areas of books simultaneously borrowed by users of public libraries and aimed to identify the relationships among the subject areas. To accomplish this, we utilized the Korean Decimal Classification codes of 984,790 loaned books in 2019 to transform the lists of concurrently borrowed books, totaling 22,443,699 records, by the same users on the same day, into vectors using the ITEM2VEC technique. Next, we extracted ten highly related classification codes for each classification code, utilizing a total of 522 classification codes to create a network. We identified 15 communities within this network and examined the characteristics of each community. Among the 15 communities, those consisting of two or more main classes allowed us to identify meaningful thematic associations. This study, grounded in users’ book usage behaviors, has suggested the topics of books that could be borrowed together. The findings offer valuable insights for library collection development and placement, recommending related subject materials, and revising classification systems.

The purpose of this study is to examine the current status of university library operation through the five laws of library science and suggest ways to improve it. To this end, the operation status of four national and public university libraries was analyzed with the scope of the study as the Busan area. Furthermore, for an in-depth investigation, the P University library in Busan was examined as a case. The operation status of national and public university libraries in the Busan region was analyzed by dividing them into the categories of university library collection materials, facilities, staff, material purchase costs, and users from 2018 to 2022. In particular, there was a decrease in users and a shortage of librarians due to COVID-19. In the case study, the operation status of P University library was investigated focusing on the first and fifth laws of Ranganathan’s five laws of library science. In the first law, the study was conducted on the aspects of access to and use of the collection, library location, usage time and book lending, and staff. In the fifth law, the investigation was divided into service improvement aspects according to changes in digital technology of P University library and library environment improvement aspects according to changes in user characteristics. As a result of the study, ‘establishment of library space composition strategy’, ‘establishment of blue ocean strategy’, and ‘expansion of recruitment and deployment of librarians’ were suggested as improvement plans.