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The following classified, annotated list of titles is intended to provide reference librarians with a current checklist of new reference books, and is designed to supplement the RSR review column, “Recent Reference Books,” by Frances Neel Cheney. “Reference Books in Print” includes all additional books received prior to the inclusion deadline established for this issue. Appearance in this column does not preclude a later review in RSR. Publishers are urged to send a copy of all new reference books directly to RSR as soon as published, for immediate listing in “Reference Books in Print.” Reference books with imprints older than two years will not be included (with the exception of current reprints or older books newly acquired for distribution by another publisher). The column shall also occasionally include library science or other library related publications of other than a reference character.

The purpose of this paper is to examine advertisements for part-time professional library jobs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The goal is to gain a better understanding of what skills and experience levels are being required of part-time librarians, as well as what their expected salary and hours might be.

Advertisements for part-time professional library positions were collected from online sources over the course of one year.

Part-time librarian positions tend to be public services positions in either public or academic libraries. Advertisements for these position indicate a need for flexibility and often do not contain information about salary or hours. Many are suitable for entry-level librarians with no experience.

Job advertisement studies are limited in that they can only examine the information contained in the advertisements themselves and therefore may not reflect the actual person hired.

This paper will provide useful information for librarians seeking part-time positions, as well as for library and information science educators and library managers who wish to mentor or hire new librarians.

This paper corrects an identified lack of research into part-time library employment.

Library assistants were originally considered to be professional librarians in the making, and were trained accordingly. With the expansion of libraries and librarianship, Britain's “apprenticeship” system of qualification gave way to formal library school education, and a new category of “non‐professional staff” was created, of people who were unwilling or unable to proceed to graduate‐level qualification. The development of non‐professional certificates of competence in the UK is described against parallel developments in the US, Canada and Australia; the COMLA training modules are also examined. The theoretical and practical issues surrounding training are discussed, training schemes and qualifications in the four countries analysed, and the relative merits of in‐house training and external certificate programmes argued.

Digital library research has attracted much attention in the most developed, and in a number of developing, countries. While many digital library research projects are funded by government agencies and national and international bodies, some are run by specific academic and research institutions and libraries, either individually or collaboratively. While some digital library projects, such as the ELINOR project in the UK, the first two phases of the eLib (Electronic Libraries) Programme in the UK, and the first phase of DLI (Digital Library Initiative) in the US, are now over, a number of other projects are currently under way in different parts of the world. Beginning with the definitions and characteristics of digital libraries, as proposed by various researchers, this paper provides brief accounts of some major digital library projects that are currently in progress, or are just completed, in different parts of the world. There follows a review of digital library research under sixteen major headings. Literature for this review has been identified through a search on LISA CD‐ROM database, and a Dialog search on library and information science databases, and the resulting output has been supplemented by a scan of the various issues of D‐Lib Magazine and Ariadne, and the websites of various organisations and institutions engaged in digital library research. The review indicates that we have learned a lot through digital library research within a short span of time. However, a number of issues are yet to be resolved. The paper ends with an indication of the research issues that need to be addressed and resolved in the near future in order to bring the digital library from the researcher‘s laboratory to the real life environment.

Academia’s overwhelming reliance on non-tenure track, or contingent, faculty is a well-known fact. While the status and working conditions of contingent classroom faculty have been well studied and documented, the corresponding trend in academic libraries has not been explored as deeply. As this paper reviews the limited LIS literature on the subject, the purpose of this paper is to provide administrators and managers with a deeper understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of contingent appointments. It also offers strategies for fostering a workplace culture that recognizes contingent librarians’ contributions and promotes their professional growth.

An overview of scholarly and professional literature on contingent librarianship, this paper is based on published research studies and academic articles; given the prominence of anecdotal and personal writing on the subject, columns and first-person essays from trade publications, as well as library-related blogs and job search sites, are also included.

Contingent librarians have been a steady presence in academic libraries for the last few decades. The trend is continuing. There are specific practices that can be applied to effectively manage contingent librarians.

The paper offers academic library administrators and managers a concise yet comprehensive overview of the issues related to contingent appointments.

A variety of federal programs have provided financial assistance to public and college libraries since enactment of the original Library Services Act in 1956, or even the initiation of the federal depository library system in 1859. Although continued federal funding for most of these programs has been questioned, the programs have continued, and some of the smaller ones have experienced a modest expansion in appropriation levels and authorized activities. This article provides background information on these programs, including brief information on their structure, authorized activities, funding levels, available program evaluations, and issues.

The purpose of this study is the use of 3D printing technology to perform maintenance on damaged parts on site. To maintain damaged parts, the user needs experience in the parts design and 3D printing technology. To help users who have little or no experience on 3D printing, a part library-based information retrieval and inspection framework was proposed to support the process of manufacturing replaceable parts using a 3D printer.

To establish the framework, 3D printing-based maintenance procedure was first defined, comprising retrieval, manufacturing and inspection steps, while identifying the technical components required to perform the procedure. Once the technical components are identified, part library-based information retrieval and inspection framework was defined based on the technical components and the relationships between the components. For validation of the concept of the framework, prototype system is developed according to the proposed framework.

The feasibility of the proposed framework is proved through maintenance experiments on gaskets and O-rings.

The main contribution of this study is the proposal of the framework, which aims to support the maintenance of damaged parts for the user who has little or no experience in part design or does not know how to operate a 3D printer.

Flexible workers are a growing part of the library and information sector, as they are in the service sector generally. Yet their specific needs and requirements have been greatly ignored. Outlines increasing flexibility in the labour market generally and discusses flexibility in library and information services. Discusses the incidence of established flexible working patterns such as part‐time, job‐share, temporary and flexi‐time working, and also of newer work forms such as homeworking and annualized hours. Uses data from a survey of 475 library and information services with a staff of 38,008 individuals. Examines the advantages and disadvantages of flexible working, and outlines the solutions worked out by case study organizations and managers. Suggests that effective use of flexible workers in library and information services necessitates the updating of management techniques and organizational strategy.

This exploratory study, a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Western Ontario in 2013, examines the materially embedded relations of power between library users and staff in public libraries and how building design regulates spatial behavior according to organizational objectives. It considers three public library buildings as organization spaces (Dale & Burrell, 2008) and determines the extent to which their spatial organizations reproduce the relations of power between the library and its public that originated with the modern public library building type ca. 1900. Adopting a multicase study design, I conducted site visits to three, purposefully selected public library buildings of similar size but various ages. Site visits included: blueprint analysis; organizational document analysis; in-depth, semi-structured interviews with library users and library staff; cognitive mapping exercises; observations; and photography.

Despite newer approaches to designing public library buildings, the use of newer information technologies, and the emergence of newer paradigms of library service delivery (e.g., the user-centered model), findings strongly suggest that the library as an organization still relies on many of the same socio-spatial models of control as it did one century ago when public library design first became standardized. The three public libraries examined show spatial organizations that were designed primarily with the librarian, library materials, and library operations in mind far more than the library user or the user’s many needs. This not only calls into question the public library’s progressiveness over the last century but also hints at its ability to survive in the new century.

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.