EBSCO Content SelectionsMapped to ALA
(LISTA)

Libraries in Turbulent Times

Surviving Hard Times: How Libraries Can Deal with Recessions – Feliciter

Library Automation in a Difficult Economy – Computers in Libraries

Library Funding

Revisiting Library Funding: What Really Works? – Online

Building a New Foundation: Library Funding – Searcher

The LibraryFunding Landscape: 2007-2008 – Library Technology Reports

School Libraries and You

Public Libraries + SchoolLibraries = Smart Partnerships – CSLA Journal

Distant and Distributed Learners are Two Sides of the Same Coin – Computers in Libraries

Libraries Connect Communities – American Libraries

Business Book Summaries Selections

Mapped to ALA

Management

Becoming an Extraordinary Manager: The 5 Essentials for Success

Managers as Mentors: Building Partnerships for Learning

PatronService

Designing the Customer-Centric Organization: A Guide to Structure, Strategyand Process

Emotional Value: Creating Strong Bonds With Your Customers

Teamwork

Creating We: Change I-Thinking to WE-Thinking, Build a Healthy, Thriving Organization

The Art of Connecting: How to Overcome Differences, Build Rapport, and Communicate Effectively with Anyone

EBSCO Content SelectionsMapped to ALA

Libraries in Turbulent Times

Surviving Hard Times: How Libraries Can Deal with Recessions

Feliciter

2008, Vol. 54 Issue 6, p272-274, 3p

The article reports on the impact of global economic crisis on public libraries. It cites that financial crisis has already affected public libraries because these institutions only depend on the funds provided by the government. Librarians fear that they may be laid from work. With problems presented in the public libraries, risk managers recommend the library administrators to use enterprise risk management (ERM) plans to survive the crisis.

Library Automation in a Difficult Economy

Computers in Libraries

Mar2009, Vol. 29 Issue 3, p22-24, 3p

The author reflects on library automation amidst the economic crisis. He mentions that the economic downturn impacted libraries, with most, having to work with budgets that are barely adequate to support their essential activities. He expects the situation to force many libraries to reconsider the technology projects planned for 2010. He points out that the economic pressure may also accelerate other trends that favor reduced costs for automation.

Library Funding

Revisiting Library Funding: What Really Works?

Online

Mar/Apr2005, Vol. 29 Issue 2, p48-53, 4p

This article explores library funding strategies in the U.S. The $177-million development of King Library drew funds from redevelopment monies, grants, foundations, gifts, individuals and corporations. Pluralistic funding must be done intelligently. Bond or grant money often can be used only for construction or capital expenses. The significant efforts to work the political process in order to get bond measures approved or to obtain grants frequently fall to the library's leaders. Similarly, the effort to obtain or maintain executive involvement, critical to the continuing accomplishment of funding efforts, also falls to the library's leaders in terms of setting a tone for success, imbuing a sense of ownership and even dealing with inevitable turnover. Director Jane Light has mentioned that the San Jose Public Library has maintained a foundation arm, with two full-time staff members. This team is working on a capital campaign for the branches and planning more work to obtain funds for the branch operating budgets. Light says libraries must stick with these efforts even though they are not easy. Libraries should share best practices with one another, including the need to provide ongoing education of diversified donor populations, identifying allies to get things done and working with local politicians to improve the political climate and set up bond measures in a way they can win approval.

Building a New Foundation: Library Funding

Searcher

Jan2006, Vol. 14 Issue 1, p26-34, 9p

The article examines different strategies that might help libraries in the U.S. to address funding and service issues that many libraries face. The ways that libraries can follow to increase its funding, such as cultivating private funding sources to supplement tax revenues, are detailed. Several strategies that libraries could use to reduce costs are also explored. It includes the re-examination of the need for branch libraries, following the lead of bookstores by centralizing some core functions and developing more flexible staffing models.

The LibraryFunding Landscape: 2007-2008

Library Technology Reports

Jan2009, Vol. 45 Issue 1, p20-25, 6p

The article focuses on the 2007-2008 Public Library Funding and Technology Access Study (PLFTAS). The survey emphasized on overall funding and financial support for public access computing services at public libraries in the U.S. The researchers gathered information on funding spent by libraries and their sources for these funding. It was observed that public libraries faced difficulties in providing fiscal data, with the response rate in the finance portion of the survey falling. Findings include a shift in expenditures, dependence on soft money for salaries and decline in overall local support for suburban libraries.

School Libraries and You

Public Libraries + SchoolLibraries = Smart Partnerships

CSLA Journal

Spring2007, Vol. 30 Issue 2, p11-12, 2p

The article reports on the significance of building partnership between public and school libraries in Fresno, California. It was inferred that collaboration between school and public libraries can help strengthen the educational needs of students and enhance their learning process. The various steps in developing such partnership are discussed including identifying public library partners in the community and determining ongoing programs, share services through Web sites and catalogs as well as promote reading and literature services through cooperation. Furthermore, it was shown that assigning homework to students has increased the demand on creating school and public libraries partnerships.

Distant and Distributed Learners are Two Sides of the Same Coin

Computers in Libraries

Jan2002, Vol. 22 Issue 1, p24, 5p, 4 color

Focuses on how academic libraries should deal with information services for so-called distant learners, and ways in which the university-wide implementation of information technology applications has affected the University of South Carolina. Topic of distance education; Mention of the report 'Distributed Education and Its Challenges: An Overview,' from an ACE/EDUCAUSE series; Concern of reference librarians that students will lose the ability to critically evaluate what they find; Services to patrons who are distance learners.

Libraries Connect Communities

American Libraries

Oct2008, Vol. 39 Issue 9, p52-55, 4p

The article focuses on the Public Library Funding and Technology Access Study. Now in its second year, the study documents the proliferation of information technology in libraries and gathers data available on technology expenditures. It is conducted by the American Library Association (ALA) and the Information Use Management and Policy Institute at Florida State University, with funding from ALA and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Business Book Summaries Selections

Mapped to ALA

Management

Becoming an Extraordinary Manager

The Five Essentials for Success

By: Len Sandler

Extraordinary managers are galvanizing forces. They make the whole of their organizations greater than the sum of its disparate parts. They motivate, praise, and exact extraordinary results from ordinary workers. But managers of this caliber are rare and usually made, not born.
In Becoming an Extraordinary Manager, Sandler identifies the major reasons organizations have historically created and sustained poor managers. He offers those already leading, and those rising through the ranks, a development plan based on five major pillars of great management: (1) motivating others, (2) attracting and retaining top talent, (3) planning and organizing group performance, (4) driving results throughout an organization, and (5) lifelong development.

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Managers as Mentors
Building Partnerships for Learning

By: Chip R. Bell

The first edition of Managers as Mentors (1996) was offered to provide supervisors and managers with the competence and confidence to shed the old authoritarian, patriarchal leader/manager model. Bell believed that, in the contemporary workplace, the requirement of learning is constant; thus, managers must adopt a partnering relationship that supports, enables, and facilitates workers so that high levels of performance and a continuous learning environment are ensured.
Today, says, Bell, because the economy is even more challenging that it was then, "helping employees grow" must now be the absolute top priority of all managers. Due to the fact that mentoring has grown in importance, managers need proficiency rather than programs, accessible resources and practical techniques rather than rules and policies, and immediately actionable guidelines rather than philosophical discussion and theory. As a consequence, the author thinks that this second edition of his work is more important than the first, for it is offered to address these needs.

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Patron Service

Designing the Customer-Centric Organization

A Guide to Structure, Strategyand Process

By: Jay R. Galbraith

Studies show that, because sales to existing customers are more profitable than sales to new customers, today’s businesses are recognizing that establishing long-term customer relationships is the best way to ensure the long-term profitability they seek. Thus, in an effort to become more customer focused or customer driven, most have put the customer at the top of their priority “to-do” lists. Galbraith (considered the foremost authority on organizational design) has found, however, that many companies are still missing the mark. Preferring to keep it simple (for management), and to create uncomplicated autonomous business units, they fail to understand that the capabilities required for true customer-centricity go far beyond a mere “cosmetic gloss of customer focus sprinkled around the edges” of product-centricity.
Designing the Customer-Centric Organization is offered to show business leaders an effective means of creating the right infrastructure for truly organizing around the customer. Drawing on the evidence culled from his three-years of research with McKinsey Organization Design Practice, Galbraith presents a variety of case studies, which together form a practical roadmap for transforming the corporation, based on what the customer demands.

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Emotional Value
Creating Strong Bonds with Your Customers

By: Janelle Barlow

Not only is emotion central to human life in terms of its role in interactions with family and friends, it is also becoming increasingly recognized as a critical aspect of interactions in the service economy. In fact, because emotion often comprises the core of the value received from those interactions, it has become a key customer differentiation. Unfortunately, the business world has little interest in, or understanding of, emotion and, thus, tends to keep it out of the business equation. Emotional Value speaks to this lack of understanding and explores the practical applications of this compelling new field. Its detailed guidelines on creating positive emotional states within the organization, making emotional competence the organization’s service model, using empathy to maximize customer experiences, turning complaints into emotional opportunities, and using emotional connections to increase customer loyalty will help customer service executives, managers, and supervisors deliver customer experiences that go beyond mere satisfaction.

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Teamwork

Creating We
Change I-Thinking to WE-Thinking
Build a Healthy, Thriving Organization

By: Judith E. Glaser

According to Glaser, organizations lose their spirit, become mediocre, and die when they fall prey to what she calls the self-serving “I-centric” behaviors of control, blame, resignation, attachment to the past, overconfidence, deference to authority, and negative self-talk. However, when leaders strive to trigger the innate “Vital Partnering Instincts” of learning, growth, and nourishment, they are able to transform toxic organizational cultures and relationships into healthy “WE-centric” environments.
Creating We provides a synthesis of the best thinking on organizational, team, and leadership development to help readers understand these key organizational management and leadership competencies. Page after page of examples and stories, culled from the headlines and Glaser’s 20-year practice, illustrates the unique challenges and related opportunities involved. These elements offer individuals, in any role, an integrated framework and methodology for creating and maintaining healthy organizations in which the focus is no longer on “my success” but on “our success.”

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The Art of Connecting

How to Overcome Differences, Build Rapport, and Communicate Effectively with Anyone

By: Claire Raines, Lara Ewing

In every kind of business and in every industry, workplaces are becoming more diverse, which has important and challenging implications for communication and for relationship building. In The Art of Connecting, Authors Claire Raines and Lara Ewing offer five core principles based on their Titanium Rule—do unto others according to their druthers—for overcoming differences and connecting on the basis of our similarities rather than our apparent differences.
Masterful connectors believe that there is always a bridge, show genuine curiosity in others, do not assume they know everything about a person, sees every individual as a culture unto themselves, and reach out with no strings attached.

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