Identifying and Ranking Barriers to Attraction and Development of Public Participation in Public Libraries from Iranian Charity Library Builders' Perspective

Studying the forms of social relations between individuals is the spotlight of sociological studies. Participation is also one of the forms of social relations that has a special place to be paid attention to. One of the most important manifestations of participation is cultural participation in the development of public libraries. The purpose of the present study is to identify and rank barriers affecting the attraction and development of public participation in public libraries from Iranian charity library builders' perspective. The study was exploratory research using a mixed research method which is a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. In the qualitative part of the study, 15 Iranian charity library builders were purposefully interviewed using snowball sampling. The research population in the quantitative part is active Iranian charity library builders and a questionnaire was distributed among 246 of them. Inferential tests including the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, exploratory factor analysis, and confirmatory factor analysis were used to analyze the data. According to the findings of the study, behavioral barriers, contextual barriers, and structural barriers were identified as effective barriers in attracting and developing public participation. The results of confirmatory factor analysis show that among the barriers affecting the attraction of public participation in public libraries from the Iranian charity library builders' perspective, structural barriers with a coefficient of .882 and then, contextual barriers with a coefficient of .832, social factors with a coefficient of .824 and behavioral barriers with a coefficient of .818 are ranked first to third priorities, respectively. To overcome the barriers to attracting public participation in public libraries, solving problems and shortcomings in public libraries needs to be mobilized, but this is not possible without planning programs to remove barriers to participation including coordinating various institutions, establishing rules and regulations to expand partnerships, alerting public library officials and managers, promoting and disseminating partnerships in various ways, and providing contexts for legal and social issues.