Do you ever feel like you're drowning in an overwhelming number of tasks? These ready-to-use lifesavers will help you stay afloat in your job while you successfully manage your facilities. You'll find advice on a variety of subjects, from completing library inventory, handling overdue materials, and establishing a book club to teaching Internet research skills and improving public relations. Each lifesaver contains a tip (guidelines for implementation), a tool (a reproducible handout or form), and talk (advice from practicing professionals). Upbeat and practical, this book will save you time and make your job more manageable.

Building on proven methods of effective supervision, this book offers academic librarians a practical guide for the day-to-day challenges that arise in supervising student employees. The authors describe the roles of employees and supervisors and review general management principles. They then explain how to organize for student employment. Hiring, compensation, orientation and training, and supervision strategies are covered in addition to common problem areas, performance appraisal, employee/employer rights, corrective discipline, and termination procedures. A revision of Baldwin's Supervising Student Employees in Academic Libraries (Libraries Unlimited, 1991), this new work has been thoroughly updated. It contains a complete list of job descriptions and detailed information on funding. Answers to frequently asked questions and a glossary of financial aid terms conclude the book.

Any organisation that wishes to tap into the wealth and influence of the rich and powerful needs to know as much about them as possible. Prospect research, already used by fund-raisers with considerably success in the United States and elsewhere to target key people, can make all the difference to the success or failure of the initial approach.
"Targeting the Powerful" is a highly practical guide to prospect research, written by a leading expert. It explains how to conduct in-depth research into a person, company or charitable organization, and how to use the information to recommend a line of approach most likely to succeed.
Contents: What is prospect research?; Setting up a prospect research department; Online, CD-Rom, the Internet or paper?; Ethics, security and confidentiality; Day-to-day questions; Marketing your organization to the prospect; People; Company information; Foundations and trusts; International comparisons; A report on a new country; General sourcesfor a new country; Specific international resources; The United Kingdom; Western Europe and Scandinavia; Central and Eastern Europe; Asia-Pacific; The United States; Canada; The rest of the world; Addresses; Index.

Librarian, author, and management expert Joan Giesecke builds from years of experience and research to provide practical and innovative strategies geared toward helping you set goals for your department and deliver first-rate library services. Linking the role of frontline manager to the rest of the organization, managers and administrators will learn the invaluable skills of mentoring, team-building, decision making, taking charge, and working and communicating with staff at all levels.

This illustrated, how-to guide provides detailed instructions, supply lists, and variations for an entire year (including summers and holidays) of exciting displays. Easily adapted to any subject or budget, these bulletin boards and showcases are proven favorites for students in middle and high school-will also excite the imaginations of younger students.

Stimulate interest in the library and reading with this illustrated how-to guide. The authors provide detailed instructions, supply lists, and variations for an entire year (including summers and holidays) of exciting displays. These bulletin boards and showcases-proven favorites for students in middle and high school, where capturing student attention is a challenge-will also excite the imaginations of younger students. All are easily adapted to any subject or budget or grade level.

Need extra funding for your library or for another educational project? Check this handy guide. Designed for educators and administrators in school and small public libraries, this book is filled with the practical information you need to prepare and execute a successful grant proposal. Learn what types of grants are available and which ones are most suitable to your needs, then follow the step-by-step guidelines for locating sources and securing grants. A wealth of examples, anecdotes, and suggestions will help you through the process. Also included are an annotated bibliography of resources and lists of helpful Internet sites.

Exciting, productive connections with authors, illustrators, and storytellers are at your fingertips with this resource. Unlike other author visit guides, this book goes beyond nuts-and-bolts planning to how to create the best possible encounters between students and authors. Successful visits in real space and in cyberspace are described, giving you specific ideas of the many ways to connect with and create meaningful links between bookpeople and children. Choosing the right guest, guidelines for successful visits, making curriculum connections, using e-mail to connect with bookpeople, live chats in virtual space, taking advantage of ITB and satellite technology, and using such props as realia and curriculum guides are some of the topics covered. Lists of author/illustrator web pages and managed Internet sites for author interaction are included.

This volume aims to help readers respond proactively and help to lead the way to collaborative learning in schools. The American Library Association has been instrumental in shaping and publishing guidelines for school libraries for 75 years. This book incorporates the standards that should help students become skillful producers and consumers of information along with guidelines and principles to help create a dynamic, student-centred programme. The book's underlying concepts feature: helping students flourish in a learning community not limited by time, place, age, occupation or disciplinary borders; designing authentic learning tasks and assessments; speaking in terms educators understand; defining your role in student learning; and joining teachers and others to identify links in student information needs, curricular content, learning outcomes and a variety of print and nonprint resources.

Hackman's practical ideas for integrating library information skills into the high school English curriculum emphasize the importance of teacher-librarian cooperation and curriculum match. This new edition also addresses the media specialist's challenge to help teachers feel comfortable with new technologies while incorporating them into the program. The author gives numerous examples of how the media specialist and English teacher can team up in composition, literature, and the performing arts-all taken from successful programs based on national, state, and regional standards. A useful resource for media specialists, teachers, library and education students, and school administrators.

Novice catalogers in special libraries, who are often expected to fulfill commitments to online bibliographic networks and cataloging consortia, will find this a thorough but uncomplicated guide to standard cataloging. Covering all aspects of bibliographic description, access points, indexing, classification, and related activities (e.g., authority control, catalog management, filing), the book focuses on the needs and cataloging problems encountered in special libraries, such as the cataloging of electronic media, technical reports, and unpublished materials. More than 100 examples illustrate the principles and practices involved. Chapters on law, science and technology, medical, business, music, and art libraries cover those materials and specific tools in depth, including subject- and profession-specific nonbook media, thesauri, classifications, and so on. Chapters on policies and catalog decision making point out advantages and disadvantages of various alternatives.

This volume aims to help readers respond proactively and help to lead the way to collaborative learning in schools. The American Library Association has been instrumental in shaping and publishing guidelines for school libraries for 75 years. This book incorporates the standards that should help students become skillful producers and consumers of information along with guidelines and principles to help create a dynamic, student-centred programme. The book's underlying concepts feature: helping students flourish in a learning community not limited by time, place, age, occupation or disciplinary borders; designing authentic learning tasks and assessments; speaking in terms educators understand; defining your role in student learning; and joining teachers and others to identify links in student information needs, curricular content, learning outcomes and a variety of print and nonprint resources.

Everhart provides practical guidelines and ready-to-use forms for evaluating a school library media center, as well as important results derived in other studies. She includes qualitative and quantitative techniques for the areas of curriculum, personnel, facilities, collections, usage, and technology. She also gives step-by-step instructions on how to create in-house surveys, conduct interviews, and use observation to gather useful data.

Conduct research, collect statistics, and evaluate your program with this useful resource. Everhart provides practical guidelines and ready-to-use forms for evaluating a school library media center, as well as important results derived in other studies. She includes qualitative and quantitative techniques for the areas of curriculum, personnel, facilities, collections, usage, and technology. She also gives step-by-step instructions on how to create in-house surveys, conduct interviews, and use observation to gather useful data. For example, there are directions on how to assess information literacy with rubrics. In addition, each chapter gives detailed references, a list of further readings, applicable Web sites, and dissertations. A quick and easy guide to justifying and supporting your SLMC operations and effectiveness, this book is invaluable to all school library media specialists. It will also be of interest to school library media supervisors and researchers.

This is a compilation of 150 thoughts about library work, written by a librarian. It is intended as a soothing volume, presented in a meditations format, reminding librarians why they chose their craft, and reinforcing the importance of their work.

What is a systems librarian? Both history and practice indicate a wide variation in the field, strong commitments to local arrangements and a lack of functional standards. Library administrators and managers struggle with the broad requirements of the position, weighing the skill sets of degree holding professionals and the non-MLS technologists. Systems librarians are often designers, planners, implementors, consultants, technology representatives or facilitators. This text provides an assessment of what system librarianship is and what it can be, outlining the type of training needed for people to fill these positions, and illustrates challenges for libraries - and systems librarians - in computing and networking.

Whether you are a library supervisor with a few employees or an adminstrator with an entire human resources system, there are specific rights, responsibilities, and regulations that you must conform to. In plain language and with a practical, straightforward approach, Baldwin tells you about employment law relating to personnel recruitment and selection; the employment relationship; collective bargaining; wage and hour laws; employment benefits; discrimination laws; health, safety, and privacy; discipline and discharge; and income replacement. By informing themselves of these basic rights and regulations, librarians and library managers will be better equipped to deal with or avoid altogether some of the potential problems that arise between employers and employees in the public library arena. The book also reviews effective management techniques as a way to avoid potentially serious personnel problems. A glossary of employment terms is included.

Increase your effectiveness as a manager by developing essential interpersonal skills with the creative approach offered in this practical reference. Designed for library school graduates, paraprofessional librarians, and aides who have the responsibility of managing school or small public libraries, this publication focuses on skills that are not part of a librarian's technical training. The techniques are easy to implement, and the book includes numerous examples that illustrate the principles. A must read for those who wish to become leaders in the field.

Service quality is an issue separate from internal observations of effectiveness and efficiency, and cannot adequately be conveyed by output and performance measures. Considerations of service quality require librarians to regard management and the provision of service from an entirely new perspective- from the viewpoint of the library user, for whom the outcome of a trip to the library has far greater relevance than the institutions' outputs. This book examines service quality, identifies its essential elements (including electronic service delivery), and discusses ways in which it can be assessed quantitatively and qualitatively. Based on a two-year research study, this book encourages every manager to consider the impact of accountability on the library's role within the larger organization. It identifies simple and practical methods by which to implement measures representing service quality and to narrow the gap between library services and customer expectations.

." . . frustrated philosophers everywhere-especially epistemologists-will enjoy this work. It is written by someone who appreciates the occasional nuances afforded by languages other than English. Moreover, it has a handy list of references, a serviceable back-of-the-book index, and an author index that is a veritable "Who's Who" of people who, like the author, have committed monography in their quest for a better understanding of our field." - Library and Information Science Research The focus of this volume is on the creation of meaning in the practice of library and information studies, and the need for an overall view and methodology of what the field is, how it develops, and how we identify our place within it when it is changing so rapidly. Succeeding versions of what the field is and what its practitioners do have left us unsure of where legitimacy lies- and how our own future can be reconciled to prevailing trends and impending changes. At the same time, there has been a movement to get away from positivist, or "scientific," models of research practice. This book argues that those models should be rejected because they take no account of how human science's work or how people in service professions construct theory.

Documents the development and use of the public library planning process and assesses its value, offering recommendations for improving the use of the process and for revising its planning manual, Planning and Role Setting for Public Libraries: A Manual of Options and Procedures . Reviews research o

A variety of perspectives on how proper human resources management strategies can provide library staff members at all levels with the skills needed for libraries of the future.

This book provides an overview of organizational decision making and the use of information in the process. In addition, it draws on original empirical work to establish general principles for design of information systems, which are tuned to the way managers actually behave and make decisions at the highest level of the organization. The book also gives insights into the ways higher education institutions operate and deal with complex problems that are messy and have broad political ramifications. It offers a solid basis for the necessary shared understanding between managers and information providers that will enable the information resources of an organization to be effectively harnessed to support decision making activities. It demonstrates the way decision making occurs in organizations and shows how information contributes to the these with a high-level decision group and, on the basis of the empirical tests, proposed a new theory of complex decision making and information in organizational settings. For readers interested in theoretical aspects of complex decision making, or in research in decision making and information, the book builds on the two theories of decision making with the highest profiles in the organizational literature. It also shows new ways of testing those theories in the real world of organizations.process. A key feature of this volume is its contribution to the development of a theory of high-level decision making in organizations that takes into account the function of information in the process. This is accomplished through an account of a research project that formulated two broadly based theories of decision making and information use, tested

This volume uses a social model to analyze issues of database ownership and copyright among automated library networks. It explores the possibility that the barriers to networking regarding database ownership and copyright are not specific to the context of libraries, but are instead part of a larger recurring theme in social groups, organizations, and systems. This social network model is significant because it explains ownership issues as a consequence of the dynamic nature of library network relationships, which have been complicated by environmental forces and a confusion of network roles. The research in this work focuses on the Online Computer Library Center's (OCLC) decision to copyright the database and the reactions of regional networks and libraries. The debate over ownership is a direct outgrowth of issues of centralization between OCLC and regional networks, issues that have strained relationships between OCLC and the regional networks that attempted to develop their own services independently. Resolving the conflict will require overcoming the problems of governance, competition, communication, policy formulation, and role definition that recur in library network relationships. Solutions are required in order to share information internationally and to link national bibliographic utilities and information networks in a common system

This handbook provides helpful guidance for the information services practitioner and manager. It contains a wealth of concrete information necessary for managing technology and its applications and for providing technological leadership. Although there are a plethora of monographs allocated to general and specific aspects of automation, computerization, and technological innovation in libraries and information centers, this volume is unique in offering a conceptual framework for implementing and managing technologies plus a detailed discussion of technologies in relation to both the needs of information seekers and the changes they have wrought in delivering services to users. The volume will also be of interest to students because it provides a historical context for recent changes brought about by technological applications, describes current practices, and explores issues and trends on the horizon.

Successful after-school programs are just a part of this detailed study of the impact of unsupervised or latchkey children on the community in general and on libraries in particular. For school librarians who have found themselves in the new and undefined role of after-school supervisor, this book is the first to examine the phenomenon and share exciting and successful ideas you can use to meet the needs of latchkey children in your library. Latchkey Children is also a comprehensive reference source on facts and information, including valuable research findings appearing in print for the first time.