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Showing 1 - 12 of 12 matches in All Departments
In 1945, Vannevar Bush, the engineer who designed the world's most powerful analog computers and the official responsible for U.S. scientific research and development during WWII, published an essay in which he predicted the development of a new kind of computing machine he called Memex. Today, computers in millions of offices and homes perform tasks that closely resemble the ideas that Bush proposed. For many people in the fields of computer and information science, Bush's Memex has been the prototype of the personal computer, and the first design for a machine to help people think and manage information. Yet, with all its renown, Memex is largely misunderstood. In From Memex to Hypertext, all of Bush's writings about Memex have been collected for the first time. Surrounding Bush's essays are chapters by historians and leading figures in the computer science research community telling the story of how the idea of Memex was developed and how Bush's writings have influenced today's research agenda in hypertext, multimedia, and artificial intelligence.
National intelligence cultures are shaped by their country's history and environment. Featuring 32 countries (such as Albania, Belgium, Croatia, Norway, Latvia, Montenegro), the work provides insight into a number of rarely discussed national intelligence agencies to allow for comparative study, offering hard to find information into one volume. In their chapters, the contributors, who are all experts from the countries discussed, address the intelligence community rather than focus on a single agency. They examine the environment in which an organization operates, its actors, and cultural and ideological climate, to cover both the external and internal factors that influence a nation's intelligence community. The result is an exhaustive, unique survey of European intelligence communities rarely discussed.
National intelligence cultures are shaped by their country's history and environment. Featuring 32 countries (such as Albania, Belgium, Croatia, Norway, Latvia, Montenegro), the work provides insight into a number of rarely discussed national intelligence agencies to allow for comparative study, offering hard to find information into one volume. In their chapters, the contributors, who are all experts from the countries discussed, address the intelligence community rather than focus on a single agency. They examine the environment in which an organization operates, its actors, and cultural and ideological climate, to cover both the external and internal factors that influence a nation's intelligence community. The result is an exhaustive, unique survey of European intelligence communities rarely discussed.
This collection of essays is designed to challenge working administrators and researchers to look more closely at their operations and consider again how they develop people and the organizations in which they work. It leads off with an article on skill development in reference service using a holistic approach to analyze reference in context. Then comes an article on the importance of organizational culture in defining service organizations in general and libraries in particular. It argues that when one considers libraries in this light, the importance of a strong ethical framework becomes evident in our institutions. The third article looks at advice networks, and addresses the importance that contacts within and outside of the library in which we work and within and outside of our profession play on individual's receptivity to innovation. The next three articles relate to personnel matters. The first discusses issues relating to the relationship between faculty status and tenure and salaries in academic libraries. This is followed by a piece that looks at the development of leaders for small, rural libraries, most of whom will not have formal training in librarianship. A third piece analyzes the criteria for selecting academic library directors that are considered important by those administrators who oversee this key leadership position. We then close with an article that looks at the validity of SERVQUAL as applied to a large public library system. LibQUAL+, an adaptation of SERVQUAL designed for use in academic libraries has become a staple in our literature for years, but there is little available that really turns a critical eye to the use of this important tool. This article will perhaps begin a healthy discussion about how this tool is applied in our libraries and how the results have been used in library operations. As always, this volume of Advances attempts to look at what it is we do as managers and to bring research and theory into our operations. It is designed to combine the practical and the theoretical in a way that will inform working managers and provide interesting questions for those engaged in research about library organizations.
This volume of Advances in Library Administration and Organization
is designed to help administrators meet the challenges of running
organizations in an ambiguous climate. It leads with a paper that
uses innovation theory and a communications model to track how LIS
practitioners acquire the theoretical base required to undergird
their efforts. This theoretical piece is followed by a very
personal view of what knowledge one must acquire to succeed as a
leader of libraries, offering a more practical view of how
administrators develop. Then comes a set of papers that address
very real problems - performance assessment and its impact, the
question of whether it is profitable for communities to completely
outsource public library operations, and then three separate
articles that look at career paths for public and academic
librarians and the retention of those people by organizations. On a
different tack, another contributor looks at how libraries
communicate with their clients while cutting journals to insure
consumer confidence in the decision-making process of the library;
subsequently developing a model for joint decision-making that
should be of interest to our community. The final paper leaves the
realm of the library and examines how public and private
organizations in the United Kingdom manage information as an asset
and how that affects their performance in the marketplace.
This volume of Advances in Library Administration and Organization
offers papers of interest to practitioners and researchers in the
library community throughout the world.. All of the papers in one
way or another address the tension between what researchers can
deliver, what they define as reputable knowledge, and what library
practitioners need to know "to get the job done." While these
papers differ from each other by problem, scale, methodology and
theory, one question "What can science tell us about practice?"
unites them all. These papers include a discussion of the
principles that underlie collection development, two papers that
critically examine the relation between distance learning and on
site library service and two more papers that use the notion of
sense making to look at what the terms leadership and public space
mean when we talk about libraries. The last three papers address a series of pragmatic issues
anyone who works within a library can identify with, namely, "what
does it mean to "market" a library," "how can we define "value" in
relation to what goes on in a library and create "value" for our
communities," and, finally, "What constitutes and impedes 'success"
for library professionals?," especially if those who are minority
women. These papers, taken together, raise the issues of how well we understand, researchers and practitioners alike, the institutions we study, manage and work within. What we in the profession often regard as common sense and "good practice" may not really be either. In short, these papers point to a number of issues, ones we often do not even acknowledge, that researchers need to help practitioners address if science is to makea difference in how librarians understand and manage the institutions they work within.
"The Advances in Library Administration and Organization Series" seeks to develop a body of research literature that contributes to the base of organizational theory upon which library administrators rely. Its mix of contributions to the literature of library administration and organization is intended to be both diverse and eclectic. The volume 28 provides a collection of thought-provoking articles on issues relating to problems library managers face and strategies in addressing those challenges. The topics covered in this volume include: managing change in research libraries; the agility of library consortia and its member libraries; the evaluation of reference services; developing a recruitment strategy for a diverse workforce; the evaluation of training and professional development programs; and, collective bargaining within faculty unions on college campuses. "Advances" is widely read by practitioners, library and information science graduate students, and those working in associated fields of information management, and remains the premier series in its area of coverage. This latest volume adds another significant contribution to the literature of library and information centre management.
How does the disintegration of the Soviet system help us to understand the character of library and information institutions and practices within post-soviet space today? Which aspects of the traditional Soviet 'information order' have disappeared from the contemporary world of libraries and information institutions and which aspects have remained, perhaps to be refigured as critical features of newly emerging national and global projects? This volume brings together diverse reflective essays, reports and empirical analyses of the changing character of the post-soviet library world to address these questions. Individual contributions from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, the New Republic of Kosovo, and the post-soviet successor states of Eurasia all provide different perspectives on LIS.
Volume twenty one of "Advances in Library Administration and Organization" offers timely articles from scholars and administrators working throughout the world. It adapts theory to practice in a variety of areas of interest to those who manage libraries. These include a demographic study of Canadian librarianship, an article on the implementation of ISO9000 in Thailand, pieces on information literacy programs in the United States, and a discussion of organizational culture within libraries from South Africa. The idea is to provide food for thought for practitioners and theorist alike so that they might be spurred to think about the challenge of making libraries run well. Whether one is interested is service philosophies as discussed in a symposium held in honor of Johannah Sherrer, the definition of command work, or the process used to thoughtfully develop and refine an assessment program in a Colorado university library, there is something here for every manager that will help them confront the challenges facing them. The articles address obstacles facing all of us every day and offer insights that can be of value as we seek a vision for libraries and librarianship in the 21st century.
This is "ALAO"'s first nation specific volume. It represents part of an effort to further internationalize the journal's contents and interests. The volume's papers describe the Library & Information Science community in Finland, outline the history of Library & Information Science in the country and reviews the scientific achievements of its Library & Information Science scholars. These papers deal with some universal themes and topics in Library & Information Science research and practice and demonstrate the unique Library & Information Science contribution Finnish scholars/practitioners bring to these problems and issues. This book series is available electronically at website.
This volume includes a series of papers designed to help
administrators meet the challenges of running organizations in an
ambiguous climate. All of the articles address real management
problems from a research perspective. The volume leads with a
bibliometric study designed to help us understand the development
of library science and higher education as disciplines and follows
with a piece on the importance of place for libraries, a study of
interactive services and professional culture within librarianship
and then pieces on staff development and mentoring. Then we look at
the work processes of research librarians and management education
for librarians. Finally, we look at service programs aimed at the
Hispanic population and provide a location analysis of public
libraries in Calcutta. As in past volume, this edition of ALAO
includes an eclectic collection of strong papers that convey the
results of the kind of research that managers need, mixing theory
with a good dose of pragmaticism. The resulting volume adds
significant value to our literature as the essays it contains
treats classic problems in new ways.
Religion and magic have often played important roles in Baltic, Eastern European, and post- USSR societies like those in Russia, Romania, Serbia, Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, and Estonia. Taken together, the studies presented in this collection suggest that the idea that religion and magic are connected to each other in some consistent, universal way may be nothing more than a reminiscence from nineteenth century anthropology. Further, these studies challenge another part of anthropology's historical legacy: the idea that magic is something that modernity and modernization will transcend. Rather, these studies suggest instead that magic is a form of work that brings modernity into being and helps render it intelligible to those who find themselves engaged in its creation. This volume brings together historical (pre- and post-1989), ethnographic, and areal studies which look at the divergent roles of state, culture, society, tradition, and the individual in enactments of magic and religion. Assessing the role magic and religion have played in the countries of Eastern Europe and beyond before and after the Cold War, it is an absorbing read for scholars of anthropology and history as well as ethnology.
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