An intrapreneurial approach to integrating information production services into an academic medical center library

The many challenges faced by health sciences libraries of all types and sizes often require innovative solutions. When an innovative solution involves calculated risk taking, the approach is called intrapreneurial. At the University of Miami School of Medicine, an intrapreneurial approach solved the fiscal problems of the biomedical communications unit. The Louis Calder Memorial Library inherited these problems when the Department of the Library and Biomedical Communications was created in the early 1980s. In this paper, two intrapreneurial programs are described, and the benefit and suitability of this management style to information services are demonstrated.     

Measures of excellence: the search for the gold standard.

Questions concerning some of the values we hold as librarians and the goals, standards, and other evaluation tools we derive from them are discussed in the context of the history of our profession and the present period of rapid change. The concepts of stable and changing paradigms and of "scientific communities" provide the foundation for consideration of how a changing conceptual framework can affect values and their application in the evaluation process. One of many possible scenarios for the future is briefly outlined to demonstrate how some traditional values may fare.     

The hospital library committee: its composition and tasks

Since a sizeable hospital must have a library, it must have a library committee. Like all hospital committees, this one is to help maintain standards of medical care and to mediate between staff and administration. Unlike others, it clusters around one elected member (the chairman) and one employee (the librarian). A dynamic librarian can, and should, influence and inspire the committee's deliberations; and must be able to depend upon the support of the physician members of the committee.     

Controlling the field of academic economics in Hungary, 1953–1976

Conclusions On the basis of these findings, I suggest that the structure and organisation of the field of Hungarian economics under state socialism should be described as a case of partitioned bureaucracy.⁹ The compromise between research economists and the political elite in the New Course era between 1953 and 1955¹⁰ survived the post-1956 reaction in so far as political economy, with its predominantly legitimatory and ideological functions, remained partitioned from the other sectors in the field through the remainder of the state-socialist period. This secured considerable protection both for Marxist-Leninist political economy—which faced the destabilising effects of exposure to the findings of serious empirical research—and for the other sectors, which were professionally oriented and earnestly interested in the pursuit of unbiased empirical research, free from stifling agitprop interference. Our data concerning the reputational control of the field reflects only one, although very important, aspect of this partitioning. Another and much plainer aspect is that, from the early 1960s, the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Central Committee no longer exercised control over the field, except in the political economy sector.The proposition about the mechanism paradigm should not be taken seriously as a statement of a Kuhnian type of intellectual organisation of Hungarian economics, with reform economics at its hard theoretical core. But it should certainly be taken seriously as a reflection of the sociopolitical structure which emerged and developed from the mid-1950s onwards. Neither the politicians nor the economists saw as necessary or even contemplated the integration of Hungarian economic research with Western mainstream economic thought. In exchange for the professional expertise and socio-economic intelligence necessary for the exercise of power, Hungary's state-socialist political class offered their economists relative autonomy and freedom from interference. The price the economists had to pay was partly to refrain from openly and systematically challenging the beliefs perpetuated by the political economy of socialism, and partly to accept in their research the paramountcy of policy orientation. But this burden they assumed willingly since it made them the only group within Hungary's academic intelligentsia—indeed, the only group in Hungarian society outside the political class—with the privilege of being coopted to the institutions with power over some restricted domains of policymaking. After 1989, especially under the conservative Antall government, this proved less than advantageous.¹¹ Although the benevolence of many critics is open to question, it could greatly benefit the field if the economists' expulsion from contemporary politics went hand in hand with provision of the material, intellectual and institutional conditions for a new approach where a fundamentally scientific orientation is paramount.