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This study takes the position that the vitality of academic libraries is grounded in the working experiences of its librarians. It suggests that a full understanding of problems facing contemporary information professionals in the post-industrial workplace requires an analysis of the labouring aspects as well as the professional nature of their work. The study of changes in the academic library work experience thus depicts the state of the library, and has implications for other intellectual workers in a social environment characterized by expanding information technologies, constricted economic resources, and the globalization of information production. Academic librarians have long recognized that their vocation lies not only in the classical role in information collection, organization, and dissemination, but also in collaboration with faculty in the teaching and research process, and in the contribution to university governance. They are becoming increasingly active in the protection of information access and assurance of information quality in view of information degradation on the Internet and various compromises necessitated by interaction with third party commercial information producers.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to draw attention to one specific upper-level government policy document in which a discourse of perpetual innovation and customer service is promoted, and the kinds of questions such discursive interventions raise for the future of work in public libraries; and second, to demonstrate the explanatory potential of the concept of immaterial labour for questions relating to emerging labour processes in libraries. The concepts of “prosumer” and Web 2.0 are included as discursive resources of relevance to any discussion of immaterial labour.

This paper presents a critical discourse analysis of a public policy visioning document for public libraries in Ontario, Canada, with reflections on related literatures.

The concept of immaterial labour provides an additional analytic tool suitable for questions of relevance to public librarians and library scholars. Within the government text under review which deals specifically with the future of the public library to 2020, the identity of the public librarian is alarmingly absent. Conversely, the library patron as a producer and consumer is privileged.

Failure to attend to the broader policy arena within which the public library resides creates dangerous blind spots for public library professionals, educators and researchers.

This paper demonstrates the value of a discourse analysis for uncovering the ideological dimensions of policy documents, while simultaneously modelling the method using the kind of policy text commonly produced in governments around the world.

This paper shows how failure to attend to the broader policy arena within which the public library resides creates dangerous blind spots for the public library community.

This paper contextualizes the immaterial and volunteer labour of the public library user as producer/consumer in the context of the future of the frontline professional and waged librarian.

The aim of the current article is to clarify satisfaction of the staff of Estonian university libraries with the division of labor, work organization and coordination, existence of intra‐organizational career opportunities as well as with the fairness of salaries in view of the qualifications and responsibilities of university librarians in Estonia.

The data used in this paper are based on reviewing and summarizing of relevant literature to provide an overview of the concepts of performance and efficiency in general and in the context of the library as well as on results of the original study, created by the paper's authors, held in 2011/2012 in Estonian university libraries to determine the attitude of the libraries' staff towards division of labor and performance appraisal.

Although a number of Estonian university librarians were mostly satisfied with the division of labor within their departments, the respondents feel that duties in the library as a whole should be reorganized and workloads should be divided more equally. Librarians are relatively pessimistic about career opportunities within their libraries. The fact is that in Estonia, the predominantly women's jobs, such as teachers, librarians and nurses, are low‐paid. Therefore, as expected, the employees of university libraries are not satisfied with their salaries. However, librarians are capable and willing to work more and/or more intensively than they are currently allowed if that would bring about an increase in their salaries.

The majority of the literature in library science has focused – and rightfully so – on the user: what do users and patrons want and/or need, how do they use it, how can librarians best provide it to them, do the users feel themselves comfortable in library building etc., etc. Also, a fairly large number of studies have focused on finding relations between librarians' job satisfaction and performance output, but, to the best of the authors' knowledge, no research has been previously carried out in the Estonian library context to determine employees' attitudes towards their division of labor and coordination as well as librarians' intra‐organizational career opportunities and fairness of the salary.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the value of French School Regulation theory for questions of relevance to researchers and practitioners working in the field of information policy in general and public librarianship in particular.

The paper is divided into two parts. Part one outlines Regulation theory's twin analytic tools of Fordism and post‐Fordism and its value for questions about the evolution of the public library. Part two provides an example of the approach's explanatory potential when applied to a series of public library planning documents produced by the Government of Ontario, Canada from the 1950s.

An interpretation of the evolution of the identity of the library user from patron to customer to information producer‐consumer is proposed at the intersection of the neoliberal state's austerity in social spending, the ubiquity of the new information and communication technologies, and fundamental changes in libraries as sites of waged‐work.

The research facilitates the development of a political economy of the contemporary public library of potential value to the international public library community. Also, conceiving of the public library as first and foremost a site of productive work forces one to re‐engage with the meaning of shifting relations between the library user and the institution on working conditions.

The applicability of a relatively under‐utilized theoretical framework is modelled that enables one to ask new questions of relevance to the field of library and information science.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a rational and sustainable division of labor between national libraries and the information industry for the preservation of knowledge.

The paper is a based on remarks presented by the author at the 25th Anniversary Conference of the National Repository Library of Finland, held in Kuopio on May 21-22, 2015.

Crafting a useful new role for libraries will require imagination and curatorial rigor, capabilities that the industry has found in the past, and can summon once again. No templates for such a role exist, but must be newly invented by the current generation of librarians. This is a tall order in an era of diminishing public funding for libraries and archives. But it will be essential if libraries are to continue to be key institutions of civil society.

There are formidable challenges to ensuring a rational and sustainable division of labor for the preservation of knowledge and many of those challenges will not be solved by new technologies alone. But the discussion needs to move beyond dated, late twentieth century strategies like mass digitization of books and “web archiving”.

This paper takes up a question raised by Edward Lim in an article on the MALMARC Project in the issue of July 1980 regarding the place of advanced technology in the libraries of developing countries where labour is cheap and plentiful. Advances in Malaysia show that some developing countries are more developed than others and that the achievements of the Project confirm that it is appropriate to introduce computers into library work there. The main question remains however, the appropriateness of advanced information systems in developing countries and what standing libraries might have in contributing to the development process where ‘information’ about information could be considered even more important than some of the fields where great effort has long been directed to ‘development’. The paper suggest some areas where library staff ‘displaced’ by automation might best serve in a developing country while libraries themselves attempt to make best use of technological developments available; these should be ‘internalised’ to give the country the best benefit of new advances.

It has been widely projected in the library literature that a substantial number of librarians will retire in the near future leaving significant gaps in the workforce, especially in library leadership. Many of those concerned with organizational development in libraries have promoted succession planning as an essential tool for addressing this much-anticipated wave of retirements. The purpose of this chapter is to argue that succession planning is the wrong approach for academic libraries. This chapter provides a review of the library literature on succession planning, as well as studies analyzing position announcements in librarianship which provide evidence as to the extent to which academic librarianship has changed in recent years. In a review of the library literature, the author found no sound explanation of why succession planning is an appropriate method for filling anticipated vacancies and no substantive evidence that succession planning programs in libraries are successful. Rather than filling anticipated vacancies with librarians prepared to fill specific positions by means of a succession planning program, the author recommends that academic library leaders should focus on the continual evaluation of current library needs and future library goals, and treat each vacancy as an opportunity to create a new position that will best satisfy the strategic goals of the library. In contrast to the nearly universal support for succession planning found in the library literature, this chapter offers a different point of view.

Describes the extent of flexible working practices in library and information services (LIS) in the UK, drawing on a recently completed study. Outlines concerns about training expressed by managers in case study organizations and in the literature. Investigates gender and equal opportunity implications in training flexible workers when LIS continue to be dominated numerically by women, yet hierarchically by men. Discusses examples of gender‐based discrimination in training provision and allocation taken from the literature in women’s studies and business studies. Considers the potential of National Vocational Qualifications and the Library Association’s framework for continuing professional development in relation to flexible workers. Outlines the British Library Research and Development Department‐funded study investigating training for flexible LIS workers.

The interesting ceremony described in another part of our columns has once more recalled attention to one of the most remarkable characters in the annals of British librarianship. When Mr. Thomas Greenwood endeavoured, at the Plymouth meeting of the Library Association, to interest librarians in the man who had done so much for the craft, it must be confessed that his appeal, for various reasons, did not succeed in arousing so much enthusiasm as might have been expected. For one thing, a considerable proportion of the librarians who attended the Plymouth conference were young men who had not been able to obtain access to the works which Edwards left behind him as his most enduring monument. Again, the prominence given to Ewart as the sole parent of the municipal library movement, had completely overshadowed Edwards' share in the work, and only a few student‐librarians knew anything about the part which Edwards had played in securing effective library legislation. On the other hand, the publications of Mr. Greenwood, of the Library Association itself, and other modern and accessible literature, contain frequent allusions to Edwards and his works, from which information could be obtained, and it is only necessary to cite, in this connection the various writings of Messrs. Axon, Ogle, Garnett, Greenwood, Sutton, Brown, and others.

In relation to institution type and employment status, this study aims to identify the requisite skills, knowledge and attitudes (SKAs) listed in job advertisements for Japanese library staff.

This study collected data on 545 posts advertised on major Japanese librarian job advertisement websites from March 2019 to January 2021. The data included institution type, employment length, application requirements and job descriptions. Job descriptions were classified into 16 categories based on required SKAs. Data were analyzed using content, cross-tabulation and cluster analyses.

The results demonstrate that 82.2% of job advertisements targeted nonregular employees. The essential SKAs are the client and technical services. The job advertisements for nonregular employees had detailed descriptions of the requisite generic and soft skills and knowledge, whereas these competencies were not specified in the advertisements for regular employees.

To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study on job advertisements in Japanese libraries. This serves as a benchmark for the content and methods of continuing education for librarians. It also demonstrates the impact of Japan's social and historical environment on job advertisements and related research.