Work socialization through part-time work: cultivating self-efficacy and engagement through care

This study provides insight into how work socialization occurs through part-time work in a Youth Employment Program. Drawing on in-depth interviews with youth employees and supervisors, we consider how the young people’s meanings of work were shaped through their early employment experiences. Participants report significant transformations in both their views of work – from seeing it primarily in terms of extrinsic rewards like a paycheck to developing more robust interpretations of work – and their level of self-efficacy. We argue that the organizational culture and supervisor relationships were crucial for the positive outcomes the youth experienced. This study demonstrates the formative impact that part-time work has on young people and the promise of studying work socialization in part-time work. Practically, our findings point to the importance of approaching the employment of young people as more than just an economic exchange. We suggest that those who employ young people should provide a work context marked by routine, supportive interactions with supervisors who provide and uphold clear expectations.     

Learn something new in 20 minutes: Bite Size sessions to support research and teaching

The School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) at The University of Sheffield run an innovative series of informal 20‐minute Bite Size sessions to help staff and students teach, research, collaborate and communicate more effectively. The sessions have two clear strands: one focused on teaching and the other on research. The remit is not to teach people how to use something in their work or study, but to let them know why they should use it and how they can employ it. By introducing participants to the possibilities and how they can apply ideas and technologies in their work and study in an enthusiastic manner, it is possible to send them away with at least the intention to explore and experiment. The evidence shows that this organic approach is working – staff and students are starting to use many of the tools that Bite Size has covered. Any kind of widespread change within organisations can be hard to deliver, but by bringing champions on your side and delivering sessions in a convenient, informal and timely manner; good practice and ideas can spread naturally. H.S.     

Reconstructing the “Work Ethic” through Medicalized Discourse on Workaholism

While commonly construed as an ethic and/or balanceable life quality, work rarely is looked upon as being a disease. Drawing from theories of structuration as well as work–life balance literature, this study examines how societal trends of production and efficiency impact the embodied nature of human life, particularly for self-proclaimed workaholics. Through conducting a narrative analysis of texts written by workaholics, the author investigates how individuals reconstruct meanings for their work through their use of diagnostic and therapeutic terminology. Themes for the analysis center on how workaholics define and diagnose workaholism, express their experiences of this addiction, and reconstruct their lifestyles through recovery. The findings underscore the benefits of intersecting health discourse with occupational and ethical discourses surrounding work. Meanwhile, the author cautions that framing work as a disease focuses attention on individuals' problems and thus runs the risk of overlooking potentially “ill” societal conditions that warrant further concern. Suggestions are offered for promoting discussions that raise explicit awareness of the embodied interconnections between work and health.     

Losing Staff: The Seven Stages of Loss and Recovery

The loss of co-workers due to retirement has a profound impact on the people who are left to carry on with the work of the unit. The process of recovery from the loss of experienced and long-serving support staff members is analogous to the stages of grief that a person experiences after the death of a loved one. This article describes how the Serials Services unit at the University of Victoria Libraries is coping with the consequences of the retirement of its two most experienced library assistants and discusses the steps taken in order to continue to provide quality service to users.     

Peer review: still king in the digital age

The article presents one of the main findings of an international study of 4,000 academic researchers that examined how trustworthiness is determined in the digital environment when it comes to scholarly reading, citing, and publishing. The study shows that peer review is still the most trustworthy characteristic of all. There is, though, a common perception that open access journals are not peer reviewed or do not have proper peer‐review systems. Researchers appear to have moved inexorably from a print‐based system to a digital system, but it has not significantly changed the way they decide what to trust. They do not trust social media. Only a minority – although significantly mostly young and early career researchers – thought that social media are anything other than more appropriate to personal interactions and peripheral to their professional/academic lives. There are other significant differences, according to the age of the researcher. Thus, in regard to choosing an outlet for publication of their work, young researchers are much less concerned with the fact that it is peer reviewed.     

Becoming business critical: Knowledge for Healthcare

Significant progress has been made in implementing Knowledge for Healthcare. This editorial reports the central contribution of effective partnerships and the involvement of librarians and knowledge specialists in this work. There are compelling business priorities. Key elements of work‐streams on demonstrating impact, workforce development and streamlining are indicated, along with areas of growing importance – knowledge management, embedded roles and health information for the public and patients. Knowledge, and the skills to help people to use it, are business critical.     

The second digital transition: to the mobile space — an analysis of Europeana

According to industry estimates the mobile device (smartphone and tablet) will soon be the main platform for searching the Web and yet our knowledge of how mobile consumers use information – especially scholarly information, and how that differs from desktop or ‘tethered’ users – is imperfect to say the very least. This article aims to correct this through an analysis of the usage logs of a major cultural, multimedia website, Europeana.eu, which started tackling the mobile challenge in 2011. The challenges of identifying mobile use – no easy matter – are described. The information behaviour of 150,000 mobile users is examined and compared with that for desktop users. The main findings are that mobile users are the fastest‐growing user community and that their visits are very different in the aggregate from those arising from desktops. Mobile visits are information ‘lite‘: typically shorter, less interactive, and with less content viewed per visit. Use takes on a social rather than office rhythm, with use peaking at nights and weekends.     

Rationality and politics of algorithms. Will the promise of big data survive the dynamics of public decision making?

Big data promises to transform public decision-making for the better by making it more responsive to actual needs and policy effects. However, much recent work on big data in public decision-making assumes a rational view of decision-making, which has been much criticized in the public administration debate. In this paper, we apply this view, and a more political one, to the context of big data and offer a qualitative study. We question the impact of big data on decision-making, realizing that big data – including its new methods and functions – must inevitably encounter existing political and managerial institutions. By studying two illustrative cases of big data use processes, we explore how these two worlds meet. Specifically, we look at the interaction between data analysts and decision makers. In this we distinguish between a rational view and a political view, and between an information logic and a decision logic. We find that big data provides ample opportunities for both analysts and decision makers to do a better job, but this doesn't necessarily imply better decision-making, because big data also provides opportunities for actors to pursue their own interests. Big data enables both data analysts and decision makers to act as autonomous agents rather than as links in a functional chain. Therefore, big data's impact cannot be interpreted only in terms of its functional promise; it must also be acknowledged as a phenomenon set to impact our policymaking institutions, including their legitimacy.     

“When I Grow Up I'd Like to Work in a Place Like This”: Museum Professionals' Narratives of Early Interest in Museums

As part of an exploratory research study, museum professionals were asked to share their stories about pivotal learning experiences in museums. Several offered personal narratives of how they first became interested in museums and started down the path toward careers in museum work, or had their imaginations opened to the possibility of broader life horizons. This group of stories seemed to be grounded in particularly vivid memories and frequently elicited strong emotions in the telling. The narratives are evidence of the impact of early museum experiences on people who later found their way into museum careers, and suggest avenues for further study of the roots of museum careers as well as other ways museums profoundly affect people's lives. The stories can also reveal to the teller, as well as to researchers and others, what stands out in their memories and the importance they assign to those memories. By attending to the thematic and emotional content of these narratives, both narrator and colleagues can find clues about where their beliefs and values really lie and, therefore, where their and the profession's time and resources might be most productively invested.     

Museum Monsters and Victorious Viruses: Improving Public Understanding of Emerging Biomedical Research

Although microbes directly impact everyone's health, most people have limited knowledge about them. In this article, we describe a museum and media public education campaign aimed at helping diverse audiences better understand emerging knowledge about microbes and infectious disease. Funded primarily by the Science Education Partnership (SEPA) program of the National Institutes of Health, this campaign involved crosscutting programs designed to extend impacts throughout a broad public audience. Collaborations with partners from public media, libraries, science education, the social sciences, and biomedical research centers extended our outreach to local and national audiences of adults and youth. Our campaign developed programs for radio broadcast, schools, libraries, museums, and publishers to ultimately reach over eight million people. In addition, we conducted a series of research studies focused on understanding the mental models that people create of the complex concepts of microbes and infectious disease and on how to engage hard‐to‐reach adolescents with this science content. These studies furthered our understanding of how people reason about unseen phenomena, the kinds of materials that might intrigue youth who claim little interest in science, and how to begin to combat misinformation pervasive in this field. Our comparisons of expert, teacher, and teen reasoning about microbes revealed their distinct mental models on the topics of infection, vaccination, and immune response. Our investigation of comics confirmed their power to motivate teenagers to want to read more about science. Across all levels of science identity, we found that youth were more engaged with the comics than with comparable essays. Together, these findings provide insights into how to educate a diverse public about emerging biomedical research.     

Work values in librarianship

Schneider's (1987a) attraction-selection-attrition framework explains that groups of workers attracted to the same occupational group may be expected to behave alike in their jobs. Specifically, it suggests that certain types of people are attracted to certain occupations, and that people who choose the same occupation tend to behave in a like manner within their occupational group. This study investigated work values in librarianship and identified the work values of library science students (i.e., a group of individuals attracted to the profession of librarianship). It also looked at the work values of business students, to investigate differences in the work values of individuals attracted to these two occupations. These results provide information about work values in librarianship which should be of interest to library managers, to practicing librarians, and to library science students.     

E‐learning: new opportunities in continuing professional development

The growth in professional learning is opening up many new opportunities for the application of e‐learning to the world of continuing professional development (CPD). CPD programmes require professionals to engage in annual programmes of professional development, and in some cases revalidation or recertification. To date, most of this activity has been off‐line. Increasingly, CPD requirements will be satisfied through the use of learning resources available on‐line or packaged into specially tailored e‐learning courses. Societies and professional associations – as the primary managers and coordinators of CPD programmes – are in a strong position to expand upon their existing Web‐based initiatives to deliver a new generation of e‐learning services to their members.     

Looking beyond satisfaction: evaluating the value and impact of information skills training

In this feature guest writers Michael Raynor and Jenny Craven from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) present an overview of their evaluative research study on the value and impact of the information skills training courses they provide at NICE. In particular, this small study used a combination of qualitative and quantitative data to look beyond satisfaction and confidence levels and identify whether learning had actually taken place as a result of attending the sessions, and how new skills were used by the attendees in their day‐to‐day work. H.S.     

Does culture influence how consumers process negative celebrity information? Impact of culture in evaluation of negative celebrity information

This study investigates the relationship between cultural orientation (individualistic or collectivistic culture) and consumers' attribution styles (dispositional and situational attributions) as well as the consequences of attribution styles on brand evaluation and purchase intention. The study also examines how people perceive different types of negative celebrity information (self-oriented and other-oriented negative information) and how their identification with a celebrity endorser affects their response to negative information. The findings suggest that culture influences how consumers – having been exposed to negative celebrity information – make attributions. Dispositional attributions lead to more negative brand evaluation as well as to negative purchase intention. Other-oriented negative information leads to, among Korean consumers, more negative brand evaluation. Finally, the study found that consumers highly identified with a celebrity endorser are less likely to be influenced by negative celebrity information.     

New ways of building,showcasing, and measuring scholarly reputation

The article reports on a study of the views and actions of nearly a hundred scholars – mostly academic researchers from four European countries and four disciplines – in regard to scholarly reputation in the Science 2.0 age. It specifically looks at the role that 'emerging reputational mechanisms and platforms are playing in building, maintaining, and showcasing scholarly reputation in the digital age. Popular examples of such platforms are ResearchGate and Academia.edu . Data were obtained through one‐to‐one interviews and focus groups, supported by desk research. The main findings were: (a) it is early days and uptake is light and patchy with platforms largely used for non‐reputational purposes, such as sharing documents; (b) most users were passive and did not fully engage with the social aspects of the platforms; (c) the reputational focus was very much on just one scholarly activity (research), on just two outputs of that activity (publications and conferences) and one measurement of that activity (citations), but there are the stirrings of change; (d) young researchers are set to profit most from the emerging platforms.     

E‐books in practice: the librarian's perspective

It has become unimaginable to provide information – particularly scientific information – without e‐books. They have become part of today's combination of media, which includes printed books and journals, e‐journals, e‐books, and databases. When e‐books first appeared on the market, librarians very quickly formulated their key requirements. The most important requirement is functionality: it must be possible to look through a book chapter by chapter, and also to get a quick overview of a comprehensive monograph. Usage arrangements, including concurrent usage and use for interlibrary loans, are also important. The use of uniform technical standards increases the acceptance of e‐books.     

What Drives Attendance at Informal Learning Activities? A Study of Two Art Programs

Multiple reasons shape how young people and families choose to participate in informal learning programs at museums and other settings. Youth interest is likely a factor, but so might be geographic proximity, institutional affiliation, household income, and race/ethnicity. We examined the relative impact of these factors through a comparative study of two art programs; one a small, neighborhood‐based organization focused on art and STEM, and the other a program in a well‐established art museum. The smaller program tended to draw youth from closer geographic proximity. Interest in art drove attendance at both programs, but institutional membership was also important. Demographic factors also were a factor, and race/ethnicity was more strongly associated with program placement than household income. We discuss the importance of better understanding of such factors as museums and other programs continue to grow as important sites for learning.     

The role of information therapy in reducing anxiety in patients undergoing in vitro fertilisation treatment

This article is the first in the feature to come from Iran. The lead author, Sara Ahmadizadeh, manages the Library at Arash Women's Hospital and was awarded an MA in Information Science and Knowledge and Librarianship from Tehran Azad University in July 2015. Her MA dissertation was innovative and ambitious in that it looked at the impact of information therapy on levels of anxiety amongst women undergoing IVF treatment. Her study demonstrated that quality information sessions, delivered in a structured way, can have a positive impact on patients’ awareness of their condition and can reduce anxiety. A. M.     

Public Support for Biodiversity After a Zoo Visit: Environmental Concern,Conservation Knowledge,and Self‐Efficacy

The biodiversity crisis is not salient to many people. A zoo visit not only provides the opportunity to learn about the issue, but also provides direct experiences with animals that may increase public engagement. The present study used a nonequivalent pretest–posttest design to assess the impact of a zoo visit on conservation knowledge and engagement by comparing 88 visitors entering a zoo in Paris and 84 visitors on their way out. Those who had completed their visit scored higher on conservation knowledge, general concern about threats to biodiversity, and perceived self‐efficacy to protect biodiversity. Notably, conservation knowledge was not highly correlated with the other dependent variables, but self‐efficacy was significantly correlated with environmental concern, behaviour, and behavioural intent. We conclude that a zoo visit does have a positive impact on knowledge and concern, and by affecting self‐efficacy, it has the potential to influence future behavior.