A study on the development of Korean academic libraries' duty model based on the job analysis

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to analyze the jobs and duties involved in Korean academic libraries and to provide a clear picture of relative issues. This research will assist universities with the HR management and institutional development that are essential for appropriate role division, organizational diagnosis and rational reform, and increasing the expertise of librarians. Design/methodology/approach -All of the various duties being executed in academic libraries were identified. Korean academic libraries were requested to assist with the survey. Questionnaires were collected surveying the level of awareness of all the duties involved in the academic libraries and survey responses analyzed to determine the importance, difficulty, and professionalism of 189 library duties. Findings -Through this study, perceived levels of frequency, importance, and difficulty of duties related to academic libraries were surveyed and average values for each duty were compared and analyzed to formulate a duty model and action plan. Originality/value -This paper presents a basic library duty model reflecting the rapidly changing information technologies and information types of Korean academic libraries based on the job analysis. Through this process, university libraries will be able to optimize human resources management and achieve efficiency in organizational management, as well as creating materials to support education/training and performance management, thus ultimately helping with the rationalization of their operation. IntroductionA country's competitiveness in research is the starting point for national competitiveness. The source of a nation's research competitiveness is universities that value basic research and the production of academic papers, and it is university libraries that offer academic information services and support to research teams. University libraries, which are at the forefront of accommodating advances in IT and the internet, have made many innovative changes. For example, they have computerized key tasks, systemized processes and built networks of access and search channels. As a result, they are experiencing many changes in organizational structure, human resources and work systems, budget allocation and spending ratios, spatial layout and function, and composition of books.

Impact of organizational justice on job performance in libraries

“…Universities are playing a vital role in creating research competitiveness for nations by valuing basic research and producing academic papers (Kim and Lee, 2011). At the same time universities are also competing with each other on the basis of research production.…”

Exploring the Significant Differences in the Importance and Frequency of Librarians’ Duties among Different Library Sizes

“…Additionally, significant differences regarding the duties' difficulties were analyzed and discussed. Other researchers have already presented the results of relevant investigations regarding academic libraries (Kim and Lee, 2011;Mouza and Grigoriadou, 2016).This study aims to investigate the importance and frequency of public librarians' duties, as well as their association with libraries' size, as measured by the number of users and materials, and whether the economic crisis in Greece has influenced their current status.…”

The economic crisis and public libraries in Greece

“…These requirements are evaluated on three levels: professional, when the librarians are vital for the tasks to be managed; paraprofessional, when no bachelor's degree is required; and nonprofessional, for duties where it is not necessary for the personnel to have training in library science. To trace the required level for each duty, we used a method similar to the one proposed by Kim and Lee (2011). First, for the 116 duties, we estimated the averages of their importance and difficulty, which were found to be 4.16 and 3.04, respectively.…”

“…Other researchers have recorded the duties of system librarians (Farajpahlou and Danesh, 2009) and the responsibilities of paraprofessionals who work in electronic resources (Erb and Erb, 2015) and technical services (Zhu, 2012). Many researchers have also presented analytical job descriptions in regard to the importance, difficulty, and frequency of duties in academic (Kim and Lee, 2011;Mouza and Grigoriadou, 2016) and public libraries (Yoon and Kim, 2009), as they contribute to all human resource practices for increased productivity and efficiency.…”