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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.

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.

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.

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.

From the pioneering work of Howard Becker (1982) on jazz scenes as art worlds, to the influence of Erving Goffman (1967) on Ingrid Monson’s (1996) foundational framework for jazz ethnography, symbolic interactionist premises have already had a powerful impact on the study of jazz and popular music. Nonetheless, they still have much to contribute toward a richer and more nuanced understanding of how jazz musicians jointly improvise meaningful musical discourses. Building upon these earlier precedents, I propose that further critical elaboration of symbolic interactionist notions – including social worlds, generalized others, and facework – could hold the key to a hermeneutics of musical meaning premised upon improvisational interplay. Specifically, I propose that the internal structure of local jazz worlds or scenes, arising from distinctive modes of meaning production, gives rise to particular types of generalized other, which in turn structures the development of artists’ professional selves or personae through the dialogic internalization of durable aesthetic predispositions. From this perspective, the common stylistic commitments that make group improvisation possible and productive may begin with widely acclaimed paradigmatic performances, whose import is then encapsulated in the shared technical conceptions of artist peer circles, broadened through articulation with the consensus aesthetic principles of culture industries, and deepened by investment with the normative beliefs associated with audience identification and consumption. Ultimately, through improvisational interaction predicated on such shared paradigms, conceptions, principles, and beliefs, jazz musicians construct and project mutually compatible creative selves, whose onstage encounters with one another suggest dramaturgical processes of meaning production, which endow the interplay of their spontaneous aesthetic gestures with narrative significance.