MANAGEMENT ATTITUDES TOWARD INFORMATION AND INFORMATION PROFESSIONALS IN BUSINESS AND INDUSTRIAL LIBRARIES

This study deals with the convergence and divergence of attitudes held by corporate managers and special librarians toward each other and toward information in the corporate library environment. The study was designed to assess these attitudes in terms of concepts related to self- and other-image; non-library sources of information in the corporate information pool; the value of information as perceived by the two groups in the corporate environment; and the groups' perceptions of management techniques and of library science principles as factors in the management of the corporate special library or information center.;Within the scope of the study two hypotheses were tested and accepted: that librarians would respond more positively to the concepts measured than would their managers; and that, notwithstanding the librarians' more positive response, the attitudes of the two groups would not differ in any statistically significant way. Together, these hypotheses permit the statement that in business and industrial libraries managers and librarians hold similar attitudes toward the concepts measured and that only a narrow, although measurable divergence in attitudes exists. Within this narrow area of divergence, areas of potential conflict of value structures were found.;Although the investigation was exploratory and descriptive in nature, the investigator believes that the results provide a generalizable value-structure construct relating librarians and managers in the for-profit environment. Additional research is required to refine the attitudinal construct presented and to extend it to include additional variables.;A systematic random sample of special librarians, information professionals, and their corporate managers in the Northeast Corridor made anonymous judgments about the concepts on a semantic differential scale that was designed to measure the attitudes of the two groups and to test their convergence in order to identify the value structures of the two groups. Both inter-group and intra-group analyses were carried out. Close convergence of attitudes was found to be the overall pattern within which significant divergences between the groups were isolated.