James M. Nyce - Böcker

Volume twenty one of "Advances in Library Administration and Organization" offers timely articles from scholars and administrators working throughout the world. It adapts theory to practice in a variety of areas of interest to those who manage libraries. These include a demographic study of Canadian librarianship, an article on the implementation of ISO9000 in Thailand, pieces on information literacy programs in the United States, and a discussion of organizational culture within libraries from South Africa. The idea is to provide food for thought for practitioners and theorist alike so that they might be spurred to think about the challenge of making libraries run well. Whether one is interested is service philosophies as discussed in a symposium held in honor of Johannah Sherrer, the definition of command work, or the process used to thoughtfully develop and refine an assessment program in a Colorado university library, there is something here for every manager that will help them confront the challenges facing them. The articles address obstacles facing all of us every day and offer insights that can be of value as we seek a vision for libraries and librarianship in the 21st century.

This volume of "Advances in Library Administration and Organization" offers papers of interest to practitioners and researchers in the library community throughout the world. All of the papers in one way or another address the tension between what researchers can deliver, what they define as reputable knowledge, and what library practitioners need to know "to get the job done". While these papers differ from each other by problem, scale, methodology and theory, one question "What can science tell us about practice?" unites them all. These papers include a discussion of the principles that underlie collection development, two papers that critically examine the relation between distance learning and on site library service and two more papers that use the notion of sense making to look at what the terms leadership and public space mean when we talk about libraries.The last three papers address a series of pragmatic issues anyone who works within a library can identify with, namely, "what does it mean to "market" a library", "how can we define "value" in relation to what goes on in a library and create "value" for our communities", and, finally, "What constitutes and impedes 'success" for library professionals? ", especially if those who are minority women. These papers, taken together, raise the issues of how well we understand, researchers and practitioners alike, the institutions we study, manage and work within. What we in the profession often regard as common sense and "good practice" may not really be either. In short, these papers point to a number of issues, ones we often do not even acknowledge, that researchers need to help practitioners address if science is to make a difference in how librarians understand and manage the institutions they work within.

This volume of "Advances in Library Administration and Organization" is designed to help administrators meet the challenges of running organizations in an ambiguous climate. It leads with a paper that uses innovation theory and a communications model to track how LIS practitioners acquire the theoretical base required to undergird their efforts. This theoretical piece is followed by a very personal view of what knowledge one must acquire to succeed as a leader of libraries, offering a more practical view of how administrators develop. Then comes a set of papers that address very real problems - performance assessment and its impact, the question of whether it is profitable for communities to completely outsource public library operations, and then three separate articles that look at career paths for public and academic librarians and the retention of those people by organizations. On a different tack, another contributor looks at how libraries communicate with their clients while cutting journals to insure consumer confidence in the decision-making process of the library; subsequently developing a model for joint decision-making that should be of interest to our community. The final paper leaves the realm of the library and examines how public and private organizations in the United Kingdom manage information as an asset and how that affects their performance in the marketplace. As in past volume, this edition of "ALAO" includes an eclectic collection of strong papers that convey the results of kind of research that managers need, mixing theory with a good dose of pragmaticism. The result should add value to the literature. It addresses theoretical and practical issues administrators face in ambiguous environments and presents an eclectic collection of papers that reflect the myriad challenges library administrators face everyday.

This volume includes a series of papers designed to help administrators meet the challenges of running organizations in an ambiguous climate. All of the articles address real management problems from a research perspective. The volume leads with a bibliometric study designed to help us understand the development of library science and higher education as disciplines and follows with a piece on the importance of place for libraries, a study of interactive services and professional culture within librarianship and then pieces on staff development and mentoring. Then, we look at the work processes of research librarians and management education for librarians. Finally, we look at service programs aimed at the Hispanic population and provide a location analysis of public libraries in Calcutta. As in past volume, this edition of "ALAO" includes an eclectic collection of strong papers that convey the results of the kind of research that managers need, mixing theory with a good dose of pragmaticism. The resulting volume adds significant value to our literature as the essays it contains treats classic problems in new ways.

This is "ALAO"'s first nation specific volume. It represents part of an effort to further internationalize the journal's contents and interests. The volume's papers describe the Library & Information Science community in Finland, outline the history of Library & Information Science in the country and reviews the scientific achievements of its Library & Information Science scholars. These papers deal with some universal themes and topics in Library & Information Science research and practice and demonstrate the unique Library & Information Science contribution Finnish scholars/practitioners bring to these problems and issues. This book series is available electronically at website.

This collection of essays is designed to challenge working administrators and researchers to look more closely at their operations and consider again how they develop people and the organizations in which they work. It leads off with an article on skill development in reference service using a holistic approach to analyze reference in context. Then comes an article on the importance of organizational culture in defining service organizations in general and libraries in particular. It argues that when one considers libraries in this light, the importance of a strong ethical framework becomes evident in our institutions. The third article looks at advice networks, and addresses the importance that contacts within and outside of the library in which we work and within and outside of our profession play on individual's receptivity to innovation. The next three articles relate to personnel matters. The first discusses issues relating to the relationship between faculty status and tenure and salaries in academic libraries. This is followed by a piece that looks at the development of leaders for small, rural libraries, most of whom will not have formal training in librarianship. A third piece analyzes the criteria for selecting academic library directors that are considered important by those administrators who oversee this key leadership position. We then close with an article that looks at the validity of SERVQUAL as applied to a large public library system. LibQUAL+, an adaptation of SERVQUAL designed for use in academic libraries has become a staple in our literature for years, but there is little available that really turns a critical eye to the use of this important tool. This article will perhaps begin a healthy discussion about how this tool is applied in our libraries and how the results have been used in library operations. As always, this volume of Advances attempts to look at what it is we do as managers and to bring research and theory into our operations. It is designed to combine the practical and the theoretical in a way that will inform working managers and provide interesting questions for those engaged in research about library organizations.

National intelligence cultures are shaped by their country’s history and environment. Featuring 32 countries (such as Albania, Belgium, Croatia, Norway, Latvia, Montenegro), the work provides insight into a number of rarely discussed national intelligence agencies to allow for comparative study, offering hard to find information into one volume. In their chapters, the contributors, who are all experts from the countries discussed, address the intelligence community rather than focus on a single agency. They examine the environment in which an organization operates, its actors, and cultural and ideological climate, to cover both the external and internal factors that influence a nation’s intelligence community. The result is an exhaustive, unique survey of European intelligence communities rarely discussed.

National intelligence cultures are shaped by their country’s history and environment. Featuring 32 countries (such as Albania, Belgium, Croatia, Norway, Latvia, Montenegro), the work provides insight into a number of rarely discussed national intelligence agencies to allow for comparative study, offering hard to find information into one volume. In their chapters, the contributors, who are all experts from the countries discussed, address the intelligence community rather than focus on a single agency. They examine the environment in which an organization operates, its actors, and cultural and ideological climate, to cover both the external and internal factors that influence a nation’s intelligence community. The result is an exhaustive, unique survey of European intelligence communities rarely discussed.

How does the disintegration of the Soviet system help us to understand the character of library and information institutions and practices within post-soviet space today? Which aspects of the traditional Soviet 'information order' have disappeared from the contemporary world of libraries and information institutions and which aspects have remained, perhaps to be refigured as critical features of newly emerging national and global projects? This volume brings together diverse reflective essays, reports and empirical analyses of the changing character of the post-soviet library world to address these questions. Individual contributions from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, the New Republic of Kosovo, and the post-soviet successor states of Eurasia all provide different perspectives on LIS.

"The Advances in Library Administration and Organization Series" seeks to develop a body of research literature that contributes to the base of organizational theory upon which library administrators rely. Its mix of contributions to the literature of library administration and organization is intended to be both diverse and eclectic. The volume 28 provides a collection of thought-provoking articles on issues relating to problems library managers face and strategies in addressing those challenges. The topics covered in this volume include: managing change in research libraries; the agility of library consortia and its member libraries; the evaluation of reference services; developing a recruitment strategy for a diverse workforce; the evaluation of training and professional development programs; and, collective bargaining within faculty unions on college campuses. "Advances" is widely read by practitioners, library and information science graduate students, and those working in associated fields of information management, and remains the premier series in its area of coverage. This latest volume adds another significant contribution to the literature of library and information centre management.