2015 HEP DA graduate Michael Perini recently published The Academic Librarian as Blended Professional: Reassessing and Redefining the Role through Chandos Publishing, an imprint of Elsevier.
Employing traditional and personal narrative, the book is a qualitative case study that extends Whitchurch’s (2009) blended professional model, designed to consider the merging of academicians’ roles across several spheres of professional and academic influence in a higher education setting, to academic librarians. Librarians and their impact on the academic community often are overlooked and unrecognized as professionals by higher education theorists. This study consequently achieves significance due to its use of higher education theory for an examination of the professional identity of academic librarians and the issues impacting librarian professional development. The work here also offers a constructive, replicable research design appropriate for the analysis of librarians in other academic settings, providing additional insight into how these professionals might perceive their roles within the larger context of a higher education environment.
The book is the end product of Michael’s dissertation that was completed under the supervision of Dr. Jaime Lester. Michael currently serves as Director of Academic Affairs at Virginia International University in Fairfax, VA.