Radon exposure is the second leading cause of lung cancer, yet few Americans test their homes for radon, particularly in rural areas. The academic team and community partners engaged the public library systems in four rural counties to offer digital radon detectors for check-out as a means of increasing the public's access to free radon testing. The check-out procedures and instructional materials were created through an iterative process, and library personnel were educated on radon and home radon testing prior to launching the lending program. Library patrons reported high usability, feasibility, and acceptability of the program. Library patron-staff interactions mainly included discussions about the logistics of radon testing. Given that public libraries are invested in making communities thrive and promoting health, providing library lending programs for radon detectors is a novel, feasible, and acceptable way to reduce the risk of lung cancer in the community.

Public libraries needed to quickly address the new challenges brought by COVID-19 to continue their services. This study aimed to understand innovative public library services during the pandemic and provide a typology that represent their services. Twitter messages of 12 large public libraries were analyzed to identify library services. A total of 751 Tweets were coded with thematic tags by service types and innovative approaches. Using the social innovation typology by Winberry and Potnis (2021), their typology was revised to show public libraries' innovative services under the emergency circumstances. The findings suggested significant differences within social innovation categories and newly emerged themes. The revised social innovation typology developed from Twitter data during the pandemic includes nine major categories of public libraries' innovative service types and provides updated insights into how public libraries continue to serve as important community resources using innovative approaches. The revised typology will be useful for future research in describing future innovation and assessing the endurance of pandemic-era service innovations.

Community colleges offer a unique context in higher education and yet specific guidance on implementing the ACRL in community colleges is lacking. Semi-structured interviews with 30 community college librarians who had instruction duties explored the state of the implementation of the in community colleges and the effect of the recent pandemic on information literacy instruction (ILI). The is most lauded for its effect on the design and delivery of instruction, but its components mainly underpin ILI rather than being explicitly taught. The pandemic limited one-shot information literacy instruction but opened up opportunities for embedding librarianship in online courses. The value of this study lies in the potential for identifying opportunities for improving ILI in community colleges, based on a better understanding of librarians' attitudes and experiences of their instructional roles. Community college librarians with responsibility for ILI can be more fully supported when their instructional challenges are better understood.

The research carried out on human information behavior (HIB) during the Covid-19 health crisis was reviewed, with the premise that HIB and information practices allow humans to adapt to the changing circumstances of existence. A literature search was run on the LISTA and Google Scholar databases from middle March 2020 up to the end of March 2021. After filtering retrieved results, 52 studies were selected. Results are summarized into seven main themes, including the use of traditional and social media, infoveillance of search engines and social media activity, misinformation, disinformation and infodemics, and uncertainty and emotions. Results point to the need to carry out additional research in specific contexts and addressing vulnerable and marginalized groups. Further areas of inquiry include the interplay of emotions, knowledge and behaviors during the information seeking process, a better understanding of local knowledge and experiential knowledge, and the need to comprehend the limitations of ICT.

Although interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) has value in library and information science (LIS), it has low uptake in Africa. The methodological and theoretical approaches to using IPA in LIS and other disciplines are outlined, including a critical analysis of applying double hermeneutics and horizontalization to construct a hermeneutic interpretation. A blended librarianship thesis conducted in Zimbabwe is compared with LIS-based IPA studies and blended librarianship research to reflect the value of IPA methods. The illustration narrates how IPA was implemented within the context of phenomenology to analyse the complexity of academic librarians' views, taking into consideration social and historical environments. The weaknesses of the study are discussed, including the use of quality criteria of credibility, dependability, and transferability. The guided analysis of the study encourages the use of IPA in LIS as it can solve research problems and generate new theories to inform practice, services, philosophy, theory, and institutions.

A new model of information sharing practices in academic communities is based on Latour's circulatory system of scientific facts, and some elements of Foster's non-linear model of information-seeking behavior. The main proposition of this model is that information-sharing practices and context simultaneously shape each other. The proposed model supports Foster's conceptualization of information practices as non-linear processes, but its emphasis on the interdependence between context and information practices provides a more effective means to capture complex negotiations involved in information-sharing practices. The proposition is that the major reason for nonlinearity in information practices is a continuous shifting of actors' interests, pressures, and concerns. Capturing these dynamic relations becomes possible through this model. The model also offers a way to generate a number of research questions and hypotheses, and as such it could be a useful tool for empirical studies on information sharing in academic communities.

This study identifies characteristics of Americans who chose the library as their primary cancer information source over the Internet by examining demographic characteristics, online use experience, concerns of information quality, and perceptions of cancer information seeking. A secondary data analysis is conducted using the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Findings reveal that people who are more likely to choose the library are, compared to their Internet counterparts, people who lack online experience, are distrustful of online cancer information, and are more aware of cancer sources. However, they are not necessarily more adept cancer information seekers and do not have a greater expectation of getting quality information from the library. These findings suggest how the library plays its role as an information source for cancer information consumers in the e-health environment. Implications of the findings are discussed in a way that libraries could invest their efforts to reduce the digital health divide and to advance consumer health information literacy.

An innovative experiment to develop and evaluate a public library computer training program to teach older adults to access and use high-quality Internet health information involved a productive collaboration among public libraries, the National Institute on Aging and the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and a Library and Information Science (LIS) academic program at a state university. One hundred and thirty-one older adults aged 54-89 participated in the study between September 2007 and July 2008. Key findings include: a) participants had overwhelmingly positive perceptions of the training program; b) after learning about two NIH websites (http://nihseniorhealth.gov and http://medlineplus.gov) from the training, many participants started using these online resources to find high quality health and medical information and, further, to guide their decision-making regarding a health- or medically-related matter; and c) computer anxiety significantly decreased (p < .001) while computer interest and efficacy significantly increased (p = .001 and p < .001, respectively) from pre- to post-training, suggesting statistically significant improvements in computer attitudes between pre- and post-training. The findings have implications for public libraries, LIS academic programs, and other organizations interested in providing similar programs in their communities.