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This essay is offered in response to an invitation to share reflections on a topic of current concern. The concern is how to position the library profession to not just gain appreciation and support of academic libraries, but to develop librarians as leaders continuing the values of higher education as essential to maintain and improve a democratic society. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This is a viewpoint piece.

The paper speculates that assessment alone may be an inadequate objective of an organizational culture for academic libraries; assessment is not universally accepted throughout higher education as a primary focus, perhaps with the exception when meeting accreditation requirements.

An informed citizenry, freedom of information, open and equitable access to knowledge, and intellectual diversity are important values to preserve. This concern overlaps with the authors’ shared and independent work to engage in assessment efforts and developing a library culture of assessment.

Preparation of academic librarians may benefit from more strongly advancing the core mission of their institutions rather than their service relationship to its customers as an objective of the library culture.

This is the first work to examine why assessment is not enough for libraries to be valued.

Thus far, we (consensual not colonial) have addressed a transcendent, metonymic sense of touch, curative of bodies and meanings, accepting Turner's hypothesis that ‘the contemporary problem of the body in society is a legacy of the Judaeo-Christian discourse of the body as flesh’ (Turner, 1997, p. 103). Then we outlined the detour of meaning, its extravagance. But there is a more immediate kind of touch. In terms of touch, we agree with Nancy and Hutchens – there is a peculiar reflexivity to touch:The sense of touch feels itself feeling itself. (Hutchens, 2005, p. 55, citing Nancy)It is by touching the other that the body is a body, absolutely separated and shared. (Nancy, 1993a, p. 205)

Technology is integral to contemporary life; where the digital transformation to virtual information accessibility impacts instruction, it alters the skills of learning and comprehension (Gonzalez-Patino & Esteban-Guitart, 2014; Lloyd, 2010). Although librarians/media specialists provide orientation, instruction, and research methods face-to-face and electronically, they recognize that digital learning instruction is not a linear process, and digital literacy (DL) is multi-disciplinary (Belshaw, 2012). Policy and public research findings indicate that higher education must be prepared to adapt to rapid changes in digital technology (Maybee, Bruce, Lupton, & Rebmann, 2017). Digital learning undergoes frequent transformations, with new disruptive innovation and research attempts at redefinition (Palfrey, 2015). Research often overlooks junior/community colleges. We are all learners and we need to understand the digital learning challenges that incorporating DL includes in the new digital ecology (Adams Becker et al., 2017). This study provides real faculty/librarian commentaries regarding the understanding needed to develop digital learning and contemporary digital library resources. The authors investigate faculties’ and librarians’ degree of DL perceptions with instruction at junior/community colleges. Survey data analysis uses the mean of digital self-efficacy of variables collected, revealing that participants surpassed Rogers’s (2003) chasm of 20% inclusion. Findings provided data to develop the Dimensions of Digital Learning rubric, a new evaluation tool that encourages faculty DL cross-training, librarians’ digital learning collaboration, and effective digital learning spaces.

Over the past twenty years, bibliographic instruction has evolved from teaching students the mechanics of locating research materials to a process‐oriented approach that emphasizes analyzing research needs, framing a research question, and evaluating the search results. In the last decade alone, academic librarians have extended bibliographic instruction to cover online catalogs, CD‐ROMs, and database searching, in addition to teaching print resources and the card catalog. We are still defining a paradigm for teaching end‐users. Some of the assumptions associated with the teaching of print resources, for example, can be applied to the teaching of information technologies, while others cannot. Our efforts are further complicated by the rapid development of new types of technologies, by vendor refusals to adopt a standard command language or user interface, and by our patrons' varying responses to both computers in general and electronic research sources in particular.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic meltdown and social unrest severely challenged most countries, their societies, economies, organizations, and individual citizens. Focusing on both more and less successful country-specific initiatives to fight the pandemic and its multitude of related consequences, this chapter explores implications for leadership and effective action at the individual, organizational, and societal levels. As international management scholars and consultants, the authors document actions taken and their wide-ranging consequences in a diverse set of countries, including countries that have been more or less successful in fighting the pandemic, are geographically larger and smaller, are located in each region of the world, are economically advanced and economically developing, and that chose unique strategies versus strategies more similar to those of their neighbors. Cultural influences on leadership, strategy, and outcomes are described for 19 countries. Informed by a cross-cultural lens, the authors explore such urgent questions as: What is most important for leaders, scholars, and organizations to learn from critical, life-threatening, society-encompassing crises and grand challenges? How do leaders build and maintain trust? What types of communication are most effective at various stages of a crisis? How can we accelerate learning processes globally? How does cultural resilience emerge within rapidly changing environments of fear, shifting cultural norms, and profound challenges to core identity and meaning? This chapter invites readers and authors alike to learn from each other and to begin to discover novel and more successful approaches to tackling grand challenges. It is not definitive; we are all still learning.

This paper examines the role of managerial curiosity as a critical factor in determining the future impact of disruptive information technologies in a global organization. Specifically, this paper presents curiosity as a managerial characteristic that plays an important role in identifying disruptive information technologies and facilitating their early adoption. Further, it uses resource‐based theory as a theoretical lens to illustrate how managerial curiosity can be a source of sustained competitive advantage. Finally, it examines the individual decision styles that are best suited in assessing disruptive information technologies.

Cultural anthropologists have explored ways in which ritual both imparts and expresses values in societies. Their findings have much to offer to educational managers in democratic societies. Victor Turner′s structure/antistructure paradigm is particularly suited to exploring the range of meanings that rituals can carry. Presents methodology derived from the practical involvement of educational managers in the analysis and design of ritual. Argues that, in educational institutions, existing rituals can be usefully analysed and that new rituals should be “self‐generated” rather than imposed.