Submitted to tbe Department of Library and Information Science For the Award of Master of Library and Information Science University of Zululand, 2009. / Different categories of people who may be scholars, lectures, students, retirees, housewives, politicians, administrators etc. use the library to access the information they require to pass exams, make decisions or read for leisure. Academic libraries are most important to all scholars and students who pass through a university. For these libraries to continue striving and provide effective services, research is required to improve on areas that are not viable to users. The professional academic librarian is mandated to provide guidance on how these services can be improved in order to make the library useful to all. This cannot be possible if the academic librarians only concentrate on shelving, acquisition, classification, cataloguing, charging and discharging and processing of information materials. The role of academic librarians has continued and will continue to change as time goes on. Many academic librarians provide research assistance to their users and other vital services to facilitate the completion of their client's research. However, it is significant to note that academic librarians must engage in research and publish, in order to improve services and attract more users to the library. Payne and Payne (2004: 9) highlights that there are two main reasons why people carry out research. One among others is because there is an intellectual challenge and the urge to fill a gap in our knowledge, or believe that current accepted theories should be tested. A second reason is that we want to change the world. Academic librarians need to be provided with incentives such as funding, promotions, and time out in order to entice them to carry out research. This study was carried out with an idea that academic librarians should carry out research and publish, for development and for the improvement of library services. Academic librarians holding a bachelors degree and above,, who were working in public universities in Eastern and Southern Africa were targeted for the study. The purpose of this research was to compare the research and publication patterns of academic librarians working in Eastern and Southern Africa from 1990 to 2006. Six objectives were formulated in order to achieve this purpose. The research was purely carried out online, 866 academic librarians names were retrieved from a total of 47 Public university libraries WebPages, via the universities websites. These names were used as access points to retrieve data from the two online databases (i.e. LISTA and WORLDCAT). Bibliometrics was used as research method, Microsoft Excel software was also employed for the purpose of data analysis and presentation of the collected data. Findings indicated that Southern Africa was the most prolific region with 194 (74.00%) of the publications emanating from there. South Africa was the most productive country in Southern Africa with 111(42.21%) publications. Tanzania was the most productive country in Eastern Africa with 31 (11.41%). Muswazi and Pienaar were the most prolific academic librarians with 11(3.97%) publications each. Most productive academic library was from Southern Africa, which was Botswana with 31 (11.41%) publications. Majority of the academic librarians from both regions contributed to one publication. The study was concluded with the following observation being made: Overall South Africa emerged the most prolific country in both regions; majority of the countries from both regions were not consistent in their publication production; there was a continuous rises and drops in research publication from 1990 to 2006; and academic librarians preferred publishing articles than any other publications, many academic librarians did not engage in research and academic librarians, from the two regions prefer publishing individually. The study further recommended several studies that needed to be carried out in Africa and other parts of the world in order to fill and clarify gaps that emanated from the study.

The problem with which this investigation is concerned is that of determining the predictors, correlates, and consequences of job satisfaction in a university library. A managerial model was constructed for the purpose of providing an overall framework of analysis. It was hypothesized, in the managerial model, that organizational effectiveness in any organization is linked closely to the concepts of job satisfaction and employee satisfactoriness. These two concepts, in turn, are closely related to managerial behavior.

This study used a qualitative case study method to explore the position of a subject librarian in a large academic library in the United States using the subject librarians at Brigham Young University as the case. In the first phase of the study, all Brigham Young University subject librarians were given the opportunity to participate in a semi-structured interview. Subject librarians considered their main purpose to be connecting the people at the university with library resources. Their duties of collection development, reference, instruction, liaison, citizenship, professional development, and scholarship are interrelated and work together in important ways. Subject librarians are satisfied with their jobs and corresponding autonomy. They are concerned about librarian stereotypes and want to overcome the ignorance about their positions. They agree that subject knowledge is important but do not agree on a formal degree standard. In the next phase of the study, one faculty member was interviewed for each participating subject librarian. Faculty members defined a subject librarian as someone who knows their subject and has library training. Faculty members valued librarian competence over any specific degree or training and did not care what status librarians held. Faculty members considered the primary duties of a subject librarian as helping faculty members purchase materials and helping faculty and students find and use the library's resources. Faculty members interviewed were pleased with and grateful for the services they received from subject librarians. This study can be used by libraries to help with the subject librarian hiring process, showing that the focus should be on people skills and connection with others and not on degree and status. The study can also help craft a subject librarian program, encouraging subject librarians to focus on faculty members' understanding and priorities.

Today, librarians are confronted with new roles during the execution of their work. The emerging roles require practical and technical skills, professional competencies and ability to perform and to constantly be in touch with those emerging technologies to stay afloat. The purpose of this research was to investigate the changing roles of academic librarians at the University of Nairobi (UoN) and its constituent college libraries in the current information age so that challenges can be established and measures put in place to overcome them. The current study employed both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The study was descriptive in nature and a survey research method was adopted. Purposive sampling was used to select respondents from each of the 13 libraries. Data was collected using a questionnaire and an interview schedule. A population of 70 respondents was to be surveyed but only 54 of them responded to the questionnaire. Quantitative data was descriptively analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) while qualitative data was analysed using content analysis. The study revealed that the role of librarians at the UoN has not necessarily changed in terms of duties, responsibilities, functions and processes, but what has changed is the intensity and manner of conducting the role. The main challenge remains that of re-training of staff in the use of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). Therefore the study recommended training of staff in the use of ICTs, acquiring powerful servers to increase bandwidth connectivity and allocating more funds towards various activities. The study recommends that a similar research be replicated using different groups of librarians, for example those who started working when the services were already automated to find out whether they are also as challenged as their counterparts. A further research should also be carried out to investigate current jobs that exist elsewhere in the profession, such as knowledge management, ICT management in libraries, research data management and data curation. / Information Science / M.A. (Information Science)

The problem with which this investigation is concerned is that of determining the predictors, correlates, and consequences of job satisfaction in a university library. A managerial model was constructed for the purpose of providing an overall framework of analysis. It was hypothesized, in the managerial model, that organizational effectiveness in any organization is linked closely to the concepts of job satisfaction and employee satisfactoriness. These two concepts, in turn, are closely related to managerial behavior.

Doctor of Philosophy / Curriculum and Instruction Programs / F. Todd Goodson / Kay Ann Taylor / Library instruction in a university setting, in the primary manner it has been taught for decades, has a problem: the instruction is not teaching. Many library instruction sessions at universities are taught through a traditional lecture-style instruction session where students are allowed no voice in the classroom and there is no room for any evaluation of the information presented. Teaching without an engaged pedagogical framework without any active participation is problematic for teaching critical information literacy. This research focused on library instruction within higher education institutions and the choices made by instruction librarians to include (or not) critical pedagogy and critical information literacy within their teaching styles and classrooms. This study explored (a) the decisions of librarians to teach either in the traditional or critical library pedagogy manner and (b) barriers or encouragement in librarians’ choice to teach through a critical lens. With critical theory as the overarching framework and engaged pedagogy a central part to all these theories, critical engaged pedagogy combines critical race feminist theory, critical library pedagogy, and critical information literacy (the latter two frequently used interchangeably). The combined theoretical framework gives context for researching the reasons that instruction librarians choose (or do not) to implement these theoretical and pedagogical styles into their instruction of information literacy in classrooms. Using the qualitative methodology of narrative inquiry, specifically narrative analysis, this study analyzed and interpreted data from interviews, observational data, and field notes recorded in a reflexive journal through the lens of this theoretical framework. Findings showed that in their everyday experiences as academic instruction librarians, the participants faced both barriers and encouragement to their decisions regarding teaching methods and curriculum in addition to how they are impacting their students’ lives and learning. Four different themes emerged from the data. The first theme, sometimes a teacher, sometimes not, speaks to the struggle that the participants handled every day: though they were instruction librarians, they were not able to always feel as though they were real teachers or faculty on their campuses. The second theme, if only I had a choice, discusses how discipline faculty affect their teaching decisions and the participants’ goal to at least try to teach critical evaluation to the students. The third theme, teaching is a political act, focuses on participants’ teaching under a critical library instruction pedagogy, emphasizing their engagement with the students, the falsehood of neutrality, and teaching about marginalized groups, injustice, oppression, and similar political-minded concepts in their classes. The fourth theme, real world, lifelong skills, discusses how the participants view their impact on student learning and student lives in general, demonstrated through teaching students critical thinking and evaluation (of the real world) skills in addition to impacting students beyond the classroom.

The problem with which this study is concerned is that of determining the relative differences in the job satisfaction of professional librarians employed in public, college/university, and special libraries. The purposes of the study were as follows: 1. To determine the differences in job satisfaction experienced by professional librarians working in public, college/university, and special libraries. 2. To determine if differences in job satisfaction are influenced by the factor of sex. 3. To determine if differences in job satisfaction are influenced by the factor of the size of the library staff. Statistically significant differences were found in job satisfaction between public and special librarians. Statistically significant differences were also found in the JDI Work scale between public and special librarians. Statistically significant differences were found on the JDI Pay and Work scales between female librarians and the females in the norms supplied by Patricia C. Smith. No statistically significant differences in job satisfaction were found associated with the size of the library staff or with sex. Females had higher scores on four of the five Job Descriptive Index scales than did males, but none of the differences were statistically significant.

Review of A Practical Writing Guide for Academic Librarians: Keeping It Short and Sweet, by Anne Langley and Jonathan D. Wallce. Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2010. 162 p. $75.00. ISBN 978-184334-532-9

Women are underrepresented among the top echelons of management at Hong Kong academic libraries. This is in contrast with the situation in the United States and certain other countries, where the representation of women in senior management is broadly in line with the profession as a whole. The present study addresses the possible role that the gender stereotyping of leaders might have in accounting for this situation. To this end, the beliefs of academic library professionals were surveyed so as to determine whether they endorsed a masculine, feminine, or androgynous (gender-neutral) sex role for an ideal library manager. This was achieved through the development of a modified form of the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), with particular care taken to ensure the measure remained valid in a Chinese cultural context. The results showed that 50% of respondents believed that a masculine personality type makes for an ideal leader, compared to just 12% that endorsed a female personality type. A preference for male leadership was therefore widespread among respondents. Additionally, there was little difference between male and female respondents, and women were just as likely as men to endorse a masculine role for good leaders. The possible impact of cultural factors on gender stereotypes among Hong Kong librarians is suggested as a potentially fruitful area for further investigation. Based on the results, a key recommendation of the paper is for managers and administrators in academic libraries and the higher education sector more generally to be made aware of the potentially unconscious impact that gender stereotyping can have on hiring and promotion decisions. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 342-356). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.