Managerial skills needed for academic library managers: The case of Iran

This survey investigates the extent to which Iranian academic library managers need managerial skills and the influence of their level of seniority on this need. The results revealed that, in general, managers' need for managerial skills is high especially “people related skills” over “analytical and self-related skills” and “task related skills”. Analysis of the mean scores of skills across three levels of managers shows that the middle level managers' need for managerial skills is higher than top managers and supervisors. Overall, most respondents ranked “creating organizational climate” as the skill most needed while few said they needed development for “counseling subordinates.”     

A lesson from the New York Times: Timing and the management of cultural change

Abstract

The author places newspaper decision‐making models within a timing framework, using the infamous New York Times‐Jayson Blair‐plagiarism case to illustrate how the U.S. newspaper industry can feasibly and sincerely engineer the change in newspaper culture suggested by an earlier industry‐commissioned study. Using arguments from timing theory, the author illustrates how the framework generates timing‐related questions about management style that would not normally get asked. Ultimately, the argument challenges newspaper managers to re‐consider the essence of the managerial concept of control and, eventually, their own managerial style and culture. Cultural transformation, the author argues, does, indeed, start at the top but with management acknowledging that it has much to learn and that popular culture‐enhancing management tools must be used only when managers consider the timing‐induced paradoxes inherent in decision‐making, where the “when”; becomes just as important as the “what.”;     

Practical help for history instruction: Making the one-shot count

While it is generally assumed that active learning, information literacy course are the most effective means of teaching library skills, not every college or university library has the talent, resources, or institutional support required for that level of instruction. Frequently, a student's library instruction is taught as a “one-shot” by a librarian without specialized training in the subject being taught. This essay is addressed to instruction librarians with limited experience in historical research find themselves called upon to conduct “one-shot” instruction sessions for history classes.     

Managers Making Sense of Millennials: Perceptions of a Generational Cohort

The study of generational cohorts has seen an increase in popularity in scholarly and popular literature. Millennials comprise the newest cohort to enter the workplace. This study explores how managers use social categorization to make sense of their Millennial-generation employees. Data were collected through interviews conducted with managers in order to learn how they viewed and described Millennials. Twenty-five managers in the hospitality industry were interviewed. Data were analyzed by searching for membership categorization devices (MCDs), then patterns in usage and meaning of the devices were explored. Three patterns were identified in using MCDs to reference Millennials: “kids”, “age group,” and “Millennials”/variations of the term. These findings are examined in reference to how they may inform managerial behavior as well as guide further study of generational cohorts.     

Management Development Programs in Large Public Libraries in the United States

There is an urgent need to identify potential library managers and prepare them for responsible positions. There is an equally pressing need for programs designed to provide current managers with additional information on new trends and developments in library administration. In order to expand and update the knowledge, skills, and abilities of present library managers and to establish a larger pool of qualified candidates for managerial positions, planned management development programs and/or activities are necessary. This study is an effort to determine the direction in which large public libraries are moving toward planning and establishing management development programs as well as to explore strategies used to attain financial support for such programs.     

Developing Legal Information Literate Law Students: “That Dog Will Hunt”

The legal profession has been adamant about the need for law schools to more adequately prepare law students for legal practice. Criticisms concerning a student's practical legal skills, such as the ability to conduct legal research, are prevalent. As the legal profession continues to transform, the need for law students and new attorneys to be “legal information literate” prior to being hired is quite evident. In order to instill competent legal research skills, legal research instruction must focus both on incorporating legal information literacy skills and on understanding how students learn. For this reason, teachers of legal research should rethink teaching strategies and explore different teaching methodologies.     

The impact of using algorithms for managerial decisions on public employees' procedural justice

Algorithms are used in public management decisions, for instance, to allocate police staff to potential crime scenes. We study how the usage of algorithms for managerial decisions affects procedural justice as reported by public employees. We argue that some public management practices may be more suitable for algorithmic decision-making than others. We hypothesize that employees' perceptions differ depending on the complexity of the practice at hand. We test this through two survey experiments on 109 Dutch public employees and 126 public employees from the UK. Our results show that when a decision is made by an algorithm for practices that are low in complexity, procedural justice increases. Our results also show that, for practices that are high in complexity, decisions involving a public manager are perceived as higher in procedural justice compared to decisions that were made automatically by computers using algorithms. Nevertheless, adding an algorithm to a public manager's decision-making process can increase procedural justice for high complexity practices. We conclude that managers should explore automation opportunities for low complexity practices, but to be cautious when using algorithms to replace public managers' decisions for high complexity practices. In the latter case, transparency about algorithms and open dialogues on perceptions could be beneficial, but this should not be seen as a panacea.     

Marketing and Advocacy: Collaboration in Principle and Practice

SUMMARY

There is renewed interest in building and sustaining support for public libraries in this country. This paper looks at the concepts of marketing and advocacy as integral components for building this sustain-ability and uses two related initiatives in the State of Kentucky to illustrate, in practice, how these concepts differ and how they need to work together for long term success. In short, “selling” libraries in itself won't get the job done; nor will just building a public advocacy infrastructure. Taken together, however, both can advance the case for libraries and build the support needed for sustainability.     

Hidden Leadership in Small Special Libraries

“The Specialist” addresses the administration of special libraries, however, identifying the administrator of a small special library is problematic. In these small libraries within organizations, the librarian often works alone and the library is overseen by a non-librarian manager. In these cases, it is not as easy to identify or define the library's administrator as it would be in a public or academic library, or even a larger special library. This column introduces a model where the administration of small special libraries is a collaboration between librarians and non-librarian managers. In this model, information professionals exercise hidden leadership and management skills without leading a staff or possessing a management title. The column also suggests ways information professionals without explicit management responsibilities in the workplace can develop these skills and apply them in their jobs.     

Women's employment and professional empowerment in South Korean dramas: a 10-year analysis

This study examined how Korean dramas portray the relationship between women's life and work. Men were shown as more affluent, more educationally privileged, older, and yet less likely to be married than women. Far more men than women were employed outside the home and holding a professional occupation or managerial position. Among young adult characters, marriage increased men's employment but decreased women's. Married men were also the most likely to be professionals or managers whereas it was highly unlikely for women, whether married or single. The negative effects of being a parent on employment and on holding a professional or managerial position were consistent for women and men. Examination of women and men's employment and professional empowerment for the past 10 years in television dramas and South Korean social statistics revealed a parallel between television reality and the observed reality, except for a gross overrepresentation of men as professionals or managers in the dramas.     

Audience Valuation in the New Media Era: Interactivity,Online Engagement,and Electronic Word-of-Mouth Value

This national survey of broadband users (N = 200) investigates people’s participatory behavior on Internet video websites by analyzing their use of interactive features. It seeks to identify a group of “interactive audiences” who take full advantage of web interactivity and may be most valuable to advertisers. This study defined audience interactivity based on people’s frequency in using interactive features and three groups were identified—non-interactive audience, average audience, and interactive audience. It compared three audience groups based on traditional audience valuation criteria such as demographics and media consumption levels, as well as newly proposed criteria including online engagement level and electronic word-of-mouth value. Results indicated that interactive audiences are younger, more engaged online, and have higher electronic word-of-mouth value than non-interactive audiences. Because audience interactivity is related to audience value, findings suggest that advertisers should invest more in this highly engaged and influential group online. The results also reveal the need for expanding audience valuation criteria, particularly in the online space, to include other variables such as online engagement level and electronic word-of-mouth influence. The study then offers practical implications for website managers and marketers.     

The Effect of Personal and Academic Variables on Student Adoption of Twitter as an Information Source

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the use of Twitter in terms of personal and academic variables of students. These included gender, grade point average (GPA), and year level. Data were collected from undergraduate students at the College of Social Sciences at Kuwait University. A structured questionnaire was used as the data collection instrument. The findings show that the majority of respondents use social media, 42.8% use Twitter “sometimes,” and 44.4% use it “always.” There is no significant difference between males and females, except for social influence (SI). There is a statistically significant difference in the use of Twitter as an information source among students for different academic year levels, with the highest mean for senior students. However, no significant differences were found by students' GPA scores. Further investigation focusing on variables such as students' level of confidence and skills of using Twitter, such as the effect of course content, etc., would provide more insight into the use of social media platforms in higher education.     

Notes toward a rhetoric of animation: The Road Runner as cultural critique

–Recent studies have suggested the need to broaden our approaches to violence in children's programming. This paper uses the violence of “The Road Runner” cartoon series as a starting point for a mythico-rhetorical analysis of the message system contained in the cartoon. It explores how the animated short re-enacts the myth of Sisyphus in the context of the post-World War II technological boom in the United States. Technology is the source of most of the violence in the cartoon, and the violence is created by failures of technology. The use of a “children's” medium to critique our reliance on technology offers substantial freedom to the animator, and, in turn, to the viewer and the critic. Examination of “The Road Runner” yields insights into the meanings of cartoon violence, into how media reproduce mythic structures, and into the potentially rich message systems of children's media.     

The right to privacy: A legal guidepost to television programing

One of the most complex problem areas of broadcast programing is where a person's “right to privacy” meets the public's (or the broadcaster's) “right to know.” Guidelines through this area are difficult to find, resting as they do upon a highly technical body of law. Textbooks in broadcasting suggest the broadcaster use caution whenever the right to privacy might become an issue, but fail to give clear instruction (apart from the need to obtain a release in some unspecified form) on the best methods of avoiding a law suit. The average newsman and other program production personnel are ill‐equipped to analyze a difficult legal question without help and with little time. The following article, written for a graduate seminar at Michigan State University under the direction of Dr. Walter Emery, is designed to provide the non‐lawyer broadcaster with some guides for minimizing the influence of the “right to privacy” on the “right to know.”     

Who are We?

This article scrutinises the usage of the words “we”, “us” and “our” by BBC radio journalists when reporting and discussing news and current affairs. By analysing reports and discussions on the “flagship” Radio 4 Today, a daily news programme whose centrality to political and public debate is widely recognised, the article raises substantive questions about clarity, accuracy and impartiality in senior broadcast journalists’ choice of language. In exploring the assumptions which may underlie the invocation, via such language choices, of an implied community, and against the backdrop of the BBC's commitment to impartiality in its Editorial Guidelines, the article identifies numerous recent examples where the choice of words and identifiers can be seen as undermining the BBC's impartiality and which show several of its senior journalists adopting the first-person plural “we” when reporting on matters of public policy. The findings therefore indicate a general need to codify norms which are seen to integrate the need for accuracy as well as impartiality, and for these norms to take into account issues which might at first glance seem to be inconsequential, micro-level features of the journalists’ language. The evidence suggests that more fine-grained guidelines on permissible circumstances for BBC journalists’ usage of “we” and “our” need revising and disseminating in the light of these findings.     

Metaphor use and perceived managerial effectiveness

This study examines the metaphorical language of three managers in a Northwest city government. Four communication specialists used an interpretative method to identify, categorize, and rate perceptions of metaphors in three 30‐minute transcribed interviews. The results establish a set of metaphor categories, support a theory of culturally‐shared metaphors, demonstrate managers' differences in metaphor use, and suggest an association between managers metaphor use and subordinate ratings of effectiveness.     

The X-factor in academic libraries: the demand for soft skills in library employees

Abstract

As the need for employees with technology skills and other expertise has increased within the contemporary academic library environment, so too has the need for employees with “soft skills.” Soft skills refer to personal, learnable attributes, such as emotional intelligence, communication aptitude, persuasion facility, storytelling ability, collegiality, and even woo. While academic libraries are ever-changing, it is critical to bear in mind the importance of the human component. This article considers the need for soft skills within the contemporary academic library environment. It will draw upon successful instances of soft skills development from outside the academic library environment to synthesize new ways of enhancing library employees’ soft skills.     

We Won't Be Fooled Again: Teaching Critical Thinking via Evaluation of Hoax and Historical Revisionist Websites in a Library Credit Course

ABSTRACT

At Central Michigan University, librarians teach multiple sections of an eight-week, one-credit research skills class to hundreds of undergraduate students each semester. While the main focus of the course is to teach students how to find, use, and properly cite library resources, librarians also address critical thinking skills by designing lessons to teach World Wide Web organization and how to analyze the information found via search engines. Showing student's obvious hoax sites about “tree octopi” and “male pregnancy” introduces the concepts of critical thinking and Website analysis. Most students quickly refute the information on such sites. However, students have a more difficult time assessing social, historical, or political revisionist Web sites' validity. Contrasting those claims with evidence accepted by international courts, historians, and scientists is useful in pointing out the flaws of seemingly well documented but one-sided revisionist sites. There are dangers in exposing students to these groups via their Websites. Yet, it is important to do so in order to convey the importance of critical analysis of information. The authors discuss students' pre- and post-test (CMU's online assessment tool, the “research readiness self-assessment” [RRSA]) scores to determine whether critical thinking skills have improved.     

The perceived impacts of e-government on U.S. cities: A survey of Florida and Texas City managers

This study examines the perceived impacts of electronic government or e-government adoption on U.S. cities. This research conducted a survey of Texas and Florida city managers in the fall of 2005 to find out their opinions on the impact of e-government on their city government. The results indicated that e-government is having a positive impact on management, stakeholder involvement, needs and collaboration, and procurement in American cities. There are, however, concerns over spam or unsolicited e-mail and the ability of e-government to reduce the level of staffing. The results of this study imply that, according to city managers' perceptions, e-government adoption in American city governments is positively viewed as having an impact on their organizations and communities.     

Bridging the Gap Inside … Inside Document Delivery

Abstract

Librarians today are faced with many choices when acquiring information and directing their users to the sources they need. This is most evident with serials. The choices have become more confusing with new options requiring libraries to determine what a full text purchase actually buys, how to be sure users can identify the material needed, and then how to acquire the actual material in the most appropriate media. Providing access by the piece is a valid solution that can help lead to the transition to full text online journals. This article critiques the use of the British Library Document Supply Centre's “inside” service and its use at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library (UIUC). The article concludes with a review of the components of a good document delivery system.