Understanding the Governance Challenges of Public Libraries Subscribing to Digital Content Distributors

TL;DR

Public libraries increasingly rely on digital content services, facing governance challenges like content quality, control, and understanding service operations, which impact their curation policies and user experience.

Contribution

This study identifies key governance challenges faced by public libraries subscribing to digital content services and offers recommendations for improving content curation and moderation.

Findings

Libraries face content quality issues and lack control over curation.

Limited understanding of distribution service operations hampers governance.

Co-constructed policies and moderation mechanisms can improve digital content management.

Abstract

As popular demand for digital information increases, public libraries are increasingly turning to commercial digital content distribution services to save curation time and costs. These services let libraries subscribe to pre-configured digital content packages that become instantly available wholesale to their patrons. However, these packages often contain content that does not align with the library's curation policy. We conducted interviews with 15 public librarians in the US to examine their experiences with subscribing to digital distribution services. We found that the subscribing libraries face many digital governance challenges, including the sub-par quality of received content, a lack of control in the curation process, and a limited understanding of how distribution services operate. We draw from prior HCI and social media moderation literature to contextualize and examine these challenges. Building upon our findings, we suggest how digital distributors, libraries, and lawmakers could improve digital distribution services in library settings. We offer recommendations for co-constructing a robust digital content curation policy and discuss how librarian's cooperation and well-deployed content moderation mechanisms could help enforce that policy. Our work informs the utility of future content moderation research that bridges the fields of CSCW and library science.