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Dissertation Information for Charles R. McClure

NAME:
- Charles R. McClure
- (Alias) Charles McClure

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Library and Information Science

SCHOOL:
- Rutgers University (USA) (1977)

ADVISORS:
- Ralph Blasingame

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Susan Artandi
- Ernest Deprospo
- Douglas H. Jones

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: ACADEMIC LIBRARIANS' CONTACT WITH INFORMATION SOURCES AND LIBRARY DECISION-MAKING

Abstract: The problem statement of this investigation is: are the number of contacts of academic librarians with factual information sources related to their involvement in the library decision making process? The study identifies a selected number of factual sources of information with which the professional academic librarian might come to contact and relates the number of those contacts to the librarian's involvement in library decision making.

The objectives of the study are: 1) to develop and test a methodology to identify who are the organizational information rich and who are involved in the decision making process within the library, 2) to review the relevant literature and to identify/evaluate conceptual and theoretical frameworks pertaining to the notion of organizational information richness and organizational decision making, 3) to evaluate the suitability of the methodology tested and to relate the findings from the study to other related literature, and 4) to generate propositions which can be used as a basis for future research related to this topic.

The hypothesis of this investigation is: those people who are identified as the organizational information rich is an academic library will tend to be involved in library decision making. The data supports this hypothesis. In response to the related research questions, the data suggests: administrators as a group come into contact with more factual sources of information than technical service librarians; factual sources of information can be grouped as either internal or external sources of information depending on their origin relative to the library; and last, the information seeking networks of professionals in the academic library tend to follow formal lines of authority.

The development of the research design represents an improvement over previous methods which have been suggested to measure the variables organizational information richness and involvement in decision making. The research design allowed to the researcher to address the hypothesis and also provide additional data related to the problem statement. The design was judged to have practical usefulness, reliability and internal validity although the sample does not appear to be representative of the population of academic librarians.

Major conclusions from this investigation are: 1) information rich academic librarians were identified in the libraries studied and a significant relationship was established between their information richness and their involvement in decision making; 20 organizational information richness in necessary but not sufficient to be involved in decision making -- a number of other factors may also affect the librarian's involvement in library decision making; 3) the job type or organizational position of the librarian is related to his/her total contacts with factual information sources; 4) the administrators who have direct responsibility for the operation of the four libraries studied contact a substantial larger quantity of factual information sources than other librarians in the organization and the individuals on whom these administrators rely for informational input into the decision making process also contact substantially more factual information sources than other librarians; and 5) the academic librarians studied in this investigation tend to be generalists in terms of their contact with factual information sources -- no patterns or preference for certain types of factual information were identified. Based on these conclusions, a number of propositions are suggested as avenues for future research related to this topic.

MPACT Scores for Charles R. McClure

A = 10
C = 6
A+C = 16
T = 26
G = 3
W = 15
TD = 17.75
TA = 5
calculated 2014-01-28 10:08:50

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