Wendi Arant Kaspar

(Desperately) Seeking Service Leadership in Academic Libraries: An Analysis of Dean and Director Position Advertisements

ABSTRACT Given the continual rate of change in academic libraries, the increasing accountability in higher education and the call to contribute to learning outcomes, career success, and lifelong learning, leadership that is responsive to the service mission is critical to their success and evolution. However, as has been consistently stated in the literature, there is a leadership vacuum. The pursuit of leadership, as evidenced by job advertisements, is representative of this lack of attention to a service leadership ethic. This study examines library dean and director position descriptions and advertisements from 2011 to 2015 for elements of the service leadership model. Analysis indicates that most leadership posting for academic libraries attend to traditional library experience and management skills, rather than service leadership attributes. Examples of framing positions based on the service leadership model are also provided.

Strategic Management and Situational Awareness in Academic Libraries

This special issue of College & Research Libraries addresses strategic management in academic libraries. Sounds impressive but what does this mean, really? The literature on strategic management in libraries or even in the management and business literature ranges broadly on this topic. It seems to be full of buzzwords and phrases—like stakeholders and competitive advantage—that are very relevant to a business environment but have no traction in an educational or public service setting. However, jargon aside, there are certainly lessons to be learned. There is no denying that these precepts from the business world are influencing what is going on in higher education and gaining a more strategic understanding of academic librarianship can only help. For this purpose, the articles herein examine different facets of library management, from performance appraisals to salaries to perceptions of libraries’ value. For the variety of topics, they all have one thing in common—they all take into account the evolving trends, changing expectations, and increased accountability affecting higher education and, in turn, academic libraries. The subservience of academic libraries to higher education is deliberate, and while apt to draw a lot of argument, I believe necessary. Academic libraries serve with the endorsement of their parent institutions. As with any discipline, they have their own context and expertise to offer but their very existence is predicated on the institutions they serve. An organization that pays attention to only its own values and priorities is functioning in a vacuum. There are more than just business practices and tenets impacting academic libraries and their institutions. Factors from every direction seem to be swaying the direction and the expectations of colleges and universities. I have written about these external factors before—because they are indicators of the environment in which academic libraries must succeed, as well as factors that academic libraries, and institutions of higher education more broadly, must acknowledge and learn to navigate. This mindfulness, also called situational awareness, is a matter of their success and, dare I say, their survival. Situational awareness can be systematized through the use of an environmental scan. Yes, it is another one of those overused industry terms. While it might sound like so much jargon, having a good understanding of the environment in which an organization functions is critical. It is strategic to look at those forces that are at work on higher education. They are a multitude. There are also many frameworks available to consider them—ways in which to do a environmental scan. While the business environment favors SWOT (Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats), I find that using a PEST analysis is quite useful in thinking about the factors influencing a situation. It is a relatively versatile framework that traditionally uses the categories: • Political • Economic • Social • Technological It is also not uncommon to see additional factors such as legal or legislative and environmental. This framework is flexible enough to adapt to the context in which it is to be applied.

Opening the Black Box

Sometimes, reading is very boring and it will take long time starting from getting the book and start reading. However, in modern era, you can take the developing technology by utilizing the internet. By internet, you can visit this page and start to search for the book that is needed. Wondering this opening the black box is the one that you need, you can go for downloading. Have you understood how to get it?

What’s So Important about Peer Review?

678 There has been a lot of dialogue about peer review recently. There were a couple of presentations and a number of discussions about it at ALA’s Annual Conference in Orlando. Since then, it is been a topic that has caught my eye whenever it comes up—which seems to be more often. Lately, there has been commentary popping up in scholarly communication prompted by offbeat perspectives of peer review: A Russian Sociologist has gone so far as to fund a monument to peer reviewers in Kickstarter—what he says will ultimately be a sculpture of a rolling dice with the various traditional outcomes of peer review on each side (https://www.kickstarter. com/projects/972533097/monument-to-an-anonymous-peer-reviewer). It is even receiving some recognition in such venues as Nature (http://www.nature.com/news/ moscow-monument-proposed-to-immortalize-peer-review-1.20578) and the Chronicle of Higher Education among others. This particular example demonstrates the perceived randomness of peer reviewer feedback. There is also the recent maneuver by the largest scientific publisher in the world to patent their online peer review process, in such a broadly worded fashion that the Electronic Frontier Foundation awarded it the “Stupid patent of the Month” (https:// www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/stupid-patent-month-elsevier-patents-online-peerreview). The response to this event has been extreme in some cases, with conjecture that this is the publisher’s effort to shut down other journals. Despite the ongoing rhetoric about the publisher’s desire for world domination, I believe it is unlikely that this will adversely impact other scholarly efforts but it has certainly prompted some strong opinions. Even in the academy, peer review, oddly, prompts some controversy and in some cases, outright disdain. A university provost recently made the statement that “peer review is the gold standard for academia”—while a bit of a truism, this declaration met with a fair bit of consternation from faculty. Some responded that they felt like peer review was out of touch with the real world, underscoring the divide between academia and practice, between knowledge and the application of knowledge to make the world a better place. In addition, some scholars maintain that traditional peer review is the only standard—that journal-based publication is all that should be considered for quality (and cited reference the indicator for impact). Certainly, many guidelines for promotion and/or tenure consider journal quality and impact primary metrics. Tenure and promotion guidelines are what send the signal to researchers about how their work is acknowledged and rewarded, and ultimately, determine who remains in universities to do research. As these guidelines may be slow to change, research, and in turn, peer review, may also be slow to evolve. The peer review process itself does seem to engender some aggravation. Certainly the formal process of peer review can appear as a barrier to publishing new discoveries in a timely and unmediated manner. There is some aggravation for the perceived arbitrariness of decisions and reviews or, at times, the downright contradictory feedback from reviewers. In a simplified model with 2 peer reviewers, there are 6 possible permutations in the outcome; of these, the reviewers would theoretically agree 50% of the time. The reality is that they disagree more than 50% of the time. A quick analysis What’s So Important about Peer Review?