Public libraries going green: environmental sustainability and green information literacy

Abstract

There is a great demand for human beings all over the world to live in a more green way, due to the earth's natural resource scarcity and other environmental issues such as climate change, pollution, emission of greenhouse gases, global warming and depletion of the ozone layer.Librarians, especially public librarians, are seen as the facilitators of access to information.Public librarians are thus in a position to create awareness of the importance of green living and to educate the general public on how to live green.The study made use of Werner's (2013) sustainable buildings, equipment and management checklist as well as Segarra's (2015) rating system for green libraries, environmental literacy, and environmental education.The aim of the study was to investigate current green practices of libraries and what public libraries can do to educate their users about environmental sustainability and green living, while making them more environmentally literate.The researcher made use of a mixed methods approach.Selected public librarians were interviewed and a checklist tested if the library is truly green.The software package ATLAS TI 7.5.7 was used to analyse the qualitative data, and themes were drawn from the interviews.The researcher made use of Microsoft Excel to tabulate and create graphs for the quantitative analysis (checklists).The findings were triangulated.The findings revealed that library staff was familiar with the majority of the terms.It was found that none of the four City of Cape Town public libraries is green.Only one participant from Meadowridge Library and two participants from Claremont Library had a strategy to make their users green information literate.Adding green information literacy, green living and environmental sustainability programmes to library business plans and Service Delivery Budget Implementation Plan (SDBIP) and partnering with good sustainable partners were suggested to create awareness about green living, environmental sustainability and to make users green information literate.Five out of eight criteria on the checklist were practiced by City of Cape Town public libraries.Library staff are not actually educating users how to live green affordably and staff lack awareness of the subject matter.

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