Sustainable Libraries for Books and Bytes: A Bibliometric Study of Web of Science from 2005-2024

Abstract

A library is termed sustainable when it's planned and operated, reducing environmental impact as far as possible. Sustainable libraries, therefore, consider all three aspects of sustainability: social, economic, and environmental. The concept of sustainable libraries, which integrate traditional books and digital resources to adapt to technological and environmental changes. This paper emphasizes the importance of sustainable practices in library management, including eco-friendly building designs, digital collections, and waste reduction. The paper also delves into a bibliometric study on sustainable libraries, analysing academic literature to identify trends, influential contributions, and research growth patterns. For the bibliometric analysis and visualization VOSviewer software is used based on 248 literature data on sustainable libraries papers gathered from the Web of Science core collection from 2005 to 2024 on the subject discipline of Library and Information Science. The year 2021 has the highest number of records, with 25 entries, and the most prolific author was found to be Henrik Jochumsen, with a total link strength of 32.  This study also provides insights into the global distribution of research on sustainable libraries, highlighting key countries, document types, and open access modes.