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The purpose of this paper is to provide examples and best practices of an academic library’s strategy of collaborating with community agencies in assisting community entrepreneurs.

This conceptual paper reflects on the evolution of a new service role for an academic library in providing outreach to community entrepreneurs and is limited to the best practices and lessons learned of one academic library.

This conceptual paper reflects on an academic library’s outreach strategy for assisting community entrepreneurs; collaboration with community agencies is featured as a best practice with examples and lessons learned.

A recent national study of academic business librarians’ outreach to entrepreneurs has established collaboration with community agencies as an effective service strategy. This conceptual paper reflects on the use of this strategy in a specific academic library’s outreach efforts to community entrepreneurs.

The dynamic environment in which the academic library operates requires explicit links between business strategy and a new management priority including the development of people; this is the focus of human resource development (HRD). It serves the needs of an organization by ensuring that employees’ expertise is state-of-the-art, something that is critical in a period of rapid technological development coinciding with ever-expanding societal needs. HRD can be relied upon to support and shape a wide range of academic library initiatives requiring a competent and engaged workforce by recognizing people as the organization’s most critical asset, one that drives competitive advantage and helps it out-perform the market. Emphasis is placed on developing an organizational context that will attract and develop talented individuals and leaders and keep them engaged. Furthermore, HRD activities must respond to job changes and integrate staff skills sets with the long-term plans and strategies of the organization thus ensuring the efficient and effective use of resources. This chapter explores HRD as a strategic concern of the organization and how it can best serve the organization in the long term. In so doing, it considers how HRD can help the academic library focus resources in those areas where there are strong likelihoods that they can produce substantial improvements in future capacity and performance. This kind of strategic planning helps the organization configure resources within a dynamic competitive environment, thus serving market needs and satisfying stakeholder expectations, helping meet its business purpose and maintain its strategic direction. The case study developed here highlights the need for the effective linkage of HRD and strategic planning for the advancement of the academic library. It suggests the need for developing and implementing both a strategic plan and an HRD plan and developing a culture of strategic human resource development (SHRD) in academic libraries.

The purpose of this paper was to examine on a national scale how academic business librarians are working with community organizations and other libraries to assist local entrepreneurs with their information needs.

A multi method approach was used to gather information. In spring 2012, a survey and follow-up interviews were conducted with academic business librarians. Additionally, business consultants who have worked with librarians were interviewed.

The survey had 53 respondents. Of those, 40 percent indicated that they collaborate to assist entrepreneurs. Five interviewees confirmed the findings of the survey and discussed their collaborative arrangements. The consultants discussed best practices in working with entrepreneurs.

This research studied academic business librarians and reached those who monitor the buslib-l and brass-l listservs. Not all librarians have the time or take the time to respond to a survey. Additionally, this research only explored collaborations to assist local entrepreneurs and did not specifically focus on campus entrepreneurs and outreach to business schools.

This study provides information on academic business librarians' efforts to assist community entrepreneurs. It also provides some information on lessons learned.

A national study of academic business librarians' outreach to entrepreneurs has not been conducted in the past.

This paper examined the impact of the novel coronavirus pandemic (known as COVID-19) on Jamaican academic libraries, during the first six months, with an emphasis on revealed library strengths, biggest impact, lessons learned and plans for library business continuity.

The local academic libraries in higher education in Jamaica (also referred to in this paper as university libraries) were surveyed.

The coronavirus pandemic revealed strengths in the areas of staffing and library modality and had the biggest impact on the latter. Lessons were learned in preparedness, communication, documentation, collaboration, staffing, library modality, and infrastructure/systems, which together shaped plans for library business re-opening/continuity.

This paper captures the initial response of Jamaican Academic Libraries (JAL) to the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Information on COVID-19 is rapidly evolving, and the preliminary initial response of Jamaica is neither the final nor complete response to the pandemic. As such, a follow-up survey of months 7–12 would be useful. Also, a survey of all English-speaking Caribbean academic libraries would be of value to library evidence and practice.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a gap in the literature on library disaster management in general but also specifically on pandemic preparedness and management, and library business continuity during a pandemic. Using JAL' response, this paper proposes: “A Pandemic Preparedness Business Continuity Planning Checklist for Jamaican Academic Libraries”, which can be adopted/adapted in other Caribbean/developing country academic libraries, as well as other library types in Jamaica, which currently look to the understudied university libraries for leadership.

This paper is the first scholarly paper on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on university libraries in the Jamaican / English-speaking Caribbean, with a focus on revealed strengths, biggest impact, lessons learned, plans for library business re-opening/continuity. As the scholarly literature on pandemic management in Caribbean academic libraries is non-existent, this paper seeks to fill this gap, albeit incrementally. Additionally, the findings can inform the Latin America and Caribbean section of international library papers on COVID-19 impact on academic libraries globally.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how academic and public libraries support entrepreneurial researchers and, in doing so, demonstrate impact and share best practices.

The authors discuss their own experiences as academic and public business librarians who support entrepreneurs. They do so by revealing the main services they provide to this unique user group and presenting examples from their own institutions. They also present what is done at other libraries by way of a literature review and an informal survey.

After navigating the landscape of business librarian support of entrepreneurs, many commonalities were found among the types of support offered. Most libraries in this study collaborate with a business incubator, center for entrepreneurship, office of economic development or small business development center in some fashion. Numerous outreach and networking efforts were found that had positive effects on the local and national economies. Although public and academic libraries have different base user groups, both types of libraries serve current and potential entrepreneurs, as well as students, who are looking for similar data in the same kinds of resources.

Although specific examples can be found in the literature, little has been published that provides an overview of the entrepreneurial services and resources provided at numerous libraries of different types as well as resulting impact. This paper fills this gap and should provide new ideas to librarians of all kinds wishing to reach entrepreneurs.

The purpose of this paper is to provide practical guidance to business librarians in academic and public libraries for applying essential concepts of licensing electronic resources in entrepreneurial contexts.

The paper is an outcome of a preconference presentation on licensing business resources, based on the practical experience of the authors in licensing and vendor negotiations. It also presents results of the preconference presurvey, gauging awareness among business librarians about licensing concepts and concerns about the usage of licensed databases by entrepreneurs.

For-profit goals of entrepreneurs using library e-resources lead to concerns among business librarians about compliance with non-commercial clauses of library license agreements and potentially to unnecessary restrictions on patrons’ database use. License agreements of business e-resources are likely to have more restrictive terms of use because of perceived value of their intellectual property by vendors, a wider range of content types and clauses carried over from commercial license agreements. Business librarians generally have only basic awareness of licensing concepts. Because of organizational silos, special terms of use sometimes are not clearly conveyed from the licensing staff to librarians who work directly with entrepreneurs.

The paper proposes a definition of entrepreneurial uses of licensed e-resources and practical approaches to manage compliance risk.

The paper provides a practical framework for business librarians to assess compliance with license agreements in the context of entrepreneurial uses.

One of the greatest challenges facing academic libraries is maintaining necessary space for collections and services. Academic administrators are forced to balance the need for space to support new and expanded programs, while supporting the traditional needs of the educational enterprise. With many of these situations, the answer comes from redeploying library space for other purposes. The net result for libraries is that functions and services run for years might no longer be possible with these changes in space. This is exactly the problem faced by the Kresge Business Administration Library at the University of Michigan when a major gift led to a construction project that saw the library’s footprint decrease by over 80%. As Kresge went through this change, there was a concerted effort to retain jobs, even though many would be dramatically changed with the new world order. This chapter focuses on the response undertaken at Kresge Library to balance the changing needs of the library that accompany dramatic space reduction. Additionally, this chapter will explore the literature on staffing trends in light of major changes to our work, political posturing to generate more work or “business” for library staff, exploration of the assessment program to ensure that we have the right staffing levels.

The professional discourse on academic library planning and design is examined. A critical realist philosophical stance and a constructionist perspective constitute the theoretical framework that, paired with Fairclough's methodology for critical discourse analysis, is used to examine the constitution of interpretative repertoires and of a discourse constructing the academic library as a learning place. The information commons, learning commons, and library designed for learning repertoires are described and the effects of discursive activity are analyzed. Three types of effects are presented: (1) the production by the LIS community of discourse on academic libraries of a sizable body of literature on the information commons and on the learning commons, (2) the construction of new types of libraries on the commons model proposed by Beagle, and (3) the metaphorization of the library as business. The study concludes that the existing discourse takes a facilities management perspective dominated by concerns with technology, equipment, and space requirements that does not address the physical, psychological, and environmental qualities of library space design. Consequently, it is suggested that architectural programming techniques should be used in library planning and design that consider the architectural features and environmental design factors contributing to the making of a place where learning is facilitated.

This study seeks to illuminate business instructors' undergraduate pedagogical processes toward developing resources and services to support their teaching.

The authors recruited participants through purposeful sampling and collected data through semi-structured interviews. The transcriptions were coded using a grounded theory approach.

The findings of this study demonstrate that faculty are motivated to be good teachers and want to engage in opportunities to improve. However, lack of time and teaching with technology pose pedagogical learning curves for faculty. Institutional support for improving teaching is welcomed, but it may also be perceived as white noise against competing priorities and a deluge of information. Lastly, business, as a discipline, may uniquely use informational formats such as multimedia and case studies that may pose a challenge to traditional collection development.

The project was designed to be exploratory, small-scale and grounded in approach. This study does not purport to be statistically representative nor are the recommendations meant to be prescriptive.

Academic libraries should be more intentional about positioning subject librarians to provide suggestions for textbooks or other course materials, collecting, organizing and preserving case studies and multimedia and their relationships with publishers that use models that subvert collecting textbooks. Libraries should also partner with technology and pedagogy support units to offer cooperative programming when possible.

This study contributes to the fields of library and information studies, business and education by articulating the unique needs of instructors within the larger contexts of business pedagogy, and the evolving relationship between libraries and undergraduate teaching support.

Reports a survey of business librarians in the USA which investigates the role that they have played in the process of the accreditation of their business schools by the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business. Two important findings are the reported lack of documentation available to the business librarians, and the perceived low levels of their involvement in the accreditation process. Argues that the involvement of the librarians will assist in the overall quality of business education and increase the visibility and usefulness of academic librarians to university administrators and teaching faculty.