Book Review: The Next Library Leadership: Attributes of Academic and Public Library Directors

Terms for Academic Library Directors

IN 1973, ARTHUR MCANALLY AND ROBERTDOWNSauthored a seminal article on the changing role of the university library director. This article takes a look at McAnally and Downs’s findings twenty years later to determine whether the changes outlined in 1973 are still valid today. Additional sources of strife for university library directors are outlined and requirements for today’s library directors ...

Book Availability: Academic Library Assessment

In the climate of increasing calls for academic assessment, the authors undertook a study to ascertain book availability in an academic library. The study described here uses the methodology pioneered by Tefko Saracevic, W. M. Shaw, Jr., and Paul Kantor and is a follow-up of earlier research reported in College & Research Libraries in 1987. The authors designed the study to identify any improve...

Auditing an Academic Library Book Collection

Public Library Directors: Hierarchical Roles and Proximity to Power

THISARTICLE EXAMINES THE CURRENT experience and trends in the roles, functions, and activities of today’s directors of large libraries or library systems. Directors assume an extensive range of complex responsibilities in their unique positions, foremost of which is accountability for internal organization, operations, and management. A shift in roles, functions, and activities is occurring, ho...

Library Leadership

At College & Research Libraries we do not get many articles on the topic of academic library leadership. I wonder why, because I think this is one of the most important and enduring topics in our profession. Maybe it is because this is a big and difficult topic to pin down. What exactly is leadership? What aspects of leadership are we talking about: defining leadership, evaluating leadership st...