Library Career Management in the Digital Age

Book excerpt: There is currently an absence of an organization model which can be used as an aid to describing and discussing career development. This book will fill this gap by presenting a new model, the Librarian Career Management Tool, that can be used to identify and structure possible opportunities and challenges to the career development of academic librarians in the digital age. The career development of academic librarians follows different paths. There are different kinds of career guidance resources targeting librarians and students in Library and Information Science and the prerequisites for career development may differ between academic libraries. Because of this heterogeneity in the field there is a need for a theoretical and practical tool, the Librarian Career Management Tool, which distils variation down to fundamental principles which people can then work with. The tool collates all possible career paths into a taxonomy of influencing factors and natural relationships between these factors for the digital librarian context. The advantage of modelling these distinct patterns is to enable informed and far-sighted decisions on the motivations for the next steps in an individual's career. It also enables key trends in digital information management to be better understood. - Helps academic library managers to identify and structure the opportunities and challenges that their employees face in the digital age - Helpful for early career academic librarians to identify and structure their motivations and what they want to achieve as librarians - Ideal for educators in higher education within LIS as a resource for use in teaching about the prerequisites for, and characteristics of, career development of academic librarians