Advances in Library Administration and Organization: Volume 29

Chasing articles for this series over the past 17 years has led me to look at a wide variety of studies and to come to understand much about what librarians and LIS scholars think about when they consider management and leadership. Most of that work has come from people who work in or write primarily about academic libraries, given that it is that group who are most likely to seek doctorates and publish as they pursue tenure and promotion. While much that has been written can apply to work in other kinds of libraries and other nonprofit organization, it is always rewarding to find good work that relates to public and school libraries. This year, we have done that, and four of the six chapters here relate directly to these organizations. A fifth talks about interpersonal dynamics in cataloging organizations, another often neglected area in library management literature.

Early on, public libraries in America tended toward grand appearances befitting seriousness of purpose. Library design changed gradually through the 20th century and more dramatically with automation and new technology. Today's libraries are becoming lively community cultural centers that may include art galleries, flexible auditoriums, meeting and conference rooms, media lounges, and cafés.

This chapter discusses changes in public library design. It focuses on four recent examples – two traditional libraries and two innovative libraries. The changing requirements present significant challenges for library administrators and for the architects who must design the libraries to be organized and used appropriately, now and in the future.

This qualitative study investigated how small group communication influences the development of shared mental models in a committee of public librarians addressing a problem-solving task. It examines the influence of communication themes, functions, roles, and rules on the group's development of shared mental models about the task and about team interaction. Data were collected over the course of a year from group meetings, email messages, group documents, and participant interviews and then analyzed using existing coding schemes and qualitative coding techniques. The findings indicate that within the group there was a strong superficial convergence around the task mental model and the team interaction mental model but a weaker convergence at a deeper level. Analysis of the group communication data shows that the group focused discussion on understanding the problem and identifying tasks, enacting group roles and rules that facilitated sharing information. The functions of their messages focused on task communication. The findings suggest that, in this group, communication themes most heavily influenced the development of a shared mental model about the task, while communication roles, rules, and functions were more influential toward the development of a shared mental model about team interaction. Implications for practice include adopting intentional tactics for surfacing mental models at various points in the group life and anchoring the emerging model within the collective cognition of the group through devices such as narratives, objects, or documentary materials.

This multiple case study investigates the impact of technology on organizational change in public libraries. Over the past 12–15 years, public access computers (PACs) have been introduced into public libraries. Once these PACs were connected to the Internet, they attracted patrons who had not previously used public library services. The main themes around which this study was organized relate to the implementation of technology with facilities and services, city government, and people. The main research questions were following: (1) How has public library culture changed since the introduction of computers for patron use? (2) What adjustments were necessary to deal with the influx of computers and other technology in public libraries? (3) Have PACs changed the way the libraries are organized and how they are staffed? The findings of the study included how technology influenced changes in staffing in the public libraries. Each of the libraries has undergone a culture shift due to the introduction of technology. One of the shifts is the change of the reference desk from general reference to the addition of a help desk with reference responsibilities. Another concern of the directors was constantly funding the upgrades necessary for software and hardware that technology requires. As not all of the directors have supportive city government, this can be problematic. Finally, the facilities where the public libraries were housed had undergone changes either through renovations or through new buildings to accommodate technology and the infrastructure needed to support it.

While holistic studies devoted to the information behavior of humanist scholars have begun to appear more frequently in the literature, there has been, until quite recently, a persistent tendency to consolidate humanists rather than attend to the variant gestalts, material working conditions, and values that might distinguish one from another. This chapter is a response to recent calls for more finely granulated descriptions of specific humanist disciplinary practices. It offers a close examination of the information behavior of theatre researchers, both academics and practitioners. For reasons that the chapter explores, theatre researchers constitute a user group that has been profoundly neglected. Using both quantitative and qualitative data obtained through a survey of listserv members of the American Society for Theatrical Research and the Theatre Library Association, the chapter examines the impact of theatre culture on theatre research practices. Moreover, inspired by Brenda Dervin's “Sense-Making Methodology,” this chapter offers the embedded perspective of a researcher who is herself a theatre scholar as well as a practicing librarian. The chapter ranges widely, illustrating its findings with, for example, published rehearsal memoirs, statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor, white papers produced by the National Endowment of the Arts, performance theory texts. Topics covered include the history of theatre studies as an academic discipline, the multiple job-holding/unemployment culture of practitioners such as actors and directors, the differences in focus and methodology that distinguish practitioners from scholars, the marginalized status of dramatic literature in university English departments. Several themes that emerged through analysis of qualitative data are discussed: the contrast between scholarly rigor and the tendency of the practitioner to “satisfice,” the conflicting claims of text and artifact, the impact of geography and teaching-intensive institutional affiliation on researchers’ access to resources. The author concludes that it is not only inadvisable and inaccurate to generalize behaviors across humanistic disciplines; it is equally inaccurate to assume that all researchers within the same discipline will manifest the same characteristics, or even that the same researcher will apply the same strategies to all projects. The only generalization about the information behavior of the theatre researcher that can be made is that it is highly task and context dependent.

Flexible scheduling in school libraries is supported by the American Association for School Libraries (AASL) and the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). Support is based on the constructivist theory of learning and posits increased learning, collaboration, and visitations by classes, small groups, and individuals to the availability of resources during the time of need, yet there is no direct evidence to support flexible scheduling. The quantitative study sought to examine the relationship between media center scheduling on students’ academic achievement, teacher and media specialist collaboration, and class visitation in an elementary school. The researcher utilized an experimental posttest-only control group design. The point-biserial correlation was utilized to identify any relationship between groups who utilized the media center on a fixed versus a flexible schedule and criterion-referenced test scores. No significant relationship was found between scheduling patterns, student achievement, and collaboration. However, the research supported increased number of visitations by classes on a fixed schedule.

The user-centered approach to understanding information use and users has shaped research in library and information science (LIS). In a user-centered environment, catalogers are told to focus on users and adapt standards to meet users’ needs while following standards in order to be efficient in their jobs. This study describes three academic cataloging units as they negotiate both the demands to follow and adapt these standards to meet users’ needs. New institutional theory served as a framework for the study. The results suggest that standards and users are pressures that cataloging units negotiate in their jobs, along with demands for work efficiency and professional legitimacy. While negotiating these pressures, catalogers and cataloging units redefine their work jurisdiction and maintain legitimacy to remain relevant in a complex work environment. Understanding how catalogers negotiate the normative institutional pressures of standards and users leads to an understanding of the complex nature of work in areas that deal with issues of standards and users, shows how an area within a profession maintains legitimacy when the profession no longer values that work, and, finally, shows the limits of the user-centered focus in LIS practice.

Peter A. Gisolfi, AIA, ASLA, LEED AP, is senior partner of Peter Gisolfi Associates, a firm of architects and landscape architects in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, and New Haven, CT. He is professor and chairman of the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York and is the author of the book, Finding the Place of Architecture in the Landscape.