Data Driven Decisions: A Practical Toolkit for Library and Information Professionals is a simple, jargon-free guide to using data for decision making in library services. The book walks readers step-by-step through each stage of implementing, reviewing and embedding data driven decisions in their organisation, providing accessible visualisations, top tips, and downloadable tools to support readers on their data journey. Staring with the absolute basics of using data, the author creates a framework for building skills and knowledge slowly until the reader is comfortable with even complex uses of data. The book begins with an exploration of explore the foundations of data driven decisions in libraries including a look at the impact of the current financial climate on resources, theoretical foundations of data collection and analysis, and how this book can be used in practice. The next section takes readers through the data driven decisions model, providing the guide for understanding and manual for implementation of the model. Finally, the book provides further perspectives and reading surrounding analysis and implementation of data driven decisions. This section aims to give supplementary and focused information on different areas of data driven decisions which can be included in processes once the reader understands the foundation of the book from earlier chapters. Highly practical and written in an accessible style, this book is an essential resource for librarians and information professionals who increasingly need to justify decisions on programmes and services through quantifiable data.

Here is an exciting book that provides detailed descriptions of dozens of the most important and unique collections of "theatricana" in the United States and Canada. In Theatre and Performing Arts Collections, distinguished theatre specialists, librarians, and curators describe the unique possessions of the best and largest collections in theatre and performing arts. Each chapter provides detailed descriptions of the collections, as well as important notes about their history--information that is not available in any other source!

Patient Safety: Perspectives on Evidence, Information and Knowledge Transfer provides background on the patient safety movement, systems safety, human error and other key philosophies that support change and innovation in the reduction of medical error. The book draws from the multidisciplinary areas within the acute care environment to provide models that support proactive changes in how team-based improvement efforts can affect the knowledge provision necessary to support safe care delivery. The publication discusses how the tenets of safety (described in the beginning of the book) have been or can be actively applied in the field. Tools and case studies, in addition to a brief discussion of core resources, are included.The key objectives of the book: * To inform healthcare leadership, clinical directors, risk managers and information professionals of the intersection between key patient safety philosophies and information, evidence and knowledge delivery mechanisms that support medical error reduction.* To raise awareness of the potential for systemic and individual information and knowledge sharing failures that are latent in the health care delivery process. * To explore the application of systemic improvement processes and tools to identify opportunities to reduce risk and potential for failure.* To provide evidence-based recommendations for health care information professionals and, with the knowledge they need to position themselves as partners with healthcare providers and leadership* To illustrate how expertise from information and knowledge professionals folds into elements and language of the safety sciences* To submit innovative activities and measures that illustrate a tangible contribution to patient safety from the knowledge transfer field

Get the information needed to advocate for the significance of your library! How do you make the case that your library is a valuable instruction center? The Teaching Library helps librarians assess data on information literacy instruction programs so that they can better support the teaching role of the academic library in campus settings. This practical, professional resource features case studies from across the United States and Canadain both public and private institutionsthat offer a variety of evaluation methods. Here are the latest, easy-to-adopt ways of measuring your library's direct contribution to student learning, on-campus and off. With a unique multifaceted approach to questions of assessment, The Teaching Library is an important resource that not only offers the latest techniques, but answers the larger question of how to make use of this data in ways that will best advocate information literacy instruction programs. From creating a multidimensional assessment to turning an initiative into a program to teaching and learning goals and beyond, this invaluable text covers many of the core issues those in this rapidly-evolving field must contend with. These contributions reinforce the importance of the learning that takes place in the classroom, in the co-curriculum, the extra-curriculum, and the surrounding community. Some of the key topics covered in The Teaching Library are: assessment practices such as 360 Degrees analysis, attitudinal, outcomes-based, and gap-measured integrating the teaching library into core mission, vision, and values statements presenting the message of a library's value to internal audiences of colleagues building momentumand maintaining it tying information literacy assessment to campus-wide assessment activities identifying and reaching end-of-program learning outcomes assessing the impact of the one-shot session on student learning information literacy instruction and the credit-course model promoting instruction among Library and Information Science educators and many more! The essays in The Teaching Library offer viable and practical ways for librarians to demonstrate their direct contribution to student learning in ways consistent with those accepted as valid across the campus. An important resource for academic librarians and Information Science professionals, The Teaching Library is also a useful tool for those in the campus community concerned with developing, funding, and continuing successful library programsprofessional staff such as alumni directors; faculty and educators looking to make students more successful; and researchers.

The Challenges to Library Learning: Solutions for Librarians is an insightful volume that offers a practical philosophy of engagement that can be used to meet the growing challenges facing librarians, including staffing shortages, depleted or eliminated training budgets, longer hours, greater workloads, and rapidly-changing technology, hindering the ability-and willingness-of employees to continue job education in library sciences. With three decades of experience as a library administrator, author Bruce E. Massis details an effective plan for inspiring initiative in the learner to pursue a goal-oriented and individualized approach to learning - helping the library to become more efficient, productive, and user-centered. Topics discussed include overcoming staff disengagement, accepting e-learning as a routine learning model, teaching and measuring information literacy training, creating a flexible alternative staffing model, the Community of Learning Program (CLP) for library staff, and the details of creating and implementing a training program. The Challenges to Library Learning: Solutions for Librarians is a vital and practical resource for anyone actively involved or pursuing a career in library administration.

Managing the Transition from Print to Electronic Journals and Resources: A Guide for Library and Information Professionals is a collection of essays from the leading authorities on print-to-e-resource transition - from library institutions of all sizes and levels of funding. This book will help librarians and information professionals to design, implement, and manage solutions to effectively provide online access to e-journals and e-resources. Special topics discussed include reconfiguring acquisition models, electronic resource management (ERM) systems, skill sets necessary for e-resource management, efficiency enhancement, and current trends and initiatives in licensing. In addition, the wide range of articles included in Managing the Transition from Print to Electronic Journals and Resources: A Guide for Library and Information Professionals, will aid librarians in navigating the problems of changing formats, staffing issues, workflow approaches, and new and interrelated tools used to manage and provide access.

The human aspect plays an important role in the social sciences. The behaviour of people has become a vital area of focus in the social sciences as well. Recent Trends in Social and Behaviour Sciences contains papers that were originally presented at the International Congress on Interdisciplinary Behavior and Social Sciences, held 4-5 November 2013, in Jakarta, Indonesia. The contributions deal with various interdisciplinary research topics, particularly in the fields of social sciences, economics and arts. The papers focus especially on such topics as language, cultural studies, economics, behaviour studies, political sciences, media and communication, psychology and human development. This printed abstracts volume comes with a full paper CD-ROM (634pp).

Critically acclaimed since its inception, "Advances in Librarianship" continues to be the essential reference source for developments in the field of libraries and library science. Articles published in the Series have won national prizes, such as the recent Blackwell North America Scholarship Award for the outstanding 1994 monograph, article, or original paper in the field of acquisitions, collection, development, and related areas of resource development. All areas of public, college, university, primary and secondary schools, and special libraries are given up-to-date, critical analysis by experts engaged in the practice of librarianship, in teaching, and in research. Written by professionals for professionals to find solutions to vexing questions, it is authoritative, in-depth, and concise, and the single best source for keeping up-to-date on key issues.

This ambitious volume, newly available in paperback, explores the rich history of the book, one of the most efficient, influential and enduring technologies ever invented. For more than 2,500 years, the book, in a wide range of forms, has been used to document, to educate and to entertain. The eminent authority Martyn Lyons charts its worldwide evolution through the centuries, from the cuneiform tablets of ancient Sumer through the development of moveable type and the emergence of the modern information revolution. Among the carefully selected illustrations are Maya codices, Egyptian papyrus scrolls, medieval illuminated manuscripts, masterpieces of early printing from Gutenberg and Aldus Manutius, atlases from the great age of travel and exploration, primers and children's books, dime novels and Japanese manga, and works of fiction ranging from Don Quixote to Level 26 , the world's first `digi-novel', and beyond.

Thomas Anthony Birrell (1924-2011) was a man of many parts. For most of his working life he was Professor of English Literature in the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where he was famous for his lively, humoristic and thought-provoking lectures. He was the author of some very popular literary surveys in Dutch, one of which - a history of English literature - has had seven editions so far. However, first and foremost he was a bibliographer and a book historian. The present collection contains fifteen of his book-historical articles, two reviews and one published version of a lecture for the illustrious 'Association Internationale de Bibliophilie'. The lecture - with a wealth of illustrations - about the British Library as the 'Custodian of the Unique' gives one a sense of Birrell's ability to present an audience with a complicated topic in comprehensible, but not simplified, terms. The reviews serve as a statement of principle of how to tackle the subject of 'English readers and books' and the standards that ought to apply. The articles demonstrate Tom Birrell's in-depth knowledge, dedication and scholarship. He once said that he felt that he could have talked to the 17th-century London booksellers on an equal footing and his work convinces one that they would have enjoyed these conversations. Aspects of Book Culture was edited by Birrell's former pupil, colleague, friend and fellow-bibliographer Jos Blom.

Cataloging Collaborations and Partnerships provides the reader with many examples of successful methods in which libraries have collaborated with each other to achieve common goals. Addressing a variety of cataloging and managerial challenges in national, public, academic, and international libraries and other organizations, it will be enlightening to readers who are investigating new ways of meeting their patrons' needs. The collaborative efforts described in this book fall into a number of broad categories: cooperative cataloging and authority initiatives, cataloging partnerships, merging and migrating online catalogs, development of training and documentation, and collaborative approaches to special projects. Included are four chapters that address collaborative projects in Europe, the West Indies, the Galapagos Islands, and South Sudan. Catalogers, managers and administrators will find inspiration in these important, and in some cases, historic collaborations. They will understand how collaborations and partnerships in cataloging will help them achieve more by sharing resources and expertise, sharing the burden of new projects and initiatives, and fostering innovation and new ways of thinking. This book was published as a triple special issue of Cataloging and Classification Quarterly.

It is more possible than ever to influence and shape our working environments, our experience of work and each other. Business leaders who set the conditions and create engaging, meaningful work through organisational design and use of the knowledge and creative potential of their workforces are engaging in smart working. In Smart Working: Creating the Next Wave, Anne Marie McEwan explains how smart working is more than just flexible and mobile working. It is about flexibility and autonomy - how people work, not just where and when. She argues that systems, working environments and governance are more likely to lead to effective performance if they maximise self-determination and choice. She describes how collaborative communication technologies create possibilities for stimulating and harnessing collective intelligence, within and beyond organisational boundaries. In short, smart working is an outcome of designing organisational systems that are good both for business and people. McEwan warns that the tendency to talk about new management paradigms risks overlooking insights derived from years of academic research, and particularly from lessons learned from process innovation methodology. This rigorously researched but intensely practical book examines current workplace trends relating to people, technology, place and space. It reviews what we already know about effective management and high performance work methods and shows how those insights can be used to advantage in contemporary workscapes. It will help those with responsibilities for the strategic direction of their organizations. Learning and development and HR professionals will understand how to interpret these insights for their own business.

It has long been apparent to academic library administrators that the current technical services operations within libraries need to be redirected and refocused in terms of both format priorities and human resources. A number of developments and directions have made this reorganization imperative, many of which have been accelerated by the current economic crisis. All of the chapters detail some aspect of technical services reorganization due to downsizing and/or reallocation of human resources, retooling professional and support staff in higher level duties and/or non-MARC metadata, "value-added" metadata opportunities, outsourcing redundant activities, and shifting resources from analog to digital object organization and description. This book will assist both catalogers and library administrators with concrete examples of moving technical services operations and personnel from the analog to the digital environment. This book was published as a special double issue of Cataloging & Classification Quarterly.

This important book examines the potential for a new community led service model in public libraries. Using theoretical approaches to working with socially excluded community members, with a direct application of those approaches in Canadian public libraries, the authors offer a powerful and persuasive case for adopting the community led approach in libraries worldwide. The book showcases good practice and outlines the challenges to community development work. With public libraries facing budget cuts, this book offers an alternative way forward based on a community led approach to developing needs based library services. This book makes a unique contribution to public library thinking and policy, synthesising the outcomes of research and best practice at the cutting edge of library service delivery, and will be essential reading for all those researching and working in the public library sector.

Focusing on the practical issues which need to be addressed by anyone involved in library design, here Ken Worpole offers his renowned expertise to architects, planners, library professionals, students, local government officers and members interested in creating and sustaining successful library buildings and services. Contemporary Library Architecture: A Planning and Design Guide features: a brief history of library architecture an account of some of the most distinctive new library designs of the 20th & 21st centuries an outline of the process for developing a successful brief and establishing a project management team a delineation of the commissioning process practical advice on how to deal with vital elements such as public accessibility, stock-holding, ICT, back office functions, children's services, co-location with other services such as learning centres and tourist & information services an sustainability in depth case studies from around the world, including public and academic libraries from the UK, Europe and the US full colour illustrations throughout, showing technical details and photographs. This book is the ultimate guide for anyone approaching library design.

The song of organisational change goes: 'Ready or not, here I come. You can't hide...' But is change collapsonomics - everything - or have some things not changed? Managing Value in Organisations argues that traditional business thinking has produced low trust with high cost in increased disengagement: the 100 year old management model still accrues organisational debt, the business model privileges producers, and the learning model pretends individual learning produces collective learning. All are now barriers to development. Working with five organisations, Donal Carroll reinvents the management model to multiply trust, the business model for more complex customer value, and learning model for significant collective learning. He provides evidence that together, these get organisations to their next stage of development faster. In a climate of perceived increasing uncertainty and 'more for less' it invites organisations to move from default models and choose their models to 'live on purpose'. This applied business research has many new ideas: value creating research method, three new models, 'techniques' for organisations to self-assess and construct their next stage, as well as 'fecund argument, productive interference, organisational orphans' and 'facing down Facebook '. It invites readers on a risky narrative, testing one idea in five organisations, over one year through two journeys - the organisations' and writer's. A different business book, it seeks to capture the 'poetry and plumbing' excitement of management innovation. Managers at every level, coaches, consultants, business scholars, researchers, anyone seeking sustainable improvement, or who thinks the impossible can't be reached will find something here.

Embracing the theory and practice of strategic foresight and illuminating how different schools of thought regard its role in policy making, Tuomo Kuosa describes how something not traditionally considered an independent discipline, is steadily becoming one. In The Evolution of Strategic Foresight he explains how the practice of strategic foresight has long been closely associated with the military and politics. Linking strategic thinking more broadly to futurology, however, it is quite new. Since strategic foresight refers to the practice of generating analyses of alternative futures and strategies, based on available intelligence and foreknowledge, the practice can and should be applied to companies, business sectors, national and trans-national agencies of all descriptions, and to all aspects of public policy making. The author explains its practice in terms of structure, process, and knowledge domains, and examines its methodologies and systems, along with how strategic foresight can be used to produce better knowledge and be more effectively linked to policy making. Using examples from 30 different countries and with access to interviews and workshops involving key experts, The Evolution of Strategic Foresight will be valuable to scholars, educators, students engaged in strategy and future studies, long-range, public policy and urban planners, analysts; risk assessment experts, and consultants, managers and decision makers in many organisations, public and private.

Shaped by encrusted layers of development spanning millennia, the southern Italian city of Matera is the ultimate palimpsest. Known as the Sassi, the majority of the ancient city is composed of thousands of structures carved into a limestone cliff and clinging to its walls. The resultant menagerie of forms possesses a surprising visual uniformity and an ineffable allure. Conversely, in the 1950s Matera also served as a crucible for Italian postwar urban and architectural theory, witnessed by the Neorealist, modernist expansion of the city that developed in aversion to the Sassi. In another about-face, the previously disparaged cave city has now been recast as a major tourist destination, UNESCO World Heritage Monument, and test subject for ideas and methods of preservation. Set within a sociopolitical and architectural history of Matera from 1950 to the present, this book analyses the contemporary effects of preservation on the city and surrounding province. More broadly, it examines the relationship between and interdependence of preservation and modernism within architectural thought. To understand inconsistencies inherent to preservation, in particular its effect of catalyzing change, the study lays bare planners' and developers' use of preservation, especially for economic goals and political will. The work asserts that preservation is not a passive, curatorial pursuit: it is a cloaked manifestation of modernism and a powerful tool often used to control economies. The study demonstrates that preservation also serves to influence societies through the shaping of memory and circulation of narratives.

Assessment as Information Practice provides information about a range of collection and service-based assessment approaches that can be applied in different contexts to benefit institutions and the users they serve by enhancing quality, efficiency, and effectiveness. With contributions from practitioners and researchers in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the United States, the chapters discuss practical and theoretical aspects of assessment in collecting institutions. Each chapter focuses on specific assessment approaches or contexts while providing guidance on method and use. The chapters can be read alone or as a series to gain an appreciation of assessment approaches, including assessment-oriented research; storytelling; design thinking; data visualisation; mixed methods assessment for digital resources; data for institutional repository assessment; bibliometric methods; and impact assessment. Assessment as Information Practice serves as a resource for practitioners involved in assessment activities. Detailing the processes and considerations that will contribute to more effective and sustainable assessment programmes, the book is also relevant to faculty, researchers, and students working in the information sector.

Government Information Management in the 21st Century provides librarians, information professionals, and government information policy leaders with a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of current issues in government information management with a global perspective. The widespread use of the Internet to provide government information and services has altered the landscape dramatically for those who organize, store, and provide access to government content. Technical challenges include digital preservation, authentication, security, and accessibility for a diverse user base. Management challenges include changes to costs, workflow, staff skills and resources, and user expectations. Public policies based on distributed paper collections must also change to address issues that are inherent to digital, networked, public content; such issues include the maintenance of personal privacy, re-use of government information, and the digital divide. The authors in this timely book are practitioners, scholars, and government officials. Together they provide an informed look at how managing government information is being tested at a time of rapid change. Part I addresses key issues for public, academic, and government libraries in organizing and providing access to government information. Part II features chapters on the diverse information issues facing governments, such as managing Freedom of Information requirements, opening government data to the public, and deploying new online technologies.

The Book of Donors for Strasbourg cathedral is an extraordinary medieval document dating from ca. 1320-1520, with 6,954 entries from artisan, merchant and aristocratic classes. These individuals listed gifts to the cathedral construction fund given in exchange for prayers for the donors' souls. The construction administrators (the Oeuvre Notre-Dame) also built a chapel dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary in the nave that housed the book and showcased prayers and masses for the building benefactors. Chapel, book and west front project formed a three part commemorative strategy that appealed to the faithful of the city and successfully competed against other religious establishments also offering memorial services. Charlotte A. Stanford's study is the first to comprehensively analyze the unpublished Book of Donors manuscript and show the types and patterns of gifts made to the cathedral. It also compares these gift entries with those in earlier obituary records kept by the cathedral canons, as well as other medieval obituary notices kept by parish churches and convents in Strasbourg. Analysis of the Book of Donors notes the increase of personal details and requests in fifteenth-century entries and discusses the different memorial opportunities available to the devout. This study draws a vivid picture of life in late medieval Strasbourg as seen through the lens of devotional and memorial practices, and will be of particular interest to scholars of art history, memory, and medieval urban life.

The circulation of books was the motor of classical civilization. However, books were both expensive and rare, and so libraries - private and public, royal and civic - played key roles in articulating intellectual life. This collection, written by an international team of scholars, presents a fundamental reassessment of how ancient libraries came into being, how they were organized and how they were used. Drawing on papyrology and archaeology, and on accounts written by those who read and wrote in them, it presents new research on reading cultures, on book collecting and on the origins of monumental library buildings. Many of the traditional stories told about ancient libraries are challenged. Few were really enormous, none were designed as research centres, and occasional conflagrations do not explain the loss of most ancient texts. But the central place of libraries in Greco-Roman culture emerges more clearly than ever.

Libraries have always been an inspiration for the standards and technologies developed by semantic web activities. However, except for the Dublin Core specification, semantic web and social networking technologies have not been widely adopted and further developed by major digital library initiatives and projects. Yet semantic technologies offer a new level of flexibility, interoperability, and relationships for digital repositories.

Kruk and McDaniel present semantic web-related aspects of current digital library activities, and introduce their functionality; they show examples ranging from general architectural descriptions to detailed usages of specific ontologies, and thus stimulate the awareness of researchers, engineers, and potential users of those technologies. Their presentation is completed by chapters on existing prototype systems such as JeromeDL, BRICKS, and Greenstone, as well as a look into the possible future of semantic digital libraries.

This book is aimed at researchers and graduate students in areas like digital libraries, the semantic web, social networks, and information retrieval. This audience will benefit from detailed descriptions of both today's possibilities and also the shortcomings of applying semantic web technologies to large digital repositories of often unstructured data.

A fundamental change in the way organisations approach innovation is taking place. It is driven by the simple realisation that not all the smart people work for just one organisation. Few intellectual property books concentrate on external innovation and more particularly on dealing with external inventors and handling their inventions. Harvesting External Innovation begins by examining the broad subject of innovation, stressing the need to understand its forms and phases, ways and means to encourage innovation. It then addresses the growing phenomenon of external innovation. A number of different approaches to engaging with the external innovator community are then considered, together with real life case studies. Harvesting External Innovation discusses in depth how best to handle intellectual property matters, how to actually work with these external inventors and how to handle their inventions, including a suggested process and check list.