Information Literacy in the Workplace: A Cross-cultural Perspective

This cross-cultural study has two main purposes: to investigate how information literacy is perceived in the workplace and to discover how employees obtain information to carry out their jobs in an effective and timely fashion. This project applies a mix of research methods, including site visits, interviews, and a survey. More than 120 participants from forty companies were involved in this study. They were from a wide variety of industries in Taiwan and Silicon Valley, in Northern California, where many companies base offices or operations from around the world. Major obstacles in conducting cross-continent research are cost, time demands, scheduling, and adaptation to local culture. In this global economy, cross-cultural and cross-border research will help educators, such as librarians, understand the complexity of skills expected in the workplace. Much has been written on information literacy, yet very few can relate how information literacy is applied in the workplace. This primary study sheds some light to help academic librarians reposition themselves as researchers-educators integral to student success

The Relationship Development and Learning Organization Dimensions.

This research examined the relationship among learning organization dimensions, leadership development, employee development, and their interactions with two demographic variables (gender and ethnicity) in the context of libraries. The researchers conducted a multivariate analysis of the variance to assess the differences by leadership training groups (low training hours vs. high training hours), or by gender; and by workplace training groups (low vs. high), or by ethnicity (white vs. all others) on a linear combination of the seven dimensions of the learning organization. A conclusive summary is provided along with contributive discussion. Implications and contributions to librarians are discussed in addition to future research recommendations. Also included are conclusive final thoughts accompanied by the limitations of this research

Ghosts of Madwomen Past: Historical and Psychiatric Madness on the Late Twentieth-Century Operatic Stage

Insanity has been important to opera since the genre’s inception. For four hundred years, operas have featured characters driven mad by love, jealousy, and shame. In this same time period, however, cultural understandings of what it means to be insane have changed many times. This dissertation explores nine post-1945 British and American operas with mad characters: Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, Benjamin Britten’s Curlew River, Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King and Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot, Dominick Argento’s The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe and Miss Havisham’s Fire, Philip Glass’s The Fall of the House of Usher, and Michael Tippett’s New Year. In these operas, modern understandings of insanity and mental illness contend with a centuries-old heritage of operatic and theatrical madness. These partially medicalized portrayals of madness demonstrate the growing centrality of medical perspectives to the concept of insanity, and provide new insight into lay understandings of madness in the under-explored second half of the twentieth century. This dissertation is divided into four chapters, each of which explores a specific convergence of medical thought and operatic imagination. Chapter 1 “The Medical Model,” lays the foundation for later chapters in its discussion of the rising dominance of the medical model in British and American culture, and the consequent structural shift in the dramatic function of operatic madness. Chapter 2, “Hearing Voices,” turns to a specific sonic aspect of twentieth-century mad opera: the hearing of disembodied voices as a fundamental aspect of madness, which I connect to the rising prominence of schizophrenia as a psychiatric diagnosis. Chapter 3, “The Self-Confined Protagonist and the Shadow of the Asylum,” explores the symbolic resonance between self-confined operatic protagonists and the involuntary confinement of insane asylums in the context of the de-institutionalization movement of the mid-twentieth century. Chapter 4, “Alcoholism, Degeneracy, and the Specter of Eugenics,” investigates the processes by which two American operas, The Medium and The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, collapse alcoholism, madness, and poverty into a single conceptual entity, creating heavily moralized narratives, which demonstrate the hidden legacy of eugenic thinking within American culture