Keywords
Citation
Hannabuss, S. (1999), "Communicating Professionally:
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
This work will be of particular relevance for trainers and students in the information and library profession. Many of the topics dealt with, like writing and speaking skills, working in groups and making presentations, are of generic interest for people at work, although here Ross and Dewdney have concentrated on making their examples suitable for library situations. There are plenty of examples, in the text and in marginal notes, so trainers can pick up this book and work with and on the ideas there easily. Ross and Dewdney are both professors in the faculty of information and media studies at the University of Western Ontario and are recognised experts on the reference interview. It has an earnest comprehensiveness often associated with North American textbooks, working through part one on skills (from non‐verbal behaviour and listening to speaking and writing), and bringing it all together with a more theoretical framework drawing on paradigms of meaning where we all construct meaning interactively and a model of learning based on a hierarchy of mastering particular skills, called microtraining.
Part two devotes itself to applications, in one‐to‐one situations (using telephones, the reference interview, end user interview, reader′s advisory interview, special situations), working in groups (dynamics, leadership, groupwork in libraries, meetings, virtual groups), making presentations, and engaging in different kinds of writing (from memos and reports to published articles). Finally there′s a chapter on the place of all this in training staff. The work has set out to cover everything and this is likely to mean that trainers and practitioners using it will pick and mix, dipping into what they need at the level they need it. Some material will be suitable for training non‐professional staff, indeed at induction levels; other material is more appropriate for advanced professional work (like the reference interview). Specific tasks (such as the media interview) will fall to particular members of staff alone. It′s a hybrid work, with one side being practical and generic for people at various levels engaged on various tasks (and this fits to the microtraining approach which emphasises how training is built up from lots of constituent parts), and another aspiring to deeper academic insights (such as the construction of meaning), and this reviewer is not convinced that it all holds together. It′s hybrid, too, in terms of its bibliographical apparatus: masses of references to books and articles, likely to be of only modest interest to practical readers, some useful specialised ones but why so many, even so? This second edition has updated material on cross‐cultural and electronic communication. It′s a useful book, likely to find its way into training collections and courses, but, because it tries to do everything, I really wonder whether it will be the success it hopes to be. Trainers will have to find local resources to help them because much of the bibliography is heavily American.