Search results

‘Communication and organisational abilities of a high order’, ‘marketing and training skills’, ‘management experience’, ‘innovator’, ‘enthusiastic and lively personality’ — these are just some of the requirements listed in recent advertisements for posts in industrial and commercial libraries. So what of the dreaded ‘library image’ — the well‐known stereotype playing a passive, sometimes remote, role? — This is hardly described by the above turns of phrase.

As a participant in the original research for the British Library's IUK 2000 project, my general brief at that time was to look at the influences on, and developments in the management and organization of UK special libraries in the year 2000. The Task Force of which I was part had as an overall title “Archives, libraries and information services”. I started by taking as a model Peter Drucker's view of corporate economics in the 1990s and the far‐reaching changes which he saw as being brought about in the social and economic environment. The main trends as seen by Drucker relate to increased international co‐operation and integration; radical business restructuring; and a challenge to the doctrine of self‐perpetuating management, raising questions of accountability.

To talk about the information explosion is certainly old‐hat. Even to talk about information technology is to use a well‐worn phrase.

Outlines the introduction of quality control and TQM in library and information services. Considers its specific application to special libraries and reports on a research project using a questionnaire survey of a range of special libraries.

This step‐by‐step guide to searching the literature of librarianship and information science begins by defining the subject area and discussing the nature of the literature. A concise and ordered search strategy is detailed, after which the reader is guided through the principal sources, such as encyclopedias, bibliographies and journals. Having considered these the author discusses sources of information relating to the broader contextual issues of libraries, for example schools. Additional sources are also indicated and the book concludes by proposing methods whereby the reader can keep up to date. The characteristics and coverage of each source are discussed and the author makes a critical evaluation of each text.

The fulfilment agency EBSCO is projecting a typical increase of 10–11% for renewing journal subscriptions for 1996. Even worse: price rises will be double that amount on average for European journals invoiced in US dollars.

The problems of One‐Man‐Bands (OMBs) began to be taken seriously in the early 1980s when the Aslib OMB group was formed. The group received considerable attention in the professional press, and became the object of a study by Judith Collins and Janet Shuter who identified them as “information professionals working in isolation”. Many of the problems identified in the Collins/Shuter study remain — not least of these being the further education and training needs of OMBs. These needs are studied in this report. The author has firstly done an extensive survey of the literature to find what has been written about this branch of the profession. Then by means of a questionnaire sent to the Aslib OMB group and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (INVOG), training and education needs have been pinpointed. Some of these needs have then been explored in greater detail by means of case studies. The author found that the most common deterrents to continuing education and training were time, cost, location, finding suitable courses to cover the large variety of skills needed and lastly, lack of encouragement from employers. The author has concluded by recommending areas where further research is needed, and suggesting some solutions to the problems discussed.

Purpose: The aim of the study is to consider the use of the Internet as a potential facilitator of positive health-related perceptions. Specifically, we propose that online health information seeking fosters positive perceptions of health. Using path modeling, we theorized several mechanisms through which information seeking could be conducive to positive health perceptions, which we conceptualized into the following four dimensions: (1) sense of empowerment in managing health, (2) self-reported ability to take better care of health, (3) sense of improved health-related quality of life, and (4) self-reported improvement of health.

Methodology: Our sample consisted of respondents who have used the Internet as a resource for health information (n = 710), drawn from the largest national probability-based online research panel. Our comparison subsample consisted of older respondents (age ≥ 60; n = 194). We used Internet-specific measures and employed structural equation models (SEM) to estimate the direct, indirect, and total effects of health-related use of the Internet on subjective health perceptions. Based on our review of the literature, competent health communication with healthcare providers and sense of empowerment in managing personal health were modeled as mediator variables. We assessed whether the proposed mediational relationships, if significant, differed across our indicators of positive health perceptions and whether any differential associations were observed among older adults. We run parallel models for each indicator of positive health perception.

Findings: Provider-patient communication informed by the Internet resources were perceived to impart a greater sense of empowerment to manage health among our respondents, which in turn, was associated with perceived contributions to better self-reported ability to provide self-care, increased health-related quality of life, and improvement in self-reported health. The SEM results revealed a good fit with our full sample and subsample.

Research Implications: Conceptualization of the multidimensional aspects of online health information seeking with separate multi-indicator analyses of the outcome variable is important to further our understanding of how technology may impact the pathways involved in influencing health perceptions and as a result health outcomes.

This article is an exploration of how power has been exercised over the future of part of a rural town in Lancashire, North West England. The article reviews a decade of debates about what should be done with the area, and draws loose comparisons between practices at various stages of the story and three conceptual frameworks from planning theory. The stages are likened to the theories of rational-comprehensive planning, agonism and communicative planning. This story is characterised by the attempts of spatially or deliberatively remote actors to define the area's future, and to justify this by recourse to one or more master narratives. The article appraises how successful each of the three planning theories have been at regulating these attempts to impose the area's future. It builds on existing critiques of rational planning and communicative planning and shows how, in this instance; well resourced agonistic debate was more effective at promoting the importance of disparate values and non-expert knowledge.