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Mystery shoppers deceive front-line personnel into believing that they are real customers. They provide their observations in a natural setting and relate evidence useful for planning, staff development, and organizational accountability. Given the coverage of mystery shopping in the literature for more than a decade, this study explores which of those public libraries currently use such shopping.

Leadership is a complex topic, one that is generating extensive research and analysis across disciplines. This article focuses on four theories pertinent to the library profession: emotional intelligence, four frames, resonant leadership, and multicultural leadership. The last of these theories has generated little attention.

Instead of presenting a research agenda, this article identifies five challenges of importance to anyone conducting research or wanting to use the results for planning or decision-making purposes. Four general areas that, over time, library researchers have often examined are viewed in terms of these challenges. Coping with these challenges is important as the profession continues to produce theoretical and action research.

A study of the persuasive effect of positive versus negative online book reviews on readers' judgment suggests that readers with high involvement were less likely to be swayed by online reviews. An experiment was conducted to test the effects of two psychological constructs in the persuasion process, namely, user's knowledge of and involvement with a literary genre. A novel aspect of the study is that the participants were exposed to reviews contradictory to their initial impression. Contrary to negativity bias widely found in previous studies of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), a positivity effect of online reviews was found. High and low involvement readers were found to rely on different judgment cues. Furthermore, it is argued that when applied in cultural consumption, the measurement of these constructs demands special treatment because of its “infinite variety” and strong hedonistic character. Involvement at the genre level helped enhance preference stability. However, such effects were not found with users' subjective knowledge at the genre level. Instead, similarity became an important judgment heuristic when users encountered books by unknown authors.

All public libraries in a single US state were surveyed in order to explore the types of personal technology assistance requests the staff received and how they responded to such requests. Staff at each library that reported having received patron requests for assistance with personal digital technology or content were invited for a 30-minute follow-up phone interview in which they were asked to provide more detail about their interactions with patrons and their opinions about this aspect of library work. In total, 130 of the 234 libraries (55.5%) in the state responded to the survey and representatives from 10 of those libraries participated in follow-up phone interviews. While public librarians are willing to tackle these patron requests, they have little preparation or specific continuing education in this area to provide them with support. Although many public librarians categorize technology assistance as reference work, official Reference and User Services Association guidelines do not consider it within the scope of reference work. The growing body of patron requests suggests that, as work in public libraries continues to evolve in order to meet patron needs, so too should the guidelines for reference work.

“How we done it good” publications—a genre concerning project-based approaches that describe how (and sometimes why) something was done—are often rebuked in the library research community for lacking traditional scientific validity, reliability, and generalizability. While scientific methodologies may be a common approach to research and inquiry, they are not the only methodological paradigms. This research posits that the how we done it good paradigm in librarianship reflects a valid and legitimate approach to research. By drawing on the concept of research through design, this study shows how these how we done it good projects reflect design methodologies which draw rigor from process, invention, relevance, and extensibility rather than replicability, generalizability, and predictability. Although these projects implicitly reflect research through design, the methodology is not yet explicitly harnessed in librarianship. More support for these types of projects can be achieved by making the legitimate design framework more explicit and increasing support from publication venues.

Identifying the critical success factors (CSFs) of institutional repositories can influence their successful implementation. This study investigates the perceived importance of the success factors and the actual performance of institutional repositories worldwide. A web-based questionnaire was distributed to 354 repository managers via the OpenDOAR email distribution service and achieved a response rate of 83.3%. Factor analysis indicated the possibility of 46 variables under six factors being important for the success of institutional repository implementation. The six factors are Management, Services, Technology, Self-archive practices, People, and Resources. A gap analysis was conducted to identify the importance and actual performance of the factors. The major finding was that several of the factors are not fully realised by the institutional repositories despite their relative importance. Institutional repositories are still in development; this study may help to guide their implementation and further development.

The relevancy of public libraries is often called into question, with some saying that library services have been or will be displaced by, among other things, new media such as social media. This study tested this displacement hypothesis with survey data collected from three nations (the U.S.: N = 879; South Korea: N = 700; and Singapore: N = 987). Ordinal regressions were used to investigate the relationship between the use of social media and nine public library services, taking into account individual demographic differences. The results show that for all three nations, social media use has significant complementary relationships with all nine library services examined. Computer and information literacy training showed the largest effect size. However, signs of displacement effects were observed in the odds ratio statistics, particularly among daily social media users and in reference services, library visits, and time spent in the library, suggesting that where displacement is concerned, these areas warrant extra attention.

In practise, public organizations often provide basic and widespread access to digital services to citizens and to varying degrees. For the effective use of public funds it is necessary for there to be an objective method for the assessment of the effectiveness of the public services (i.e. including digital services). A methodology that can analyse the effectiveness of the digital services provided by public organizations is proposed. The methodology was applied to the digital services provided by the Municipal Library of Prague (MLP). This methodology allows comparison of the effectiveness of the different services provided. This contributes to the effectiveness of the decisions of public representatives and overall social effectiveness of the digital services provided. The results show that the effectiveness of digital services (provided by remote access) at the MLP in 2012 is 4.02 (this means that each unit of financial investment brings benefits in the amount of 4.02 units). In contrast, digital services provided directly in the library have a very low effectiveness, i.e. 1:0.89, thus they are clearly ineffective. In addition, when compared to all the services that are provided, digital services have the highest effectiveness of all. The proposed methodology can therefore help economic decision-making but also to improve the quality and range of services. It can be used in other organizations and various public sectors.

This exploratory conceptual content analysis describes the published school library advocacy literature in the United States from 2001–2011. In 47 articles, the advocacy efforts undertaken, the responsible parties, the target populations, and goals and reasons for advocacy were examined. In all, 372 separate advocacy efforts were found. Of these, 168 efforts outlined tangible results of advocacy efforts while 204 efforts described strategies or techniques for advocacy but did not identify an outcome. The general school community was the most predominant target population for advocacy. Advocacy efforts specifically targeting school administrators and teachers were an infrequent target. The advocacy goal mentioned most frequently in the literature was enhancing awareness. Most (83%) advocacy activities were initiated by school librarians or an individual in the school library field. School library researchers should address the dearth of empirical and theoretical work on both the practice and impact of advocacy on the profession.

Although several library and information science (LIS) and information needs, seeking, and use (INSU) scholars have called for improving the discipline's conceptual and theoretical foundation, the LIS literature presents surprisingly few models for exploring and clarifying central concepts. While models for concept exploration such as the treatise or explication focus on determining “the” definition of a concept, other approaches, such as discourse analysis, have clear methodological and theoretical premises but lack sufficiently identifiable methods for application. The purpose of this paper is to describe, a collection of innovative approaches of concept analysis (CA) from nursing scholarship. While individual approaches to CA differ slightly from each other in terms of theoretical standpoint and method, all share the goal of clarifying individual concepts to establish a foundation for empirical research. This paper describes the theoretical foundations and application of CA approaches from nursing scholarship and presents an abbreviated case of its application to usage, a concept of interest to the LIS community. CA holds a great deal of potential for LIS scholars who seek to clarify the discipline's concepts, whether foundational and basic, or more obscure and specific.