Soft skills are a collection of people management skills, important to many professions and job positions, including academic librarianship. Yet the concept of soft skills lacks definition, scope, instrumentation, and systematic education and training. This literature review explores the definition of soft skills ; contrasts skills with related concepts, such as personality traits, attitudes, beliefs, and values; and compares a set of soft skill typologies. We discuss a number of conceptual issues associated with soft skills and suggest several lines of research to help clarify and strengthen librarians’ understanding of and development of soft skills.

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The Whole Student 863 a linear fashion-as they mature. A complete understanding of how students develop and retain IL skills requires an understanding of their cognitive, emotional, and social development. For IL instruction to be the most effective, these dimensions that make up the whole student should be studied and incorporated into instructional methods. In this paper, I present data from an exploratory study that tested relationships between two of these three dimensions: students' emotional and cognitive development and their IL competency. Literature ReviewTwo theoretical perspectives underpin this study. Kuhlthau's Information Search Process (ISP) demonstrates that students' information seeking exhibits consistent cognitive, behavioral, and affective dimensions. 2 Although the information behavior documented in Kuhlthau's research (a term paper assignment) does not address acquisition of IL skills specifically, the fundamental premise suggests that interacting with information produces discernible and discrete feelings, thoughts, and actions that are consistent across populations and are stage specific.In a more recent and more general treatise, Knud Illeris presents a theory of learning that argues that the process of learning includes two integrated processes, interaction and internalization, processes that occur within a field of cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions. 3 In Illeris' model, each of these dimensions is activated to a varying extent while the learner is 1) interacting with the material and the environment through perception, transmission, experience, imitation, activity, or participation; and 2) internalizing and integrating the acquired knowledge with emotional patterns by accumulation (establishing new learning), by assimilation (adding new ideas to existing structures), or accommodation (reconstructing or transforming existing structures). 4 Drawing from these two theories, it is reasonable to state that students experience the acquisition of IL skills similarly to other learning and that the learning process contains cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions. Furthermore, such thoughts, feelings, and social influences should interact with a student's acquisition of IL skills in ways that are detectable similarly to how thoughts, feelings, and actions were revealed in the ISP model. These theories suggest that we can uncover a more complete understanding of how students develop IL competency through examination of their cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions.Based on this theoretical premise, four constructs were chosen to investigate how students' cognition and emotion would influence their IL competency. Emotional intelligence (EI) and dispositional affect represent the emotional dimension; motivation and coping speak to students' cognition. Although the social dimension of learning is also theoretically linked to IL, it exceeds the scope of this particular research because of constraints of the research design. However, future research should investigate how social ch...

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