Best Practices for Managing Organizational Diversity

Organizations with increasingly diverse workforces and customer populations face challenges in reaping diversity’s benefits while managing its potentially disruptive effects. This article defines workplace diversity and identifies best practices supporting planned and positive diversity management. It explores how academic libraries can apply diversity management best practices and provides a reading list for leaders and human resource managers wishing to optimize their organization’s approach to diversity.     

Emergent Team Roles in Organizational Meetings: Identifying Communication Patterns via Cluster Analysis

Previous team role taxonomies have largely relied on self-report data, have focused on functional roles and have described individual predispositions or personality traits. Instead, this study takes a communicative approach and proposes that team roles are produced, shaped and sustained in communicative behaviors. To identify team roles communicatively, 59 regular organizational meetings were videotaped and analyzed. Cluster analysis revealed five emergent roles: the solution seeker, the problem analyst, the procedural facilitator, the complainer, and the indifferent. In terms of meeting outcomes, solution seekers were beneficial to idea longevity, whereas complainers were harmful for meeting satisfaction and idea longevity. Future research directions and managerial implications are highlighted.     

Data-Driven Decisions for Library Liaisons: Exploring Strategies for Effectively Managing Diminishing Monograph Collections

Many academic libraries have liaison programs as a means of building relevant and useful library collections and to promote library resources to campus users. Librarians have long served as liaisons without the benefit of much data to guide decisions. In this age of library budget cuts, librarians need to make every dollar count. What collection and use data help liaisons build a quality monograph collection that better meets the needs of library users? This article offers some ideas for providing the data needed by liaisons for more informed decision making and collection management and, ultimately, for ensuring that library materials purchased are needed and used.     

Work Calling: Exploring the Communicative Intersections of Meaningful Work and Organizational Spirituality

In the present study, we first describe three themes from the interdisciplinary literature: sacred and secular variations; calling as historically and culturally situated; and potential benefits, alienation, and marginalization. Second, through a thematic analysis (Owen, 1984) based on participant data, we examine how participants’ understanding and interpretation of work calling as an overarching meaningfulness, a combination of personal passion and skill set, and a contribution to society serve as definitional makers. We argue that these findings emphasize the processural and constitutive nature of work calling. We conclude by highlighting the communicative dimensions of work calling as they may contribute to future critical and empirical work, noting the possibilities for sense-making theory to intervene in this interdisciplinary area of inquiry.     

传统媒体媒介融合的基础:成本、市场和收益

降低成本、扩大市场和增加收益是传统媒体媒介融合持续推进的前提条件,事实上由于规模效益、范围和经济不足导致传统媒体在媒介融合过程中产品边际成本上升、沉没成本增大、市场开拓乏力和收益增长受限.传媒管理体制改革只有打破条块分割、扩大整体资本容量,并把非规则化的意识形态诉求转变为文化安全基础上的规范法制诉求,才能解放经营管理者的创新能力,才能从根本上突破传统媒体媒介融合中成本、市场和收益的困境.     

“扩散代理”——图书馆未来的发展趋势

进入20世纪90年代后，图书馆发展分为三个阶段：90年代中期以前，以分布式计算和网络技术为特征，每个人、每个机构都可以“出版”(publication)和“创造”(creation)图书馆，信息产品和信息服务呈爆炸式增长。“内容标准”(content standard)和“智力系统”(intellectual system)使人们可以参照共同标准创造图书馆。     

Managing the Reference Collection:

This essay presents the case for pruning an academic reference collection. Rather than a theoretical discourse on the virtues and vices of weeding, we present a practical discussion that focuses on the actual implementation of a reference pruning project. Thus we cover the planning stages, the logistics of organization, criteria for weeding, and the communication issues that seem always to arise during a weeding project. We also discuss various modes and modalities for dealing with conflict resolution as well as the vexing question of how to deal with reference serials in both their traditional and electronic formats. The emphasis throughout the paper is on the practical problems, issues, and concerns likely to confront librarians attempting to organize and carry out a reference collection review/pruning program.     

Virtual Serendipity: Preserving Embodied Browsing Activity in the 21st Century Research Library

As academic library collections are moved off site to make room for learning commons-type collaboration spaces, exploratory research processes (e.g. stacks browsing activities) are threatened. Given the range of benefits associated with chance information encounters in the physical book stacks, the disappearance of accessible collections is problematic. Fortunately, by focusing on embodied aspects of the physical browsing experience we can leverage emerging technologies to preserve instances of serendipitous information retrieval. Virtual reality, in this case, provides a browsing platform that allows for the type of search activity typically associated with research in the physical books stacks and preserves the benefits thereof.     

Organizational Surveys: A System for Employee Voice

Although surveys are often used to assess and track employee attitudes and opinions over time and are used quite frequently by applied communication researchers, the use of surveys as a channel to voice employee attitudes and opinions has not been fully explored in the employee voice or basic organizational communication literature. With the increased call for accountability, effective applied communication researchers can play an important role in ensuring that organizations engage in the survey process in a manner that is “safe” for employees, and ethical and practical for the organization. Because the question of how to accomplish this task is complex and cannot be fully addressed within the constraints of a commentary, I offer three general principles to guide future researchers in helping overcome organizational communication problems:

1. Build trust in the organizational survey process, the researcher(s), and the organization.

2. Eliminate the adversarial relationship that often exists between management and employees who speak up.

3. Provide evidence that the organization does more than purport to value the things that it says it values.

     

Living the Future: Organizational Performance Assessment

ABSTRACT

Organizational performance assessment is a practice-based framework that builds on the synergy between planning and assessment, and results in the discernment of impact and value. It promotes a set of practices that enables the library to effectively integrate planning, strategy, performance, assessment, and organizational development in order to advance the parent institution's mission. This article discusses some foundations of organizational performance assessment, useful practices, and examples from libraries that are “living the future.”

This article originally published in Journal of Library Administration, Vol. 51, Issues 7–8, pages 618–644, 2011. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2011.601267.     

LCC from UDC: Managing the conversion

The Singapore Polytechnic (SP) Library embarked on the project to convert books and periodicals from the Universal Decimal Classification system to the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) system after benchmarking projects showed that work performance could be improved upon the conversion. Planning began in 2005 with strong support from SP management. It was decided to carry out the project in-house. Internship at the National University of Singapore Library was arranged for one staff to learn the use of LCC and how special collections and issues were handled. Student assistants were recruited to assist in various processes. In addition, 10,000 bibliographic records were outsourced to a vendor to assign LCC call numbers in order to speed up the project. The library collection was converted and re-shelved during the Polytechnic vacation periods from February 2007 to March 2008, with the Library remaining open throughout the period.     

Enacting Organizational Culture: Balloons in the Air

Objective: To actively engage students in creating and analyzing an organizational culture

Course: Organizational Communication     

Managing Technical Services in the 1990's:

No abstract available for this article.     

Across the Table: Competing Perspectives for Managing Technology in a Library Setting

ABSTRACT

In a lively point/counterpoint format, the authors discuss issues of library technology from two perspectives: that of a library administrator and that of an Emerging Technologies Librarian. Rather than providing an artificial sense of closure, this article is designed to highlight differing positions on these issues, inviting libraries to use these conflicting viewpoints as tools to aid them in finding the solutions that best fit their unique situation.     

档案视角：数字化环境下知识产权管理的基本原则

美国全国人文科学同盟(the National Humanities Alliance，NHA)于1997年3月24日提出了“数字化环境下知识产权管理的基本原则”(以下简称“NHA原则”)。……     

Managing Search Engine Optimization: An Introduction for Library Administrators

No abstract available for this article.