Students and teachers of information and library studies will recognize this well‐known work instantly. Since the appearance of the first edition in 1982 (the second was 1987, the third was 1995), then under authors Peter Jordan and Noragh Jones, this has found its natural way on to the reading lists of most courses on human resource management where HRM has been directed at the ILS field. Jordan is now retired but was a lecturer and also Head of Reader Services at Manchester Metropolitan University Library. In this fourth edition he is joined by Caroline Lloyd, Reader Services Librarian at Birkbeck College in the University of London. This new edition has been updated, above all in areas like technology and change, social inclusion, lifelong learning and new modes of learning, and employment law. New materials (like 360 appraisal, counselling, time and stress management) have been added, and original material reordered.
The key role of this work, its niche in a field crowded by highly eligible HR books, is its focus on ILS, and that means that most collections serving courses for students, and any professional collection to support continuing professional development, is likely to buy it. It brings together a useful range of HR‐related issues, provides examples in ILS (e.g. job satisfaction of professional staff and others, recruiting information employees, actual appraisal schemes and training programmes used by academic, public, special and other libraries), and discusses the issues and examples in a clear and approachable way. This provides that necessary “bridge” between the well‐documented field of HRM and the well but highly dispersed way in which ILS HRM itself is covered (usually by articles here and there, oblique looks in HR books, etc.). Some ideas, like the job content/context matrix, are particularly useful for training at any level. For these reasons, then, this fourth edition will jump easily into my recommended readings.
Because it takes a helpfully literal look at HRM in ILS, it has an obviousness, a practicality, which more sophisticated readers may find naive. So many works in the field of general HRM develop an incisive argument, perhaps change management, or organizational culture, or law and ethics, or knowledge management, or privatisation (if it is the public sector), that the plain structure of topics – HR planning, recruiting and selecting, training, motivating, appraising – may beg the question for such readers about what over‐arching philosophy or even policy the authors have on HR. Possible themes peep out – new roles as educators and content providers, changing structures and legalism, new challenges for leadership, life/work issues – and they are there for any perceptive student or teacher who can pick them up and run with them. This takes us back to the new edition itself: lots of very relevant and useful things here, to support training, to compare practice, to revisit fundamentals, to check on how things like appraisal and training are moving along. That is its strength and that is why it will sell well. Pity there is no paperback for students and trainees to buy.
