Advances in Library Administration and Organization, Volume 23 (Advances in Library Administration and Organization)

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...