Evaluation, which is a critical component of the planning process, assesses the effectiveness and efficiency of library programs and services in the context of stated goals and objectives. This book views evaluation as a type of research study in which evaluators collect either research or management data. Chapters discuss steps of the evaluation process and provide practical examples of the application of these steps to specific library problems. The overall objectives of the volume are to introduce readers to the relationship between planning and evaluation; to discuss the components of an evaluation study in clear prose so that readers can easily understand the different steps; to foster an attitude that recognizes the importance of evaluation for the development of library programs and services; to offer examples of each component of the evaluation process; to identify writings on evaluation in libraries and information centers; and to encourage organizational change and underscore the importance of evaluation to library decision making.

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What is the significance of heritage for how welfare is defined? What function does heritage have in the public realm and how is heritage becoming a resource for citizens to gain influence in society? Who and what defines the public debates and the politics about heritage? Is there a knowledge gap between research communities, management, and the public understanding and use of heritage? These are some of the questions that the authors of this book reflect upon. They provide Nordic perspectives on how the management of the past takes place, and how it is carried out in the service of the society, offering new interpretations of the role of heritage in present society, where institutional heritage management has become just one of the many and multiple ways in which different publics engage with cultural heritage. This book addresses the main challenges faced by heritage managers today in light of the changing understanding of heritage in society.

Whether used as a text for library and information science students, as a resource for professional librarians needing to access the information produced by or for the federal establishment, or as a guide for researchers, this acclaimed title is an essential resource and a valuable tool guiding readers through the vast and constantly changing terrain of government information in print and electronic forms. Morehead describes administrative machinery and information systems of the Government Printing Office (GPO); introduces general checklists, indexes, and guides to government information; describes the Congress and intrinsic sources that comprise the legislative process; and details many other government publications. Morehead provides a broad overview of public access issues, giving special attention to the impact of electronic formats (notably the Internet's World Wide Web) on the dissemination of federal government information. He then describes administrative machinery and information systems

This is an edited volume based on the 2007 Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR), now in its second meeting. Metadata research is a pluri-disciplinary field that encompasses all aspects of the definition, creation, assessment, management and use of metadata. The volume brings together world class leaders to contribute their research and up-to-date information on metadata and semantics applied to library management, e-commerce, e-business, information science and librarianship, to name a few. The book is designed for a professional audience composed of researchers and practitioners in industry.

Foundations in Library and Information Sciences

With the onslaught of emergent technology in academia, libraries are privy to many innovative techniques to recognize and classify geospatial data - above and beyond the traditional map librarianship. As librarians become more involved in the development and provision of GIS services and resources, they encounter both problems and solutions. ""Integrating Geographic Information Systems into Library Services"" integrates traditional map librarianship and contemporary issues in digital librarianship within a framework of a global embedded information infrastructure, addressing technical, legal, and institutional factors such as collection development, reference and research services, and cataloging/metadata, as well as issues in accessibility and standards.

Processing the Past explores the dramatic changes taking place in historical understanding and archival management, and hence the relations between historians and archivists. Written by an archivist and a historian, it shows how these changes have been brought on by new historical thinking, new conceptions of archives, changing notions of historical authority, modifications in archival practices, and new information technologies. The book takes an "archival turn" by situating archives as subjects rather than places of study, and examining the increasingly problematic relationships between historical and archival work. The book sets the background to these changes by showing how nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians and archivists in Europe and North American came to occupy the same conceptual and methodological space. For both, authoritative history was based on authoritative archives and mutual understandings of scientific research. The authors then show how these connections changed as historians began to ask questions not easily answered by traditional documentation, and archivists began to confront an unmanageable increase in the amount of material they processed and the challenges of new electronic technologies. The book situates these changes in a review of contemporary historical concepts and archival practices. The authors contend that historians and archivists have divided into two entirely separate professions with distinct conceptual frameworks, training, and purposes, as well as different understandings of the authorities that govern their work. Processing the Past moves toward bridging this divide by speaking in one voice to these very different audiences as well as to general readers. The book concludes by raising the worrisome question of what future historical archives might be like if historical scholars and archivists no longer understand each other, and indeed, whether their now different notions of what is archival and historical will ever again be joined.

This book discusses both the philosophy of language and linguistic philosophy.

The future of reference librarianship as a viable and essential part of the library depends on developing a proactive, participatory, and hands-on approach to automation. This book pulls together the most important elements of change likely to influence library information services and explains them clearly. It covers both the conceptual context and practical real-life implementations of current automation in reference services. The automation technologies include OPACs, CD-ROM, international networks, expert systems, natural language processing, and virtual reality. In addition to helping people find information, reference librarians also perform another service: the comprehension and understanding of the operative connections between and route to information. It necessitates an unrelenting exploration and immersion within the world information matrix to maintain currency and knowledge. The author shows how reference librarians have in the past and will in the future take a leading role in adapting automation to reference services.

This is the first booklength study of women in library education. The authors set out to examine the dynamic social processes and significant relationships--such as mentioning--that have shaped the aspirations and career goals of women faculty in library and information science. Employing a intergenerational sample the authors construct a unique view of the changes in opportunities and gender role expectations in the field. In addition, Maack and Passet apply management models of mentoring and support relationships to the university environment. This leads to an analysis of the kinds of mentoring and peer support relationships that best enable women to succeed, and the authors conclude with recommendatons for ways to foster positive mentoring relationships.

Written from a feminist perspective, the volume draws from the work of scholars in women's studies, sociology, psychology, management, anthropology, and higher education. Not only will the volume be of interest to those in or aspiring to a career in academia it will be of use to scholars and students in the above disciplines as well.

In response to the often-cited need to improve science literacy in the United States, this book examines how popular science information resources contribute to this goal and recommends nearly 2,500 significant titles--70 percent published since 1990--representing all fields of modern science. This guide provides librarians, educators, and other information specialists with an understanding of science literacy, as well as the knowledge of the skills and principles necessary to evaluate works of popular science. The annotated bibliographies are organized into nine subject areas and represent the body of current, significant popular literature for the entire discipline, including reference works, autobiography and biography, history of the discipline, and specific topics within the discipline. Nonprint resources are evaluated as well. This work will be valuable for collection development, making reference recommendations, and designing programmatic learning activities and is intended for public, high school, community college, and college and university librarians, as well as for science teachers.

Librarians and information specialists must develop representative collections and be able to evaluate and recommend scientific information resources effectively. This work is unique in developing a unifying contextual background and linking popular science library collections to science literacy. Part One, Scientific Information, Popular Science, and Lifelong Learning, discusses historical and current issues related to popular science, science literacy, and information resources. Included is the most exhaustive discussion available of how to evaluate works of popular science. Part Two, Subject Guides to Popular Information Resources, is an annotated bibliography of 2,500 recommended print and nonprint works in general science, astronomy and space sciences, biological sciences, chemistry, mathematics, medicine and health sciences, natural history, physics, and technology and applied science. Each core entry contains a complete bibliographic citation, a 25-75 word descriptive and evaluative annotation, and a list of review sources. Annotations consider the resource's level of relevance, scope, comprehensibility, and uniqueness, and compare resources, especially the ways in which they complement or contrast with one another. Additional recommended titles contain a brief annotation.

The Turn analyzes the research of information seeking and retrieval (IS&R) and proposes a new direction of integrating research in these two areas: the fields should turn off their separate and narrow paths and construct a new avenue of research. An essential direction for this avenue is context as given in the subtitle Integration of Information Seeking and Retrieval in Context. Other essential themes in the book include:

IS&R research models, frameworks and theories; search and works tasks and situations in context; interaction between humans and machines; information acquisition, relevance and information use; research design and methodology based on a structured set of explicit variables - all set into the holistic cognitive approach. The present monograph invites the reader into a construction project - there is much research to do for a contextual understanding of IS&R.

The Turn represents a wide-ranging perspective of IS&R by providing a novel unique research framework, covering both individual and social aspects of information behavior, including the generation, searching, retrieval and use of information. Regarding traditional laboratory information retrieval research, the monograph proposes the extension of research toward actors, search and work tasks, IR interaction and utility of information. Regarding traditional information seeking research, it proposes the extension toward information access technology and work task contexts.

The Turn is the first synthesis of research in the broad area of IS&R ranging from systems oriented laboratory IR research to social science oriented information seeking studies.

Using Subject Headings for Online Retrieval is an indispensable tool for online system designers who are developing new systems or refining existing ones. The book describes subject analysis and subject searching in online catalogs, including the limitations of retrieval, and demonstrates how such limitations can be overcome through system design and programming. The book describes the Library of Congress Subject Headings system and system characteristics, shows how information is stored in machine-readable files, and offers examples of and recommendations for successful retrieval methods. Tables are included to support these recommendations, and diagrams, graphs, and bar charts are used to provide results of data analysis. Practitioners in institutions using or considering the installation of an online catalog will refer to this book often to generate specifications. Researchers in library systems, information retrieval, and user behavior will appreciate the book's detailing of the results of an extensive, empirical study of the subject terms entered into online systems by end users. Using Subject Headings for Online Retrieval also addresses the needs of advanced students in library schools and instructors in library automation, information retrieval, cataloging, indexing, and user behavior.

Since the mid 1980s academic libraries have established minority residency programs in an effort to increase the representation of librarians of color in their institutions. Now more than a decade later, these programs continue to be developed. Essays written by librarians of color who participated in residency programs, and administrators whose institutions made the programs possible, remind us of the continuing need for diversity in academic libraries.

The decade prior to World War II was a time of intense introspection on the part of librarians. There was considerable controversy over whether librarianship constituted a science in any proper sense of the term. Education for librarianship was undergoing close scrutiny and reform. Issues related to federal aid, adult education, and rural library development were unresolved and subject to heated discussion. In the late 1940s the Public Library Inquiry was conceived to study and document the conditions, achievements, and weaknesses of public libraries and librarianship. For the next 40 years, the Inquiry set the tone and agenda for professional discourse about the purpose of the public library.

This book examines the professional and political ideology that informed and sustained the Public LIbrary Inquiry. The volumes of the Inquiry, while representing the results of research on the status of the public library and librarianship, also reveal a remarkably consistent ideological position that united them in a way perhaps unintended by their creators. Inherent in the Inquiry's discourse are particular notions and assumptions about the nature of American democracy, the public library, and relations between them. The Inquiry also reflects, in its recommendations, particular professional values that define what the public library's purpose ought to be if the library is to contribute meaningfully to a democratic culture, and gain social recognition of that contribution.

This unique publication provides a thesaurus of all Library of Congress sub-Saharan African subject headings ever published, including classification numbers for most subject headings and cross-references from related or unused versions of a heading. Thus it provides a valuable easy-to-use thesaurus for those doing library research and online searches in African Studies. The volume covers the 41 countries that make up Africa south of the Sahara and the islands of Cape Verde, the Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion, Saint Helena, Sao Tome Principe, and the Seychelles. It consists of some 4,000 subject headings, including the names of over 600 African peoples and nearly 600 African languages. In addition to the cross-references from unused synonyms and references to broader, related, and narrower terms that are found in Library of Congress Subject Headings, Otchere has added hundreds more to help the user more easily locate the desired term.

This international collection explores the role of ideology in the information age, challenging the dominant ideology of the information age through examinations of its philosophical and theoretical assumptions, its images of the future, and its international dimensions.

This study, written in the context of its first publication in 1970, discusses and documents the invasion of privacy by the corporation and the social institution in the search for efficiency in information processing. Discussing areas such as the impact of the computer on administration, privacy and the storage on information, the authors assess the technical and social feasibility of constructing integrated data banks to cover the details of populations. The book was hugely influential both in terms of scholarship and legislation, and the years following saw the Data Protection Act of 1984, which was then consolidated by the Act of 1998. The topics under discussion remain of great concern to the public in our increasingly web-based world, ensuring the continued relevance of this title to academics and students with an interest in data protection and public privacy.

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Resource discovery has many meanings, and it is now being defined as library research software that allows a library user to search multiple Web-based resources simultaneously and generate usable search results. Planning and Implementing Resource Discovery Tools in Academic Libraries addresses the many new resource discovery tools and products in existence, as well as their potential uses and applications. This timely publication will be invaluable to librarians and administrators seeking information on how to evaluate, choose, and ultimately implement a resource discovery product for their library s collection.