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This chapter introduces Building Back Better Libraries (BBBL) as a critical concept for improved library planning both prior to and following a disaster or other emergency. Building Back Better, an idea widely discussed in the disaster recovery literature, seeks to use the difficulty of a disaster as an opportunity to go beyond the status quo and to promote changes that result in stronger, more resilient communities. The authors will define BBB elements and frameworks, building upon those to create a model for library disaster planning and recovery, and applying it to cases involving space and facilities, collections, services, and people.

Literature on the Building Back Better concept and frameworks, as well as library emergency response, was reviewed. This source material was used to develop a modified framework for improved library disaster planning and recovery. The Building Back Better Libraries framework is discussed and applied to cases involving library facilities and spaces, collections, and services, and its implementation through a disaster planning team is reviewed.

Though all libraries hope to avoid disaster, few succeed. One survey found that as many as 75% of academic library respondents had experienced a disaster or emergency. Evidence also suggests that few libraries are prepared, with as many as 66–80% of libraries reporting that they have no emergency plan with staff trained to carry it out. Even when plans are in place, the rush to respond to immediate needs following a disaster can overwhelm the ability to pursue effective long-term planning. Building Back Better, when framed for libraries, provides a planning tool to balance short-term response with long-term recovery and resilience. The Building Back Better Libraries framework focuses on the areas of risk assessment for library collections and spaces; recovery and rejuvenation for facilities, collections, and services; and implementation and monitoring, with particular discussion of the human element and the role of a library disaster planning team.

The proposed framework, Building Back Better Libraries (BBBL), can be used to strengthen disaster planning in a manner that balances meeting immediate needs with implementing longer term plans to create stronger and more resilient libraries.

Although aspects of BBB ideas are present in existing library literature, the concept is not formally defined for the library context.

Purpose – Academic librarians are well positioned to take on the role of the informed learning developer, working with teachers to design coursework in which students learn to use information as they engage with course context. This chapter aims to provide insights to academic librarians of how they may approach integrating information literacy into courses using an informed learning approach by identifying key aspects of this collaborative work.

Methods The literature on educational development, specifically outlining the core responsibilities, activities, skills, and models used by educational developers is reviewed and key aspects are identified and applied to describe the role of a developer working with teachers to foster learning through engagement with information in higher education.

Findings – Four key aspects of the work of educational developers are identified: collaborative, scholarly, contextual, and reflective. When adapted to describe the efforts of a developer focused on creating informed learning experiences for students, the four aspects include:

partnering with teachers to develop informed learning experiences by leveraging the expertise of the teacher and the librarian;

applying an informed learning pedagogic approach, and drawing from and sharing information literacy scholarship illuminating how information is used in the learning process;

creating informed learning experiences that are responsive to institutional and disciplinary perspectives; and

encouraging teachers to reflect on their intentions for content-focused learning and how learning outcomes may be shaped through interactions with information.

Implications – Drawing upon their expertise in how learners use information, academic librarians can use the findings to concentrate their consultative efforts to effectively partner with teachers to transform student learning experiences in higher education.

This study investigated the development of institutional repositories (IRs) at doctoral institutions, identifying factors that influence development and best practices using a comparative case study analysis approach to gather and analyze data. The development of a repository is one of the more complex projects that librarians may undertake. While many librarians have managed large information system projects, IR projects involve a larger stakeholder group and require support from technical services, public services, and administration to succeed. A significant increase in the development of repositories is expected with technology and process improvements for digital collection development so further study is warranted. Both institutional and subject repositories were examined for the case studies. Best practices and recommendations for future developers, such as early involvement of stakeholder groups and the need to educate both librarians and teaching faculty about open access collections, are also discussed. This study contributes to a more informed understanding of the development of IRs and identifies a model framework for future IR developers. The best practices framework incorporates the processes from the case study sites and includes additional factors identified from the case study interviews. Key to the framework is the inclusion of stakeholder groups on campus and assessment measures. While the case studies focused on doctoral institutions, the framework can be adapted to any size institution.

Academic library consortia activity has become an integral part of academic libraries’ operations. Consortia have come to assert considerable bargaining power over publishers and have provided libraries with considerable economic advantage. They interact with publishers both as consumers of publishers’ products, with much stronger bargaining power than individual libraries hold, and, increasingly, as rival publishers themselves. Are consortia changing the relationship between academic libraries and publishers? Is the role of academic library consortia placing academic libraries in a position that should and will attract the attention of competition policy regulators? Competition policy prohibits buying and selling cartels that can negatively impact the free market on which the Canadian economic system, like other Western economies, depends. Competition policy as part of economic policy is, however, only relevant where we are concerned with aspects of the market economy. Traditionally, public goods for the greater social and cultural benefit of society are not considered part of the market economic system. If the activities of academic library consortia are part of that public good perspective, competition policy may not be a relevant concern. Using evidence gained from in-depth interviews from a national sample of university librarians and from interviews with the relevant federal government policy makers, this research establishes whether library consortia are viewed as participating in the market economy of Canada or not. Are consortia viewed by librarians and government as serving a public good role of providing information for a greater social and cultural benefit or are they seen from a market-economic perspective of changing power relations with publishers? Findings show government has little in-depth understanding of academic library consortia activity, but would most likely consider such activity predominantly from a market economic perspective. University librarians view consortia from a public good perspective but also as having an important future role in library operations and in changing the existing scholarly publishing paradigm. One-third of librarian respondents felt that future consortia could compete with publishers by becoming publishers and through initiatives such as open source institutional repositories. Librarians also felt that consortia have had a positive effect on librarians’ professional roles through the facilitation of knowledge building and collaboration opportunities outside of the home institution.

Because of online digital resources, academic libraries no longer need to spend as much time and energy organizing their own collections as they used to. They now have an opportunity to pivot their expertise in organizing information outward. “Inside-out” library services can include support for special collections, digital scholarship, scholarly communication, and data management. A key characteristic of such services is that an academic library takes on broader information management challenges at their college or university. This chapter will examine what it takes to build successful inside-out library services by looking at their cost, how well they complement existing library expertise and culture, and their impact on teaching, research, and the wider community.

Social media tools are in increasing use across higher education and Twitter hashtags, live blogs, Facebook events, and Flickr groups are becoming a regular feature of academic conferences and event. In this chapter the author reflects on the experience of planning, moderating, and analyzing social media amplification of the 2009 Beyond the Repository Fringe event. Based upon this experience several important issues regarding social media usage are considered and a series of practical guidelines for planning amplification of higher education events are proposed.

Purpose — The purpose of this chapter is to give a framework to the issues that need to be addressed with the advent of the global economy and the realisation that the only lasting competitive advantage is an organisation's ability to effectively exploit intellectual capital. Excellent companies build learning organisations systematically, but in their haste, many firms underestimate the importance of cultural, technological, executive and learning imperatives that permeate dynamic, knowledge-based environments. Learning is a dynamic process between the needs of the individual, its leader, operational environment and the demands of the organisation.

Methodology — An initial quantitative study of 101 successful multinational companies with manufacturing facilities in Ireland the findings from which were reinforced by five case studies randomly selected from the ten firms identified from the quantitative research actively developing towards becoming learning organisations.

Findings — The findings of the quantitative and qualitative research are undertaken in the development of the learning imperatives presented in the body of the chapter under: Host Location, Culture Shock, Cross-Cultural Understanding, New Technology, Intellectual Capital, Dissatisfaction with the Traditional Management Paradigm, Nature of Global Business, Executive Challenge of Multinational Assignments, Learning Imperatives in Dynamic Multinational Environments.

Research implications — The research spanned 18 years and has relevance for all organisations irrespective of size operating in culturally diverse environments or simply planning to expand their operations.

Social implications — Are many and varied; however, this chapter, due to word constraints, only examines nine key attributes from the 35 identified. Nevertheless, every one of them will resonate to a greater or lesser extent with leaders from every walk of life.

Originality — The research work outlined in this chapter constituted an important element of the author's doctoral thesis, and its primary value is in the manner in which it simplifies complex issues that consciously or unconsciously affect groups or individuals in their respective working environments.

The purpose of our chapter is to explore the extent to which online repositories of stories related to corporate social responsibility (CSR), reported by companies, represent a tool which can contribute, combined with the potential pressure of the social networks, to perpetuating and increasing such reporting behaviour.

In order to explore this, we have analysed the CSR stories of companies published on the largest online repository from Romania, that is, the website www.responsabilitatesociala.ro. We explore two research questions: Could a repository site facilitate that more and more companies report their CSR activities? and Will a company that presented one case at some point in time present more cases in the next reporting period? For this purpose we have used as method the content analysis having as counting unit each article published and each company which, at some point, published something. Our analysis covered the articles published within 2006–2012 and thus we have used 1121 articles/case studies.

In terms of findings, we conclude that such online repository leads to an important increase in the number of companies having their CSR activities published, although such increase has not been steady. In our view such reporting started a trend. Some companies, after being published in a certain year may have not reported the following year, but nonetheless, new companies decided to publish about their CSR activities each year. In the case of the second question, we could not determine a particular pattern. The number of companies which published, at least in 6 out of the 7 years we have analysed, has been quite low – 12, and there have been big discrepancies between years and between articles per company.

The main limitation of our chapter is that we could not correlate the articles published with other variables, such as: reporting on Facebook and on the official webpage or the extent to which CSR managers from companies think that such repositories have exerted any type of good pressure on them to publish and report their activities.

This approach is important for CSR managers and other stakeholders – such repositories can be both a source of inspiration and a good practice model. One can ‘show, view and shop’ CSR activities in one stop online and take the example further. We believe that this is something specific for all countries, where CSR entered the business as a public relations (PR) concept and then evolved.

The value of our chapter consists in exploring such simple and on-hand online repositories and finding issues of interest for further research.

This chapter focuses on a university case that interprets the variability of academic freedom in terms of faculty’s textbook selection and the need for students’ textbook affordability. Faculty members are participants in a collective bargaining unit and students are members of the student government organization in a state university system. The faculty contract outlines tenets of academic freedom that delineate faculty selection of curriculum (textbooks), instruction, and assessment practices. This chapter highlights the nuances of faculty rights in the name of academic freedom and the students’ need for more affordable textbooks which includes open educational resource materials. In this case, the administration, faculty association, and the student government worked together to create a set of conditions for a more affordable textbook selection. This collaborative process is explored and explained as a set of practices that other colleges and universities can replicate at their institutions.

This chapter outlines libraries’ (and librarians’) changing identities in the new world of research mandates from funders, institutions, and publishers. As libraries respond to the demands of these mandates on their users at the individual, departmental, and institutional levels, they need to revise their approaches to relationship building and user engagement, as well as maintain flexibility in the face of changing roles and skill requirements. This chapter will (1) outline the changing scholarly ecosystem; (2) summarize major terms and concepts to understand the process of producing research outputs; (3) discuss the perspectives of the major players in the research enterprise; (4) present some of the challenges that research mandates and the changing research environment have brought to libraries; and finally (5) review ways in which libraries have successfully addressed them. The focus here is on the academic research setting, although many of the strategies outlined can be equally applicable in both non-academic research and non-research funding contexts.