Occupational health and safety in information centers: The case of Çankırı Karatekin University Library and Djibouti University Library

Although occupational health and safety is seen as a discipline that has gained importance and come to the fore as an indicator of the priority of human life in the last century, it is actually a practice that goes back much further. While industrialized societies lead the way in this regard, non-industrialized societies realized the importance and necessity of occupational health and safety too late. Although occupational health and safety was perceived as a necessity for workplaces with intensive production, over time, it has become valid for all workplaces without distinction of producing services or goods. Information centers have also had their share from this scope expansion and it has been understood that occupational health and safety practices are also a necessity for information centers. In this study, it is aimed to draw attention to the importance and necessity of the subject in the context of information centers by drawing a general framework for the discipline of occupational health and safety. It is thought that the higher the awareness level of information center employees on occupational health and safety, the more important the issue will be by all stakeholders, namely managers, information professionals, users and legislators, and will be effective in taking the necessary steps. Based on this idea, in this study, it was tried to measure the occupational safety and health awareness levels of Çankırı Karatekin University Library and Djibouti University Library employees. As a result of the questionnaire applied to 16 people, 8 of them from both library staff, it was determined that the occupational health and safety perception levels of these employees were not high.