Qualitative and Quantitative Investigation of the Situation of the Iranian Public Libraries Naming

Naming as a linguistic phenomenon conveys descriptive, expressive and social meanings. According to their information, educational and cultural functions, public libraries have branches throughout the country. Each of these branches has a name, and their proper naming can help create value and success and promote their status. In this article, an attempt is made to examine the current situation of the names of the Iranian public libraries and extract its problems.

In two stages, the researchers first described the status of public library letters using the content analysis method. Crosscheck control was used to validate the findings. Then, they extracted the problems of naming based on the comparison of the current situation with the instructions for naming public libraries and the instructions for writing Persian script and linguistic criteria.

The results of the first phase showed a tendency to using more anthropomorphically masculine names, including the names of martyrs of the Islamic Revolution, Religious, cultural and literary figures of similar values. Also, most of the names belong to contemporary people, and most of the names in the libraries belong to the martyrs of a particular region or have special characteristics (martyrs of anonymous or unknown martyrs). The current process of naming public libraries in the country did not indicate a scientific policy, leading to problems such as lack of religious sensitivity or lack of attention to linguistic criteria such as length of letters, etc. in public library naming.

It can be concluded that the status of the naming of public libraries in Iran, as well as the naming of places and passages that were studied in the literature has a tendency to anthropocentric designations, masculine, contemporary people and among the names of libraries, the greatest repetition is related to the names of the martyrs, infallibles, and religious figures; and attention to the scientific, cultural and women celebrities in naming has been significantly lower. This situation reflects the ideological practices of the rulers on public libraries-like other urban spaces. Although naming can be used as a powerful tool to better perform the socio-cultural functions of the library, officials use this tool to symbolically control the environment. It was also concluded that the current guidelines for naming public libraries are not fully implemented and there are discrepancies between the current status of library names and organizational and national guidelines. It is recommended that conflicts are resolved and also naming policy was amended by Iranian Public Libraries Foundation.