Preface

This volume presents chapters on innovations in two parts. The first part focuses on leadership and the latter half under management. Our thoughts for the theme of this volume are centered on the use of new digital and social media swirling around us and how these engender new approaches within and external to all information service providers. How can we design and redesign ourselves in the face of changing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats? This volume presents a wide range of potential answers.

Be it France, Nigeria, Canada, or the United States and United Kingdom, librarians everywhere are searching for innovative ways to manage operations, themselves, and at the same time enlarging their leadership roles—not just on campus but also in their cities and surrounding communities. This volume provides some stellar examples of both leadership and management creativity. Take for example, a small academic library in a private university in Indonesia engaging its greater metropolitan population of 5.6 million in edutainment events—from interactive children’s activities, to walking tours of historic sites and more importantly, building a digital repository of that city’s history and culture. In doing this, the library wove academic students and faculty members into the fabric of the entire city. The partnerships both inside the University and in the external community are exemplary showcases from which all types of libraries can learn. The chapter by Toong Tjiek Liauw (Aditya Nugraha) is unlike any outreach activities experienced in our combined professional lives which—alas—total nearly century.

The following chapters deal with mindful leadership and how it impacts libraries, both public and academic. As a reviewer said of the chapter by Beverage, DeLong, Herold, and Neufeld, this provides a “a great landscape for leaders” if they want to hone their talents to better their environments. This is followed by a study by Goulding and Walton in which, after strong literature review, they report the findings of the attributes of leaders in collaborative enterprises and establish a link between distributed leadership, collaborative work, and innovation. Willey literature review examines how devolved leadership and development of a community of practice helped a group of library instructors learn and grow in their roles as teacher in a higher education setting. The chapter by Judge and McMenemy covers interviews of school media librarians in both the United States and Scotland about their roles and positions. After a thorough literature review, the authors present a model for optimum conditions and support which will ensure highly successful school library operations and enable further development of school libraries in many countries. According to an eminent scholar in the field this is, simply put, a great chapter. Last but not least in this section is the chapter by deJong addressing service science and service design approaches to building customer service systems for libraries independent of the community served. This chapter, conceptual in nature, presents the why and how of implementing service design as a means of increasing user satisfaction and patronage and represents the application of a novel subdisciplines of management studies to various library environments.

The section on management has similar creative solutions to day-to-day library operations. The chapter by Barnhart et al. recounts how a team struggled to reinvent traditional interview processes in order to find colleagues who were good “fits” for both existing and evolving teams. They describe how engagement of applicants in real-life activities during the interview processes ensured that both candidates and existing staff would experience and engage in their future responsibilities as a cohesive group. The result is a model which would do well for others who seek to find people who might best complement existing teams’ knowledge, skills, and styles. A similar approach is taken at Kansas State University Libraries where Hoeve, Urton, and Bell report development of a matrix approach to both collections and they became client focused by restructured positions and transformed their roles from traditional narrow collection development librarians into more broadly focused, service-oriented colleagues.

McCormack’s chapter clearly, and in depth, provides a thorough literature review which differentiates between situational and short-term stresses that managers face—as opposed to chronic conditions which drain energy and create total burnout. McCormack not only provides a scholarly foundation but also has valuable practical advice for mitigating these situations. This is followed by Olorunsola’s study of the use and management of gossip in academic libraries—highly useful despite its seemingly geographic limitations. Of this, one reviewer said that it is one of the most refreshing and interesting papers she has reviewed for Advances in Librarianship to date. Gossip can have negative impact in organizations but in this study, a fair portion of upper level managers conceded that it has its uses, particularly if it identifies problems/issues which can be resolved once they surface. Stepping back farther, and looking at a broader, even global picture, Schöpfel analyzes the extent to which the United Nation’s Agenda 21 can be used by libraries to ensure global sustainability through actions at local levels. He concludes that in so doing, a global library will ultimately emerge.

As editors, we trust that readers will find these chapters helpful to them as current and future leaders and managers.

We could not have succeeded in completing this volume without the authors all of whom were unfailingly prompt and responsive to our questions and suggestions. To them go our heartfelt thanks. Members of the Editorial Advisory Board also deserve our thanks for giving us advice about possible themes for volumes, for guiding potential authors to us, and for reviewing the papers submitted. Its members are: Kenneth Haycock, Professor Emeritus at San Jose’s School of Library and Information Science and more recently, Research Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, all the while spearheading a consulting company in Vancouver, Canada; Maureen Mackenzie, Business Professor at Molloy College, Rockville Centre, NY whose experience and education straddle the worlds of business and information management; Pat Levine (formerly Molholt), currently a consultant, grant writer and editor in Ashley Falls, MA, and who retired as Associate Vice President at Columbia University’s Medical Center, New York, NY; Marie Radford, Chair and Professor of the Department of Library and Information Science (recipient of numerous research grants to examine information seeking behaviors) at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information, Newark, NJ; Robert A. Seal, Dean of Libraries at Loyola University, Chicago, IL, who has not only contributed to this series as an author, but has been the backbone of the Editorial Advisory Board since 2002; Louise Schaper, an award-winning public librarian with her roots in Bell Labs and currently Vice President of Schaper Consulting, Inc., in Naples, FL; Barbara A. Stripling, Assistant Professor of Practice at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies in Syracuse, NY (who juggles time and effort between teaching and serving as President-Elect, and then President of the American Library Association, 2012–2014); and last but not least, Cathy Wilt, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium, Inc. (PALCI) in Philadelphia, PA, with many years of experience in directing library consortia.

Once again, our gratitude goes to the Emerald team with which we worked—Sarah Baxter, Virginia Chapman, and Wendy Lynch. Their support and help in clarifying publication processes was much appreciated.

Anne Woodsworth

W. David Penniman

Editors