Senior public librarians looking to the future

The purpose of this paper is to explore senior public librarians' views on medium‐term and long‐term plans for the provision of library services. The paper also aims to extend work in the literature of public librarianship studies, which up to recently has largely been an under‐researched area.

A total of 30 in‐depth interviews were conducted with senior public librarians in Ireland, the UK and the USA. A semi‐structured interview format was used, and the grounded theory approach was used to analyse the data.

Half of the contributors to the current study articulated that their five‐year vision would include the maintenance and development of the core services in which they were already engaged together with introducing innovative expansion of services. Of the respondents, 90 per cent expressed optimism for the survival of public library services through the middle of the twenty‐first century.

The librarians repeatedly made the case that they are very different from managers in the private sector and from other public sector managers. They believe that they are managers of institutions that are fundamentally making a difference to the lives of people. They also believe that they and their libraries are major catalysts of change in the social environments.

By locating this study in a transnational context, the study contributes in an innovative way to an under‐researched topic. The primary domain to which this study contributes is librarianship. Within the domain of librarianship, the specific focus is on senior management, addressing an acknowledged gap in that field, as the literature on librarianship has traditionally shown very little attention to management within librarianship.