As it does each year, this invaluable, eagerly awaited guide will light the way for collection development specialists in smaller public, college, and school libraries, enabling them to easily identify the best, most affordable, and most appropriate new reference materials in any field. Featuring 550 titles chosen from the 2013 edition of the larger American Reference Books Annual, this volume caters to smaller libraries that must ensure every dollar of their often-limited budget is wisely invested. To help them do that, the editor has selected only titles that are highly reviewed, have a low price point, and will appeal to a broad audience. The book presents high-quality, critical reviews of 2012 reference products, both print and online, suitable for small college libraries, medium-sized and small public libraries, and school libraries. Chapters are arranged in four major subdivisions: General Reference, Social Sciences, Humanities, and Science and Technology. Within each, reviews are further divided by form: bibliography, biography, handbooks and yearbooks, and so on. Each review is written by a librarian working in the field and can be trusted to be accurate and fair. Each indicates the type of library or libraries for which the work is appropriate. Features 550 reviews chosen from American Reference Books Annual, a comprehensive and respected reviewing source for reference materials Offers unexcelled reliability, as all reviews are written by subject experts working in the library profession Retains any critical comments to ensure balance and aid in the selection process Considers affordability and broad appeal as criteria for inclusion

Information value and quality can be considered an essential factor to evaluate both conceptual and practical contributions in organisational, technical, and scientific tasks and projects. It is important to effectively observe and implement these concepts in real organisational plans and efforts. Rethinking the Conceptual Base for New Practical Applications in Information Value and Quality discusses the re-evaluation of the conceptual base of information value and quality found in different forms of media; and how these concepts can be analyzed in real applications and business scenarios. This book is a vital reference source for scholars, practitioners, IT specialists, and students interested in information and knowledge management.

This volume contains two Open Access Chapters Volume 1 of the two part collection Stories and Lessons from the World's Leading Opera, Orchestra Librarians, and Music Archivists, explores the current trends and practices in the field of music performance librarianship. Featuring interviews and conversations from over twenty orchestra, opera, and ballet librarians and archivists working for some of the world's leading performing arts and educational institutions from North and South America, this book is a helpful resource to librarians, and archivists who need to manage artifacts in a variety of situations in the world of performing arts. For music and library science professors, this serves as a useful teaching tool or reference material by allowing students to gain a glimpse into the profession of music performance librarianship. Finally, this book functions as a unique and important reference tool for all students who are considering a career in music performance librarianship or a profession in archives in the world of performing arts.

Over the past fifty years, only a small body of knowledge has been published regarding libraries in prisons. Exploring the Roles and Practices of Libraries in Prisons: International Perspectives aims to strengthen and expand this body of knowledge, with each chapter addressing different aspects of the roles and practices of library services to prisons and prisoners. Writing from Croatia, Sri Lanka, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Australia, Norway, Germany and the United States of America, this edited collection focuses on prison library programming, the role of prison libraries as supporters of prisoner literacy development, censorship, future visions for prison libraries, and descriptions of prison libraries across the world. Libraries in both adult and juvenile prisons are studied, as are prison libraries from diverse carceral contexts such as the rapidly expanding American carceral system, through to the 'normalisation' prisons of Norway. This book will be of interest to prison managers, education and custodial staff, prison librarians, library and information studies academics and students, education researchers and practitioners, readers interested in social justice, education, censorship, prison life, and prison reform.

Digital Humanities, Libraries, and Partnerships brings forward ideas and reflections that stay fresh beyond the changing technological landscape. The book encapsulates a cultural shift for libraries and librarians and presents a collection of authors who reflect on the collaborations they have formed around digital humanities work. Authors examine a range of issues, including labor equity, digital infrastructure, digital pedagogy, and community partnerships. Readers will find kinship in the complexities of the partnerships described in this book, and become more equipped to conceptualize their own paths and partnerships.

Licensing Electronic Resources in Academic Libraries: A Practical Handbook provides librarians charged with reviewing, negotiating, and processing licenses with fundamental information that will ensure they not only understand the contents of a license, but are also able to successfully complete the licensing life cycle from start to finish. The contents of the monograph includes basic concepts, real word examples, and tips for negotiation.

A Practical Guide for Informationists: Supporting Research and Clinical Practice guides new informationists to a successful career, giving them a pathway to this savvier, more technically advanced, domain-focused role in modern day information centers and libraries. The book's broad scope serves as an invaluable toolkit for healthcare professionals, researchers and graduate students in information management, library and information science, data management, informatics, etc. Furthermore, it is also ideal as a textbook for courses in medical reference services/medical informatics in MLIS programs.

Volume 7 of the series Creating the 21st-Century Academic Library is focused on new approaches and initiatives in marketing the academic library, as well as the importance of outreach through partnerships and collaborations both internal and external to the library. Implementation of social media strategies, the use of library spaces for collaboration and inspiration, planning events and extravaganzas in the library, librarians as event coordinators and user-centered programming, the delivery of library services through digital engagement, using Instagram to create a library character for the YouTube generation, using workshops to promote digital library services, an examination of the new librarianship paradigm, the process of marketing and constructing a digital collection based on U.S. Highway 89 and the Intermountain West, and how librarians at Loyola University New Orleans have embedded their expertise and practice into their university culture, are the primary topics in this book.

IMPACT Learning: Librarians at the Forefront of Change in Higher Education describes how academic libraries can enable the success of higher education students by creating or partnering with teaching and learning initiatives that support meaningful learning through engagement with information. Since the 1970s, the academic library community has been advocating and developing programming for information literacy. This book discusses existing models, extracting lessons from Purdue University Libraries' partnership with other units to create a campus-wide course development program, Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation (IMPACT), which provides academic libraries with tools and strategies for working with faculty and departments to integrate information literacy into disciplinary courses.

Across the country educators are facing the challenge of restructuring the secondary school to meet the needs of students in the twenty-first century. Block scheduling provides sustained time and fosters an environment for active and experiential learning, a key to student success in life. The author, who has spearheaded the adoption of block scheduling in her school's library media center, has prepared a complete guide for library media specialists contemplating or moving to block scheduling. In preparing this guide she has incorporated the experiences of twelve secondary school libraries across the country that have also moved to block scheduling. Step by step, this guide walks the library media specialist through planning, networking, curriculum and instruction, professional development, technology, and assessment. Practical suggestions, forms, lesson plans, and case studies of other media centers that have successfully adopted block scheduling will help the library media specialist to make the transition to the block. Block scheduling places a high demand on staff, materials, and information technologies. Shaw stresses that networking of people and resources is essential to successful adoption of block scheduling. She takes the reader through the planning and transitional phases of a high school adopting block scheduling and addresses concerns about instructional change, ongoing curriculum, and the role of the library media specialist as a teacher of information technology. She provides ideas on where to find professional development and how to network with other library media specialists with expertise in the block and offers practical suggestions on resource sharing, study hall, flexible scheduling, budget, collection development, substitute teachers, and assessment techniques.

Managing the Multigenerational Librarian Workforce examines how libraries are undergoing a massive shift in their workforce. As baby boomers retire, an influx of Gen Y and millennials has taken their place. This book presents the differences that generational groups bring to the workforce, along with a working mindset that has been shaped, at least in part, by when they were educated and spent their formative early-career years. For the librarian manager, it is important to understand the needs and perspectives of various generations and the career stages they are in if they are to effectively manage the library.

The Intersection: Where Evidence Based Nursing and Information Literacy Meet describes how the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework and Information literacy Competency Standards for Nursing mesh with nursing essentials, thus speaking to the information needs of nurses, nurse educators, and librarians who support worldwide nursing programs. In order to find the best evidence from studies, students and practicing nurses must be proficient in the entire range of information literacy skills. Though the references for this document are from U.S. organizations, they are applicable to nursing audiences across the globe.

Collaboration and the Academic Library: Internal and External, Local and Regional, National and International explores the considerable change that has affected universities and academic libraries in recent years. Given this complex and important context, it is clear that the academic library increasingly needs to operate in partnership with its users and other professionals and organizations to be successful in meeting the needs of its clientele. Academic librarians need to work closely with client groups so that services are relevant, and close partnerships with other professionals need to be forged to provide seamless services for users. The book looks at all aspects of collaboration affecting academic libraries, both internally and externally, to help the reader understand future directions for collaborative activities in a complex and difficult working environment.

This critical ethnography of school libraries contributes to the study of the politics of literacy at the elementary school level as well as provides an interesting case study of "border crossing." The book interrogates two accounts of social reproduction and proposes a third. Students at working-poor Chavez Elementary resisted attempts to get them "hooked" on reading fiction, but while many were socialized to the labor of a piecework economy, many also found ways to use texts as they chose. At professional-managerial Crest Hills, students managed their discourse practices in ways that reproduced those of their office workplace, but their success was achieved at the expense of great anxiety about the future. At working-class Roosevelt, the librarians attended to the rhetoric of librarianship, but students reassembled knowledge on their own terms. A second project theorizes the school library as a geopolitical space, and critiques children's fiction and the social order that its texts help construct through a semiotic analysis of text classification within school libraries. An investigation of the origins of that system and of the ways of reading that it promotes--with particular attention to the history of the popular novel--describes the gender- and class-based politics of leisure reading.

School library media specialists are now considered part of the teaching staff and are charged with integrating their library and information skills curriculum with the more general classroom curriculum. At the same time more and more special needs students are part of every school and every classroom. Thus, the media specialist must work effectively with special needs students on a regular basis to develop their information skills, and must also serve as a resource to classroom teachers. This professional reference offers practical information to school library media specialists on how to serve special needs students and their classroom teachers effectively. The first part of the book highlights the teaching role of the media specialist and discusses how and what to teach special needs students. The second part views the media specialist as an information expert who must structure the library and its resources for students with special needs. The third section treats the media specialist's role as a professional who must collaborate with other teachers.

Recent years have seen numerous and substantial changes in the processes, expectations, and criteria that inform the work of regional accreditation commissions and professional accreditation associations. This sourcebook offers an overview of the accreditation process focused specifically on contemporary expectations for and challenges to libraries, information technologies, and academic computing, and offers practical advice to those librarians involved with academic accreditation activity. Chapters in this professional reference book overview and discuss the principal issues and challenges of academic accreditation, the process of accreditation, and the role of libraries in that process. Throughout the book, attention is given to changing student demographics, the impact of new technologies on the mission of the university, and the evolving expectations placed on the library and other campus information centers. Chapter authors include several executives associated with regional accreditation commissions, library administrators who have extensive experience with accreditation, and university administrators knowledgeable of accreditation issues.

Focusing on one of the most fundamental areas of librarianship, Gorman and a host of distinguished contributors examine the current state of the field of technical services and offer their views on its future. The book is divided into four sections: acquisitions, bibliographic control, automation, and administration. Within these sections individual chapters address specific aspects of the field (e.g., serials acquisitions, descriptive cataloging, circulation services). The text has been thoroughly updated, with some chapters entirely rewritten and others replaced. Specialized chapters on book gathering plans, preservation, and Slavic technical services have been dropped from this edition and a chapter on global standardization has been added. Offering a stimulating diversity of voices and perspectives, this landmark work is a major contribution to the area of technical services in the tradition of Tauber's Technical Services in Libraries (Columbia University Press, 1954). Valuable as supplementary

As a branch of International and Area Studies Librarianship (IASL), East Asian Librarianship has become increasingly important in an age of globalization as scholars engage in interdisciplinary research and study. Volume 2 of Inside Major East Asian Library Collections in North America presents an extensive collection of interviews that give key insights into Chinese, Korean, and Asian American librarianship. East Asian Studies librarianship requires a variety of technical skills, combining deep subject background with knowledge of library processes/workflows, an awareness of research trends, and digital developments in their respective fields. Professionalism, tradition, standards, respected bodies of knowledge and individual practicing professionals’ personality traits are closely examined over both volumes. Inside Major East Asian Library Collections in North America promotes shared understanding of subject area librarians’ work and contribution to society and will enable further collaborations and new services, utilizing the unique and distributed nature of their expertise.

Inherent Strategies in Library Management describes general and specific strategies for libraries based on core library values, and does so through concrete research. Many strategic management books for libraries introduce concepts of business management to the library world, but often neglect traditional library culture and core values. This book reexamines management through the lens of libraries themselves, rather than relying on strategies borrowed from the business world, in an attempt to bring to light the factors and decision-making processes behind how librarians have run their libraries over the past fifty decades. In other words, their decisions can be regarded as inherent management, born naturally from the core foundations, considerations, and operations of libraries. In addition, this book investigates the broad influences of business management theories on libraries, including a discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of their use.

Drawing on research in the areas of business organization, information technology, and information economics this book develops an empirical basis for integrating the three fields. It investigates information technology management based on the theoretical foundations of information economics, examines the chief information officer phenomenon and identifies the factors that lead organizations to create such a position, and analyzes organizational and managerial motivations leading to investment in information technology. Karake concludes that the way information technology is managed and the magnitude of investment in such technology depends on the organization ownership structure, that the ownership structure is a determinant of the degree of control information managers exercise, and that there is a significant relationship between the size and composition of boards of directors and the management of and investment in information technology.

This study will be of interest to students, researchers, and practitioners of information technology management and information technology performance.

This volume is the most comprehensive compilation of ideas related to library performance yet assembled. It brings together noted researchers and successful library directors and educators who have extended the landmark findings and efforts of their mentor and friend, Ernest DeProsp. The editors give a historical account of contemporary measurement activities; suggest methodologies for measuring performance; offer viewpoints on planning, goal-setting and validity; and comment on problems associated with planning, one of the major tools of measurement. Readers of the book will develop informed opinions about planning, a practice that when entered into unaware can enslave an organization in endless data gathering routines and tax their endurance beyond reasonable points. Thought-provoking comments on the directions taken, and not taken, by library thinkers challenge the reader to speculate about current library-think.

At the heart of any discussion about the future of libraries is the future of librarians-and how well our instructional programs, especially the Master of Library Science (MLS) degree, prepare them for their careers. Building on the Re-envisioning the MLS initiative from the University of Maryland's iSchool and the Information Policy & Access Center (iPAC), this book continues the critical conversations around preparing future librarians. Library and information science (LIS) programs are the foundation of librarianship, and their design requires input from everyone in the field-from academics designing programs and courses, to practitioners reflecting on how prepared (or unprepared) they are to serve their communities, to hiring authorities considering qualifications of candidates. The second installment of this two-part volume explores many of the challenges and opportunities inherent in the future of the MLS degree, including the changing nature of the communities that libraries serve and how LIS education should address these changes, how archival training must accommodate big data, the specialized skill sets librarians need on the job, and how best to prepare librarians for their role as educators. These conversations will never be fully resolved, as LIS education must continue to evolve to ensure the efficacy of libraries and the librarians at the heart of the work.