Can I Have Your Attention? Implications of the Research on Distractions and Multitasking for Reference Librarians

The media have identified the past decade as “the age of distraction.” People today find it harder to work on long, sustained tasks because distractions are eroding their attention spans, fostering a culture of discontinuity. Fields as diverse as psychology, business, education, human-computer interaction, and communication studies have produced a wealth of studies on interruptions, distractions, and multitasking—research that has important implications for reference librarians. The nature of our jobs invites interruptions by the public, requires familiarity with the latest technology, stimulates curiosity about a broad range of subjects, and demands adeptness at multitasking—all factors that can atomize attention.     

Action Research,Assessment, and Institutional Review Boards (IRB): Conflicting Demands or Productive Tension for the Academic Librarian?

This article puts forward an “assessment/action research/publication” cycle that integrates aspects of the assessment, research, and Institutional Review Board (IRB) processes to provide academic librarians with a systematic approach for balancing competing workplace demands and give library managers a roadmap for creating a “research culture” (Jacobs, Berg, and Cornwall) within their libraries. The article argues that librarians and library managers have much to gain by integrating action research into librarians’ everyday work loads, including increased ease in meeting publication demands for tenure and/or promotion, institutionalizing habits of reflective practice across all library service areas, and overall library improvement.     

Does It Matter If I Feel Sorry or Sorry for You? Testing the Roles of Empathy and Sympathy as Mechanisms Driving Viewer Response to a Dramatic Ad

Narrative messages on average produce higher levels of involvement, intention, and behavior than other message formats. Narratives also generate feelings of sympathy and empathy, although few studies have directly compared the roles of each emotion in the persuasion process. This article presents the results of two studies that tested the effect of exposure to a narrative or nonnarrative ad on persuasive outcomes and the roles sympathy and empathy play in the persuasion process. Both studies found that the narrative ad produced higher levels of involvement, intention, and behavior and that empathy played a more important role in persuasion than sympathy.     

Acquisition of multilingual materials; Through a central resource agency or by individual libraries?: Contribution to the panel on finding,selecting, and purchasing materials for multilingual libraries in the 80s,New York, 30 June 1986

Different ways are explored of organizing acquisitions work for multilingual public library collections, on the local, national and international scale. The respective technical pros and cons of three methods—decentralized acquisitions, centralized acquisitions to rotating deposit collections, centralized cooperative acquisitions—are set forth. Mention is also made of some external demographic and social factors which influence the library's choice of an acquisitions method. Flexibility and responsiveness to reader needs are stressed.