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This dissertation investigates library users' experience and understanding of a library online public access catalogue (OPAC), Encore by Innovative Interfaces.This is done with particular reference to the mental models concept from cognitive science, underpinned by George Kelly's personal construct psychology. Research techniques known to be useful in similar research on other information retrieval systems will be applied to a new area of next-generation catalogues. This further demonstrates that the application of repertory grid technique (RGT) to work on OPACs is viable. The application of this to the next-generation catalogues that have appeared in the last five years is novel, and provides a useful starting point for further research in this area. Repertory grid technique is combined with cognitive walkthrough techniques based on ideas from Web usability testing to provide several views of user experience of the catalogue. This is analysed qualitatively and sketches of several models of the Encore catalogue are developed. It was found that library users' mental models of Encore tend to take cues from their experience of the Web, especially search engines, and concludes with guidelines for library staff expecting to train library users on a next-generation catalogue.

We are a group of students, teachers and library workers organising the Working Class Academics Conference 2021 (https://workingclass-academics.co.uk/).\ud \ud We know from our work and educational experiences that libraries are key to students' independent engagement with scholarship and finding voice as writers and thinkers. They are vital in providing a conducive learning environment, which working-class students may not otherwise have available.\ud \ud At the same time, the dominant cultures of education and librarianship are middle-class, and libraries represent and reflect middle-class values and norms throughout their educational practices. We recognise libraries, from their foundations to collections, reading lists, and as learning spaces represent a site of marginalisation within education settings.\ud \ud The Covid-19 pandemic has intensified class inequalities and injustice, with students' access to their regular learning environments being restricted or unavailable, and many working-class students experiencing digital poverty due to lacking access to the devices and data connections needed to support online study.\ud \ud In discussion, we reflect critically with CALC attendees on our experiences of the role of libraries in working-class educational experiences. We will ask how we can connect our critical practices as working-class educators with critical library practices, how we can better represent working-class experience and identity at the intersection of those critical practices, and how we can improve the interface between academic libraries and working-class students.\ud \ud We reject discourses of deficit that position the knowledges and literacies of working-class students and communities as lacking, in fact we unapologetically celebrate the cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) of working-class communities. We are particularly keen to create a space which sees, recognises and celebrates the knowledge of working-class library workers at CALC.

This presentation is a critical reflection on the limitations of academic libraries' attempts to support widening participation in higher education as a political project, and on our potential to support working class equity, self-actualisation and liberation.\ud \ud Critical sociologists of education have developed a rich body of research and scholarship which addresses working-class exclusion from higher education, especially in terms of access, and feelings of marginalisation and impostorship of working-class students. However, relatively little attention has been paid to working-class experiences of academic libraries as a site of marginalisation within higher education.\ud \ud Libraries should be key to learners' independent formation of their academic identities and in finding voice as writers. They provide spaces free from assessment, and librarians select and provide access to print and online collections which form reserves of cultural capital. These, alongside practices and ways of knowing developed within educational settings, represent those capitals most valued and legitimised by universities and wider society. In our practice however, librarians misrecognise working-class students (in the sense meant within Nancy Fraser's model of recognition and theory of justice). This misrecognition is facilitated by middle-class cultures of higher education and librarianship, and deficit models of working-class communities which employ middle-class experience and knowledge as representative markers of 'good' students. Working-class exclusion from professional librarianship based on economic inequality, as well as cultural hierarchies, also limits potential for change from within.

Library workers across all industries and sectors will recognise from their workplaces a context of constrained budgets, intensification of work processes, and pressure to continuously improve to meet the evolving needs and increased expectations of customers.\ud \ud We seek to demonstrate the ways we add value, drive customer satisfaction, and work increasingly efficiently. In doing so we actively involve ourselves in roles of self-government rooted in measurement, evaluative techniques, and logic based on markets and competition. Gaps appear between the service that is achievable within our organisational financial constraints and our commitment—framed by professional ethics and personal morals—to providing effective services. Library workers can find this situation emotionally charged, unsettling, and generative of feelings of impostorship.\ud \ud Delegates attending this workshop will co-create a space for frank conversations about these issues. It will help participants find their critical voices in responding to challenges in their workplaces, and in feeling both confident and supported.