Giving a Voice to Students with Disabilities to Design Library Experiences: An Ethnographic Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In my opinion, this article presents a very innovative and interesting research, which is relevant for two different reasons: on the one hand, it deals with access of persons to disabilities to libraries, which is part of their right to participation in cultural life, recognized by article 30 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (the paragraph 1.c of this Article refers specifically to libraries); on the other hand, it outlines the advantages of participation of persons with disabilities in the design of inclusive and accessible settings. The background of the research is sufficiently presented in the introduction, and the research project that has been carried out is very well described in paragraph 2 of the Article.

However, the presentation of the results of the research seems to me weak. Although the research questions mentioned in page 2 (lines 123-129) are answered, and some ideas to improve the accessibility of libraries are presented in pages 9-10, I think this part of the study could be developed. In pages 5-6, the paper explains that different ideas to improve accessibility emerged in Phase 1 of the study, and some of them, which were deemed good and feasible, were even implemented and tested in phase 2. Maybe it would be interesting to know all those ideas. Perhaps a list of all the ideas that emerged in Phase 1 could be offered, specifying which of them were implemented. And a more complete set of proposals to improve the accessibility of libraries could be listed as result of the research project. In this way the paper would be more useful for “library managers to successfully design inclusive encounters and relationships with students with disabilities”, as suggested in lines 372-373.

Additionally, a minor question. Although the paper mentions at least twice the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, no reference is made specifically to article 30. Maybe it is interesting to relate the subject of the research specifically to this Article of the Convention, and maybe even quote Article 30.1.c, where, as it has been said, libraries are specifically mentioned.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Review: “Giving a Voice to Students with Disabilities to Design Library Experiences: An Ethnographic Study”

Thank you for the opportunity to review this work, which touches on an important area of library management and leadership, and one that is crucially timely as the COVID-19 pandemic ebbs and services can return and libraries have the opportunity to return “better”.  (This point is one that the work overlooks, but might actually be a good addition to the introduction, strengthening the argument that this work makes at this time). However, it needs substantial revision of its methodological detail and the presentation of its results to bring it up to a scholarly quality suitable for this journal. I would encourage the authors to consider combining (or if it suits better, replacing) scholarly dissemination with a more trade-level dissemination of findings and recommendations directly to knowledge users through their national or regional Library and Information Association (IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations, is a good starting point)

Some specific recommendations I have for each section:

1a. Introduction: As mentioned above, the introduction does a good job of answering “why” scholars and library managers should care about finding out what PwD users need in a library, but it would be good to see “why now” – it would enrich the argument for the paper to highlight why this current point in time (either in Spain, or generally) is one that needs/warrants a new look at PwD needs in libraries given current specifics in the university sector. It was also unclear, as I read, what type of libraries the work discusses and why – it seemed to be public/community libraries, but why the focus then on how these libraries serve students with disabilities. Are these university/higher education students, or secondary school students? And why is the focus on how public libraries serve them, not their own educational institutions’ libraries?

1b. I am slightly confused as to what “service-dominant value co-creation” is, and how this process, in terms of methodological conceptualisation, is a different thing to Participatory Action Research. I found some of the ways that PwD were talked about slightly depersonalising and operationalised, rather than genuinely participative and collaborative. Perhaps citing a couple of other case studies where this method is used, and named as such, would show that it is a grounded and recognised methodology. It might be that what you are actually doing is Participatory Action Research after all – you might check the literature about such a methodology and see if it aligns with your approach and you might better ground your work in the corpus of methodological literatre around that (see Kidd, S. A., & Kral, M. J. (2005). Practicing participatory action research. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52(2), 187–195. https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1037/0022-0167.52.2.187). Taking a PAR approach, or talking about your approach within a PAR paradigm, might also lift your relationship with your PwD participants out of the slightly more operationalised context the interactions sit within as it stands.

2a. Materials and methods – as above, need to clarify what kind of students these are, and why the focus is on the public library’s service and their needs, rather than their university’s library. Beyond that, the methodology is well described in the data-collection phase, though it would be good to provide an explanation/examination of the ethical considerations and steps taken to ensure ethical research. This could be detailing approval by an ethics committee, or just a paragraph on how you considered ethical challenges and issues and ensured your research was mindful of these (e.g. Goldsmith, L., & Skirton, H. (2015). Research involving people with a learning disability – methodological challenges and ethical considerations. Journal of Research in Nursing, 20(6), 435–446. https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1177/1744987115591867). You state that they were “selected” – were they invited to self-select to participate? Were they given any incentives to participate, particularly given the extent of their involvement across multiple sessions?

2b. In section 2.3.2 you state that in your ethnographic shadowing you “strove to ensure that the collected information was relevant to the participants’ library visit experience”. How did you undertake this? Did you ask the participants to reflect on what you saw them experience, or collaboratively review field notes? Or is this based on an assumption by the researcher of what was most “relevant” on the participants’ behalf? This is, as per above, an important ethical and reflexive consideration, and needs to be expanded upon.

2c. In Figure 4, it is important to expand the caption to include a more descriptive label of the four depicted challenges/issues, rather than have the reader interpret the problems (I myself could see the desk was too high and the doorway was narrow, but had no idea what the first and fourth images were conveying). More importantly for your work and its importance to PwD, if you consider that readers with visual disabilities might be accessing your work via a screen reader, they will be unable to draw out the contextual meaning of the images that you are showing through the images and arrows.

2d. In section 2.3.3 you do not specify what the survey asked. Was it a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions? (e.g. demographic information plus multiple-choice questions plus open-ended response questions?)

3. I did not find the presentation of results was satisfactorily detailed, given the expansive amount of research conducted. As the work is quite short (around 6500 words, by estimate) there is plenty of room to expand on results across the three separate work packages.

3a. There is no analysis presented of the survey instrument – although the sample number is small, it is vital that the non-textual questions be analysed and presented, if there were any (For example, 50% of respondents answered they often/always experienced difficulty getting help from staff, or whatever you asked). I would recommend going through the questions in the survey and looking for trends – with such a small sample it would be impractical to perform complex analyses for significance, but at least trends could be identified and presented with clear data to support them.

3b. In terms of presenting the ethnographic, focus group and open-ended question results, the thematic structure that is here is a good start, but could be vastly expanded. For example, under “communication”, two examples are shown, but it is unclear which phase of the research they come from, and they sit alone with little connection. Under the larger theme of “communication” you might draw out subthemes like “preferred forms of communication”, “challenges to communication”, etc, and fill these with ethnographic observations, focus group suggestions and survey quotes as appropriate. Having more than one in each subtheme reinforces that it is an important subtheme/issue across the cohort, not just a one-off.

3c. All quotes should presented as part of a full contextualised sentence, not just by themselves alone (e.g. line 284-6).

3d. I would recommend removing the RQs from the results – RQs are something to be answered in a discussion section, drawing on the results and interpreting them, whereas the results alone should be included here. They should also not be blankly presented as RQ1, RQ2, but woven into fully-articulated sentences.

3e. The paragraph 318-23 does not quite “fit” where it is positioned under “communication”. The first part, “The ideas that emerged in Phase 1 were developed by the library managers with the support of Girona Provincial Council and then tested during phases 2 and 3 of the project” should be in the methods section. Table 3, which appears to me to be a small subset of some of the findings coded into themes, would fit better at the start of the Results section, though it should be there rather than in an appendix (this journal can do pop-out tables), and the text of each item should be smaller but there should be more items, so that the table encompasses all the themes/subthemes to be covered. However, with a better structured analysis (as per 3a and 3b above) it would be unnecessary to include it at all.

4. The Discussion here talks mostly about how the methodological approach has worked, not about reflecting on the findings and how they might a) connect with existing literature on PwD use of libraries, or b) might sit within the context of the libraries in question, or with disability services in a local/national context. It needs substantial expansion, across similar sections/themes as those set out in the Results section.
5. The Conclusion section should also contain a “strengths and limitations” paragraph; what was this study not able to do, what future research/work could be done (either by yourselves or others) to do some of those things? It should also commence by restating the major themed findings of the research, rather than focusing on justifying the SD-Co-Creation method again.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the revised manuscript of this article. Commendably the author has made multiple revisions to this work in response to previous feedback, and the result is a greatly strengthened submission.

There are a few minor revisions I could recommend from this point:

• Line 30 – “As a result of the current health crisis” : does this refer to the Covid-19 pandemic? Or some other health crisis in the region under discussion? Needs to be more explicitly stated.
• Line 274-5 “strategies designed to let interviewers play an active role and 274 explain their own narrative” : should this read interviewees, rather than interviewers?
• Line 291/Table A3 – the use of “x” within the table is not clear. Does an “x” mark mean that the specific encounter/critical encounter was meant to aid users with that specific category of disability? Or that it failed that category of user? This could be explained in a caption to the table, or check marks might be used to disassociate from a negative interpretation which might be incorrect.
• Line 314 – the quote from P18 should run-on in natural language from the previous sentence, instead of being simply presented. A way to do this might be ‘This strengthens the relationship between library staff and users with 313 disabilities in the value co-creation process. For example, “The library improved its signage…’ Additionally, Line 317 – the quote from P18 should be in quotation marks “ “
• Line 323 – ‘coming in phase 1’ should read ‘ coming out of phase 1’
• Line 426-429 – format as two complete sentences rather than a bullet list; e.g. “Firstly, it can better identify the adjustments…. Secondly, it can improve students…”
• Line 470-474 – the limitations section is a welcome addition; however, would suggest moving this paragraph up one (to after line 459) so that the whole paper can finish strongly by reinforcing the strengths and opportunities of the work.

Author Response

Dear reviewer 2

Please see the attachment. 

Thank you very much

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf