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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how US public libraries offer information literacy (IL) instruction to their patrons.

The study is a content analysis of eight library websites to determine passive IL instruction and active literacy instruction.

Library web guides offer passive IL instruction by highlighting resources patrons may wish to access to resolve information inquiries. Further, the authors found that a little less than 50 per cent of library programming offers some IL instruction, the majority of which relates to helping patrons learn to use tools to create information products.

IL is the ability to recognize the need for information, to effectively find information to meet that need and to use information for some purpose or goal. Academic, school and public libraries believe that understanding and using information critically and effectively bring gains to an individual and to society. However, they diverge in how and why they engage in IL instruction. The authors’ findings suggest that less than half of the libraries surveyed are providing active IL instruction, despite the recognition of the benefits IL provides.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the perceptions of librarians toward continuing education (CE) in library management.

The study followed survey design to collect perceptions of librarians from around the USA. In total, 166 usable surveys were returned and the bulk of the analysis examined responses from non-directors (n=96).

Non-director librarians identified knowledge areas important for success as a manager including human resources, leadership, and organizational behavior. The majority of respondents assessed their own level of management knowledge as average to above average. In all, 38 percent of respondents indicated their management knowledge came from workshops, webinars, and conferences. Respondents reported that the opportunity for a salary increase, as well as a personal desire to learn were motivators for seeking CE in management.

A CE program in management should extend the knowledge learned in the MLIS degree, address knowledge, skills, and individual development, be flexibly scheduled and reasonably priced, and offer clear benefits to the library and to the learner.

This research demonstrates the importance of building a CE program in management that compliments other educational offerings in order to help librarians develop the knowledge and skills needed to lead libraries.

This chapter provides background information on the human emotions process, differentiating between processes that are spontaneous and automatic and those that can be regulated with intentional effort. The chapter then also highlights two constructs, emotional labor and emotional intelligence, that naturally derive from the emotion process and are prevalent in the workplace. These two constructs are important to understand from a theoretical and empirical perspective to identify and manage them most effectively in library work settings. The chapter is a general review of some key concepts citing seminal and exemplar literature from the fields of organizational behavior, psychology, and library and information science to support and illustrate the ideas presented. The value of the chapter is first as an orientation to the science behind emotions. To more fully understand how and why emotion is such a force in the workplace, it is necessary to understand the emotion process. Further, the chapter adds practical value by presenting the constructs of emotional labor and emotional intelligence and including suggestions for how employees and managers can most effectively harness the power of emotions in ways that are most productive for individual employees as well as to achieve organizational goals.

The purpose of the paper is to explore the research on the personality trait of customer orientation (CO) and consider how it may be applicable to customer service work in libraries.

The paper reviews business research literature on CO and relates it to library science literature on customer service.

CO is a measurable personality trait that is shown to predict customer service behaviors in service employees. Research also shows that CO is associated with customers’ perceptions of service quality.

Libraries should prioritize CO in their hiring, training and recognition processes.

CO is a well-researched personality trait in the business literature. The original contribution of this paper is to report the research on customer orientation, relate it to similar concepts in librarianship and suggest ways libraries can integrate an awareness of CO in their human resources processes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the current state of continuing education in management for librarians.

Directors from public and academic libraries were surveyed to explore their perceptions of the need for and value of management knowledge in librarians.

The results show that library directors consider a wide range of management areas important for librarians to possess and believe that having above average management knowledge is a significant factor in hiring and promotion decisions. Respondents perceive that applicants for mid to senior positions in libraries are more likely to have average or low levels of management knowledge.

Limitations to the study are the small sample and the exclusive focus on library directors. Future research on the need for and value of management knowledge for librarians should also examine the perceptions of early to mid career librarians and should explore associations between employees' levels of management knowledge and promotion and hiring decisions.

Results suggest that librarians who wish to move up professionally would benefit from pursuing continuing education in management. Libraries should look for ways to offer management training to staff through collaborations with other libraries and community organizations. Library and information science education programs should offer strategically designed continuing education in specific areas of management.

This research demonstrates a gap in the field of librarianship in the development of highly knowledgeable, trained managers, and offers some solutions to librarians, library institutions, and schools of library and information science toward closing that gap.

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 paper characterizes translation as a task and aims to identify how it influences professional translators' information needs and use of resources to meet those needs.

This research is exploratory and qualitative. Data are based on focus group sessions with 19 professional translators. Where appropriate, findings are related to several theories relating task characteristics and information behavior (IB).

The findings support some of Byström's findings about relationship between task and information use but also suggest new hypotheses or relationships among task, information need, and information use, including the notion of a zone of familiarity. Translators use a wide range of resources, both formal and informal, localized sources, including personal contacts with other translators, native speakers, and domain experts, to supplement their basic resources, which are different types of dictionaries. The study addresses translator problems created by the need to translate materials in less commonly taught languages.

Focus group sessions allow only for identifying concepts, relationships, and hypotheses, not for indicating the relative importance of variables or distribution across individuals. Translation does not cover literary translation.

The paper suggests content and features of workstations offering access to wide range of resources for professional translators.

Unlike other information behavior studies of professional translators, this article focuses on a broad range of resources, not just on dictionary use. It also identifies information problems associated not only with normal task activities, but also with translators' moving out of their zone of familiarity, i.e. their range of domain, language, and style expertise. The model of translator IB is potentially generalizable to other groups and both supports and expands other task‐related research.