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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of Greece’s economic crisis on public librarians’ obligations. Design/methodology/approach In total, 43 public library managers completed a questionnaire regarding 116 librarian responsibilities. Managers evaluated these responsibilities considering their importance, difficulty, and frequency. Regarding difficulty, a two-way analysis of variance was applied to examine whether there exists a significant difference among duties’ categories and libraries’ classifications, considering their number of users and materials, and whether the perceived difficulties were connected with the economic crisis. Findings The results reveal that public librarians face many difficulties due to workload and increased responsibilities resulting from the lack of qualified personnel both in library and computer science. Difficulties also arise from the inability to meet some operational needs because of reduced funding. Practical implications Contrary to these unfavorable conditions, many new opportunities and challenges have emerged, including the implementation of new practices and actions (volunteerism, donations, cooperation with local actors) to effectively cope with the new threats. Originality/value This is the first time that job description has been recorded and used to outline the duties of Greece’s public librarians. This is particularly useful to develop libraries’ strategic planning and to assist all human resource practices to increase efficiency, especially during the period of financial crisis. Further specific duties were also proposed to enhance the librarians’ effectiveness under the new working environment, focusing on the required processes for their successful completion.

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This paper aims to investigate the sustainability of the general Greek government net borrowing, applying novel techniques for both to determine the order of integration of a difference stationary series and to specify the final form of the co-integration equation. Co-integration analysis was applied, and robust rules of thumb are suggested taking into account the individuality of the case under consideration. The empirical application revealed that the Greek debt is not sustainable. Further, we introduce consistent planning methods to obtain optimal time paths for both government revenue and spending, so as sustainability of the debt to become a feasible task under certain assumptions. Finally, we suggest a policy making approach on macrolevel combining co-integration with optimal control.