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Library space and services should center on library patrons and what they need. Trying to match the needs of each patron can become a daunting task. A new approach needs to be taken – one that describes patrons and their needs in a useful way. Using an approach from marketing and product design, personas or user groups offer a unique approach to thinking and describing patron needs to assist in the identification and design of library space and services.

The identification, development, and validation of personas employs an iterative process using both qualitative and quantitative methods to first identify user patterns, then develop the patterns into meaningful descriptions, and finally to validate the personas. Once validated, additional data is collected, and, as librarians become persona-minded, the persona descriptions continue to be enriched.

The chapter provides a description of personas found in one academic library and how those personas were developed before being used to assist in library space identification and development. One unique feature of our personas was the fluid nature where patrons would shift personas depending on personal needs.

Personas are a practical and meaningful tool for thinking about library space and service design in the development stage. Several examples of library spaces that focus on the needs of specific personas are provided.

The initial jurisprudential response to the gig economy above has included the exploration of two new legal personae: algorithmic persons and dependent contractors. The author uses the word ‘exploration’ here, because neither figure has become an established character on the legal landscape in the United States – yet. Given the sector’s claims of absolute novelty, it may seem that the best way to develop regulations is to identify new positions and actors, define them, and then apply existing regulations and expectations or develop new ones accordingly. This chapter explains why this approach is misguided. First, legal personae have only a tangential relationship with actually existing human beings. Much regulatory energy could be caught up in elaborate definitions and descriptions intended to develop robust regulation, only to find that they create the blueprint for future business models that avert these very frameworks. Second, these legal personae are developed within the existing frameworks of employment law and corporate regulation, which in the United States, are determined by a phantasmagoric understanding of ‘the market’. Unless this basic framework is questioned, one can expect that these new legal personae will fail to protect actual workers and consumers.

Intercollegiate athletics are a major investment of time for student-athletes who must balance their academic and athletic commitments. For African American males, sports participation may have adverse effects on both their educational outcomes and career development. According to the extant research base, the low academic achievement and high aspirations toward professional athletic careers for many African American males are due to a variety of factors including socialization toward athletics by family, community members, and the media. We posit that African American male student-athletes may prematurely settle on an athletic identity with limited or no exploration to other possible identities, namely career identities. Using an adaptation of Dawkins, Braddock II, and Celaya’s (2009) model of academic engagement, we categorize African American male student-athletes into three persona types; maintenance, incentive, and integrative. Maintenance and incentive persona types value academics as a necessary step toward an athletic career, whereas integrative persona type understands that academics and athletics can benefit a comprehensive career development.

Technology moves fast. If you do ot iterate and plan with agility, a new approach will come along, and you will miss it. This premise from Ferris Bueller. Cheesy or not, it does not make it any less factual. The author learned many new concepts in doing the research for this chapter. There were several “aha!” moments that warrant sharing. The research here garnered an opinion that relates to the concept of balance. The moment an organism or organization is closest to “balanced” is when it has optimal performance. Modern IT projects require Agile methodologies. Many organizations do not necessitate the same agility in the departments that the IT organization supports. It is the author’s opinion that this imbalance can cause problems with IT or company projects before they start.

As far as technologies the only thing that anyone can say definitively is that technology will change and that those changes will accelerate. Given that information, the best that any practitioner can do is write programming logic that uses robust, clean baseline technology that follows an existing pattern or standard, and then hope that the next piece of sliced bread builds on the premise of the previous loaf. The way people interface with technology is shifting with the advent of smartphones and tablets. The engineers of the future must understand and apply very sound logic in setting up new systems. The systems of the future are likely continuously deployed and a large portion of the programming logic will auto-generated based on the inputs coming into the system.

This chapter examines the 1999 trial of Aaron McKinney for the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming whose death propelled forward an incipient movement to legislate against hate crimes. It explores the competing ways in which Aaron McKinney was conjured as a legal persona, defined through the opposing lenses of gay panic and of homophobic hate. It situates those personae in conflicting narratives of criminal culpability emerging out of indeterminate legal doctrines and definitions (the unwritten law; the meaning of ‘malice’), and argues that in conjuring them, adversarial criminal trials necessarily destabilise the ‘default legal person’. In doing so, trials performatively reconstruct the past in ways that both mark and mask a past events. In the McKinney case, contests over his culpability emerged against a backdrop of loss, both epistemological and affective, generating a projective reckoning with Shepard’s death in ways that enabled a politically transformational mourning process.

In this chapter we discuss the implications social media have for the self-representation and identity formulation of professionals within organizations. Under the assumption that new, technology-mediated networking possibilities call for a reformulation of the boundaries between the professional and the private, we propose several avenues of investigation. The concept of “online personae” is also introduced in order to describe how managers may strive for equilibrium while balancing on and offline identities with impression management efforts.

Proceeding conceptually, we review the existing literature and practice of managerial social media use and delineate the challenges, or “tensions” professionals have to mitigate while expressing themselves online. This allows for a full exploration of digital interaction as a quest for equilibrium, between one’s professional and personal self-expression, but also between the management of one’s impression, and the emotional attachment to a social media profile.

We argue that social media may challenge current conceptions of managerial identity and work practices to a degree. Social media may demand different forms of representation both to inside and outside audiences, which can lead to the mediatization of both the professional and the organization, and call for a more conscious formulation of identity and management of impressions. We argue in particular that, within this context, online personae may serve as entities (through single or multiple accounts) delineating boundaries between the various roles managers are asked to perform within their professional and personal lives.

Managerial awareness toward a tool such as online personae may help in critically reflecting the embeddedness of managerial practice within social networks. A critical management of personae can also help in formulating identity-based strategies for gaining access and improving the quality of connections and interactions. Ultimately, as social media become a tool for workplace collaboration, the strategic thinking behind online personae might take a progressively larger importance for the success of individuals, and for organizations at large.

The chapter introduces a managerial point-of-view to the field of digital identities, widely analyzed on samples of adolescents and young adults. This allows to investigate matters proper of a professional life, such as the management of work/life boundaries, which become increasingly blurry in the online world. The chapter also introduces the concept of “online personae,” which aims at describing with more specificities the message and audience consequences behind the choice of one single social media profile, or several coexisting ones.

The academic discourse around celebrity and iconicity has resulted in the same human brand as labeled as an inauthentic and illegitimate celebrity and as a culturally important symbol of legitimate achievement. We address the research question of how are contradictions between celebrity and iconicity resolved in creating and managing a human brand.

Using structuration theory, we analyzed David Bowie’s 50 year career, from 1964 to 2013, totaling 562 documents. Applying Langley’s (1999) stages of data collection of grounding, organizing, and replicating, we develop a process of model of celebrity and iconicity.

We identify three stages of human brand symbolic associations: forming, fixing, and transitioning associations. These represent alternate trajectories that Bowie and Ziggy Stardust followed to become icons. In resolving his trajectories across these stages, Bowie adapts and adopts commercial materials, business practices, and new technologies to converge his symbolic associations into a coherent iconic human brand.

Limitations of this paper lie in focusing on one human brand in a particular industry. Future research is suggested in three areas: (1) the relationship between the proposed model and other human brand activities; (2) to explore how the process is manipulated by other market agents; and (3) whether a human brand’s association shifts can precede culture.

This perspective challenges existing conceptualizations of celebrity and iconicity by framing them as inter-related processes, where celebrity associations are fixed in time, while iconic associations transition across time periods to reflect changing cultural values and concerns.