This book, first published in 1984, analyses the provision of more effective library service by relying more heavily on collaboration between reference and technical services librarians.

Taking a broad approach from career counselling theory to recommendations of major sources of career and job information, this book, first published in 1992, covers subjects such as cooperative programs between librarians, career planning professionals, and job search counsellors and the evaluation of career-related materials. It emphasizes the constant demand for career and job information regardless of economic conditions. Librarians can act as intermediaries to help patrons locate career and employment sources dispersed throughout the collection, demonstrate their proper use, and guide them to additional useful sources. Specific chapters explain how to expand career and job services by networking with other community resources and developing a strong core collection of the best resources available. Other ground breaking topics analysed include employment and labour market trends for the 1990s, unemployment services in libraries, evaluation criteria for career resources, essential career planning and employment materials, specialized collections for relocation literature, and employment of persons with disabilities.

This book, first published in 1992, explores the issue of library assessment methods and the impact of accountability on the delivery of reference services. It is a call for librarians to actively adopt performance measures and learn how to work with the results. It analyses a wealth of assessment methods that librarians can use to collect data and create standards that are valid, practical, and useful in accounting for reference services. Some of the methodologies described include quantitative measures, qualitative measures, patron surveys, questionnaires, interviews, case studies, peer review, unobtrusive testing, and even updating the library's policies and procedures manual as a way to evaluate services. A variety of assessment methods for reference services are applied to all types of libraries. Chapters in Assessment and Accountability in Reference Work describe how a small town library defends the relevancy of its services at a town meeting, how a special library documents the value of its services to cost-conscious management, and how academic libraries can become involved in university- and college-level assessment programs. Librarians seeking to develop their own assessment methods will benefit from practical advice on assessing diversity in the library, and helpful suggestions for improving reference services through training workshops, peer-coaching, and changes in organizational climate.

This book, first published in 1984, is an effective guide to help librarians develop a more systematic and effective approach to dealing with overdues. The editors present statistical data on overdues, as well as successful tactics employed by various libraries to combat the persistent problem of overdue materials.

British university libraries face major financial, technological, and organizational challenges. Cuts in funding, the spread of new technology, and changes to the provision of university education as a whole are combining to fundamentally alter the circumstances in which university libraries operate. This book, first published in 1989, provides a thorough understanding of the major trends that have emerged during the past decade and projects them into the future to assess their likely effect over the next few years. By focusing on the most important developments in the areas of finance, staffing, collections, services, automation, and relations with other libraries, author Toby Burrows exposes the forces that threaten the very nature of the British university library. The changes affecting British universities as a whole are also analysed since these broad influences have been a major cause of change in libraries and are essential to an understanding of that change. The future of the British university library depends on its ability to clearly articulate a coherent vision of its own future; this book takes a crucial step toward this goal.

This book, first published in 1989, examines the problems and benefits of installing a ready-made computer system in a sci-tech library. These systems, usually known as turnkey systems, provide a means for obtaining the network for a lower cost than a new system designed by a consultant. These papers analyse the benefits and problems with turnkey systems in a variety of different situations.

As the mission statements of libraries across the nation change to reflect the realities of post-liberal America and its emphasis on economic values, librarians have had to pick up their long-standing paradigm and move it in an endless shuffle from knowledge stewardship, to information broker, to entertainment director. Many library boards have made it clear that the public library, especially in smaller communities, can earn its keep only by becoming the center of educational, informational, and entertainment possibilities for their taxpayers. This has necessitated a ten-year learning curve unprecedented in professional life. Few librarians, even those being schooled today in our graduate schools, are prepared to shift into high gear when it comes to conceptualizing, planning, paying for, and evaluating public programs for their patrons. Unlike its predecessors that leave ideas for public programming to the imagination, Programming for Adults lists ideas, names names, and massages the already fertile librarian imagination to the challenge and creativity inherent in adult programming. Legal issues are discussed, possible pitfalls are flagged, and evaluative follow-ups are suggested. The advice put forth in this book can help you put on your show to the satisfaction of your boss and, more importantly, to the accolades of your public.

Needed now more than ever: a guide that includes 500 diverse contemporary fiction and memoir recommendations for preteens and teens with the goal of inspiring greater empathy for themselves, their peers, and the world around them. As young people are diagnosed with anxiety and depression in increasing numbers, or dealing with other issues that can isolate them from family and friends-such as bullying, learning disabilities, racism, or homophobia-characters in books can help them feel less alone. And just as important, reading books that feature a diverse range of real-life topics helps generate openness, empathy, and compassion in all kids. Better with Books is a valuable resource for parents, teachers, librarians, therapists, and all caregivers who recognize the power of literature to improve young readers' lives. Each chapter explores a particular issue affecting preteens and teens today and includes a list of recommended related books-all published within the last decade. Recommendations are grouped by age: those appropriate for middle-grade readers and those for teens. Reading lists are organized around: Adoption and foster care Body image Immigration Learning challenges LGBTQIA+ youth Mental health Nature and environmentalism Physical disability Poverty and homelessness Race and ethnicity Religion and spirituality

The literature of American music librarianship has been around since the 19th century when public libraries began to keep records of player-piano concerts, significant donations of books and music, and suggestions for housing music. As the 20th century began, American periodicals printed more and more articles on increasingly specialized topics within music studies. Eventually books were developed to aid the music librarian; their publication has continued over the course of nearly a century. This book reflects the great diversity of the literature of music librarianship. The main resources included are items of historical interest, descriptions of individual collections, catalogues of collections, articles describing specific library functions, record-related subjects, bibliographies designed for music library use, literature from Canada and Britain when relevant to U.S. library practices, key discographies, and information on specialized music research. The material is ordered by topic and indexed by author, subject, and library name.

This title was first published in 2003. The UK branch of the International Association of Music Libraries was founded in 1953. This volume of specially commissioned essays celebrates the golden jubilee of branch's foundation and surveys the achievements of the last 50 years. With an emphasis on practical music librarianship, the essays examine the challenges that have faced the profession in recent years, as well as current developments in the field and the impact of modern advances in information technology.

School library media centers are at a critical juncture. Over the next decade, schools will undergo fundamental technological, economic, societal, instructional, and administrative changes. Craver discusses the major forces for change confronting school libraries, analyzes their implications as a guide for future decision making, and recommends that school library media specialists assume a leadership role in meeting these challenges. The work provides current data and statistics on future trends in technology, employment, education, society, instruction, and school administration that can help the school library media specialist to formulate forceful arguments for the acquisition of new technologies, instructional reform, and full implementation of resource-based learning. School library media specialists who need to plan and make decisions about the future of their school libraries will find this book an invaluable resource. To visualize the future, Craver creates contrasting scenarios of utopian and dystopian school library media centers in the 21st century. Chapter 1, Technological Trends, discusses the digitalization of all media and the implications of the technological revolution on the school library media center. Chapter 2, Economic Trends, considers the impact of demographic changes and declining budgets and how to deal with them. Chapter 3, Employment Trends, outlines future trends in the workforce and suggests ways in which the school library can respond. Chapter 4, Educational Trends, charts the decline in literacy and the growing school reform movement. Chapter 5, Social and Behavioral Trends, discusses the change from a nation with minorities to a nation of minorities and the transformation of the American family. Chapter 6, Instructional Trends, shows how the instructional role of the school library media specialist will change with the presence of advanced technologies. Chapter 7, Organizational and Managerial Trends, describes the role the school library media specialist will have to assume as the technological, economic, educational, and cultural changes affect the daily business of the media center. Chapter 8, Challenges, focuses on a series of challenges in technology, performance-based programs, collection development, instruction, and organization and manayement of the library media center.

Pulls together research results from Scandinavian public library researchers on current public library issues, including how public libraries are facing and dealing with the various professional challenges of modern society. Contributors tackle topics as wide ranging as the challenges of serving a multi-cultural society, new library media and services, internet services and new trends in library management. This collection of articles also includes library history works focusing on the relationship between public library ideas and practices in the USA and the Scandinavian countries.

Research indicates that collaboration is one of three key priorities school library media specialists should have if they want to make a difference at their schools. By working with the administrators and educators, school library media specialists can effectively integrate information literacy skills throughout the curriculum, and help to ensure that today's children and young adults will be capable and effective users of information as adults. This title fills a void in the professional literature by incorporating the information about the theory of collaboration available in the business and educational psychology literatures, and translating the pertinent material into ideas and methods useful to school library media specialists.

Libraries seeking to grow or enhance community outreach will welcome Building Community Engagement and Outreach in Libraries to assist them in planning and executing engagement programs. Eight chapters offer a variety of methods and strategies that library managers can employ to broaden and enhance their libraries' community engagement activities.The volume includes both theoretical frameworks and strategic case studies.Readers will learn how to plan and execute successful community engagement programs with tips on providing leadership for working with staff, fostering relationships with community partners and using assessment to plan for future programming. Specific applications of community engagement practices include using data to inform stakeholders, providing health literacy workshops, staff training for community programs, outreach to engage the community with archives, working with underserved communities and diversity training. This is an important addition to the literature on how libraries can work with their communities to provide critical services and resources. Providing valuable insights about the diverse ways that outreach can be accomplished within and through our communities, this volume serves as a significant resource for both library managers, their staff and their partners.

This handbook is designed to help researchers, journalists, students, and business people to locate the rich array of Washington institutions and organizations that focus on issues pertaining to Central Asia and the Caucasus region, particularly in the post-Soviet period. Washington's status as a major repository of documentation on every aspect of the region is strong and growing daily. Beyond the Library of Congress, which intensively collects newspapers and other published materials from the region, and the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which does the same for radio, there are hundreds of national and international public, non-profit, and private organizations and institutions in Washington with extensive links to Central Asia and the Caucasus, all of which maintain active archives and collections. The Guide includes more than 270 entries. It describes the structure and scholarly and technical resources of libraries, archives and manuscript repositories, museums and galleries, collections of sound and visual recordings, map and film collections, and the holdings of research centers and information agencies. Academic programs and departments of the metropolitan area's many institutions of higher learning are covered, along with international organizations, U.S. and foreign government agencies, association and advocacy groups, scientific organizations, educational and cultural organizations, corporations, technical assistance organizations, religious organizations, publications and media operations, bookstores and online resources. An index of organizations and institutions enhances the Guide's usefulness.

This resource is as much a tribute to its editors and contributors, a cadre of champions who have made the study of this underrepresented group their lifework, as it is a testament to their unwavering respect for the young inquiring mind. It begins with a historical overview of the literature on children's use and understanding of electronic information systems, when these retrieval mechanisms were in their infancy. Subsequent essays by leading figures in the field, all peer-reviewed, highlight the theoretical and empirical progress that has occurred since then. Including classic papers originally published elsewhere, the result is a powerful synthesis of thought, practice, and belief. For practitioners and academics, and all those who seek to better understand the complex dynamics of information seeking among children and young adults. Deserves a place on every professional bookshelf for many years to come.

The authors provide us with the first in depth look at the origins and subsequent evolution of this fascinating field of study. Beginning with a discussion of the Library Anxiety Scale, the most widely used measure of library anxiety among college and university students, it investigates a number of theoretical models, provides an extensive framework for conducting research at the institutional level, and offers both proven and proposed strategies for prevention and intervention. If there are more nonusers than users in your community--or if you suspect your users could benefit more from the experience--let Library Anxiety ease your troubled hearts and smooth the way ahead.

The goal of the MLA Basic Manual Series is to present definitive discussion on specific aspects of the music library profession, but this third volume in the series is a bit atypical. Although it focuses uniquely on instruction in the music library, because music library users' needs, curricular content, or institutional designs differ, it would be impossible to present a single viewpoint on this subject. Because the nature of such instructional programs meshes intimately with the institution itself, to divorce a program from its library would negate the context for its development. As a result, this volume provides three different approaches to instructional programs. Gregg Geary demonstrates how plans for teaching non-music majors about music resources match educational competencies established at the University of Hawaii; Laura Snyder presents the course she helped develop while teaching a graduate-level class on music bibliography at Eastman; and Kathleen Abromeit offers an overview of the program employed at Oberlin Conservatory Library for training undergraduate students to serve as reference assistants. This easy-to-read manual enables the reader to learn about the traits of these programs, adapt ideas to make them applicable to their own settings, and ultimately benefit from the experiences of these authors.

First published in 1992, the purpose of this book is to identify and describe the most important factors that must be considered in making decisions about the optimal ways to provide access to information - in short the best way to use the humans, the machines, and the intangible resources known as information, particularly at the organizational level. In recent years executives have begun to outsource computing and telecommunications functions primarily to control costs. Traditional libraries and information centres have been disbanded in favour of service contracts or outright leasing of staff. Both the private and public sector are examining their information service operations from the point of view of cost effectiveness. Decisions about owning versus leasing of information are being made daily. Decision makers are finding that they must deal differently with funding and budgeting of information systems and libraries than they have in the past. New paradigms for these service functions already exist. Not only have corporations and governments begun to contract out entire information service operations, but libraries themselves have begun to consider the costs, effectiveness, and implications of outsourcing some of their operations and services. This book provides a framework for decision-makers to view and review information services within their organizations. Entire units, components of libraries and information centres are defined and untangled so that the widest variety of organizations can analyse their own environments. Although there is a minimal use of library and computing jargon, a short glossary at the end explains terms for which there is no simple English language substitute. Each chapter is accompanied by comments from a broad range of experts in the information field.

Examine the vital issues facing sci-tech libraries in today's economic and technological climate
This book addresses current challenges and changes in science and technology libraries--and shows how librarians are handling them in difficult financial times. It examines issues related to closing and merging libraries, online collections maintenance and costs, assistance/outreach geared toward specific groups of library patrons, and the gathering of usage statistics in the electronic environment. You'll also find specific descriptions--and a general overview--of new technologies and case studies of the impact of new technologies on sci-tech library management. Handy tables and figures make the information easy to access and understand.
Presenting a wide variety of problems and solutions, Information Practice in Science and Technology will help you understand the needs of users regarding current information technologies and how to meet them. From the editor: "Among the critical challenges facing sci-tech libraries (and actually all libraries) are the need to perform detailed collection assessment and evaluation, particularly in regard to e-resource collections; the need to examine and provide appropriate public services; and the need to develop strategies for the adoption of new information technologies. This book addresses these key issues and attempts to provide both perspective and insight into these problems."
Information Practice in Science and Technology examines: how merging academic departmental libraries can both improve services and smooth the transition to increased use of digital information the process of developing, managing, and providing access to an electronic collection--a case study from the University of Notre Dame, with special attention paid to licensing and publisher agreements how a limited Web interface can be enhanced and become a digital portal to a library's print collection--a case study from the Grainger Engineering Library at the University of Illinois how libraries can support academic faculty research in cross-disciplinary subject areas how to address the specialized subject area information needs of meteorologists and geologists outreach methods that the University of California uses to better connect with library patrons and demonstrate the services that the library offers Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)--the new technology for archiving and linking electronic information how to gather and benefit from usage statistics, with attention to electronic databases, statistics gathered from public library terminals, and transaction log usage statistics for electronic reserves the proposals to provide all government documents through an electronic distribution system--and what that will mean to sci-tech libraries

Will the library of the future be "bookless"? Will reference librarians disappear? Will information continue to double every few years? These are but some of the issues tackled by a group of curious librarians. Perhaps, like them, you too are troubled by the swift current of changes flowing through your institution. Unleashed by the erudite Martin Raish, contributors were asked to write about whatever was uppermost on their minds about today's academic libraries and librarians. The result is a constellation of opinion, expressed with intelligence, poignancy, and wit.

This thought-provoking collection of essays is essential reading for anyone who cares about cultural institutions and their role in the community of learners. These institutions-often museums or libraries-have the power to profoundly alter our sense of ourselves and of the world around us, but that power carries with it obligations. David Carr challenges us to contemplate both the effects and the responsibilities, to examine carefully the nuances of these experiences. Yet a visit to a cultural institution is itself only one act in the broader activity of learning throughout our lives. Carr has much to say about the experience of learning in its best sense and thus speaks not only to lovers of cultural institutions, but also to lovers of learning everywhere.

Marketing and Social Media: A Guide for Libraries, Archives, and Museums, Second Edition is a much-needed guide to marketing for libraries, archives, and museum professionals in the social media age. This book serves as both an introductory textbook and as a guide for working professionals interested in developing well-planned evidence-based marketing campaigns. Chapters cover coordinating efforts with the organization's mission, goals, and objectives, how to do a SWOT analysis and environmental scanning, the use of existing data as well as issues in collecting additional data, how to identify and involve stakeholders, a 4-step marketing model, considerations of price, placement, product, and promotion, market research, understanding customer groups and market segmentation, marketing mix strategy and evaluation, promotional activities, channel selection, social media marketing activities, content marketing, social media policies, guidelines, crisis communication, and evidence-based assessment. Discussion of social media and examples of social media marketing activities are included throughout the book, as well as case study examples of marketing and social media campaigns in libraries, archives and museums. This second edition further includes a new final chapter offering step-by-step guidance for brand-new social media managers on how to get started from their first day on the job with social media marketing, management, assessment, strategic planning, and content calendar planning activities, in addition to working with colleagues and managers to integrate social media into work activities across the organization. For educators, this text includes elements which can be developed into classroom or workshop assignments which include pull quotes highlighting important concepts in each chapter, key terms, discussion questions, illustrative case study examples from archives, libraries and museums, and an annotated bibliography for further reading.

Completely updated, with a new section on using the computer in the cataloging function, this new edition of a classic will be a welcome tool for the volunteer or paraprofessional in a small library. Covering the essentials in clear nontechnical language, Hoffman explains the how and why of arranging publications, the principles of cataloging (including description, main and added entries, analytics, the shelf list, cross references, and filing), and online records. Nearly 100 examples illustrate the cataloging practice. Why do you need a shelf list? What is an authority file? Easy to understand and practical, this gem illuminates the world of monographs, series, irregular serials, uniform titles, simple and complex subject headings, tracings, and location codes. Even the world of the small library is startlingly complex-Hoffman's guide will simplify it. Reviews of previous editions: "Hoffman's guide to simplified cataloging practice will be a great help...this handbook lays out the options of collection organization clearly and in everyday language." -Booklist "Because of its emphasis on fundamentals, rigorous reasoning, and its readable style, the book is also helpful for library school students as well as for practicing librarians." -Reference & Research Book News "...will provide its intended reader, the nonprofessional or volunteer in charge of a small library, with solid, well-organized information necessary to catalog a collection systematically." LRTS

Library research has changed dramatically since Marilyn Lutzker and Eleanor Ferrall's Criminal Justice Research in Libraries was published in 1986. In addition to covering the enduring elements of traditional research, this new edition provides full coverage of research using the World Wide Web, hypertext documents, computer indexes, and other online resources. It gives an in-depth explanation of such concepts as databases, networks, and full text, and the Internet gets a full chapter. The chapters on bibliographic searching, the library catalog, and comparative research are almost totally new, and chapters on indexes and abstracts, newsletters, newspapers and news broadcasts, documents, reports and conference proceedings, and statistics reflect the shift to computerized sources. The chapter on legal resources discusses the wealth of legal information available on the Internet. A new chapter on library research in forensic science corrects an omission from the first book. With the growth of computerized indexes and the Internet, more and more researchers are admitting that they feel inadequate to the new tools. Librarians themselves are struggling to keep abreast of the new technology. This book will help students, practitioners, scholars, and librarians develop a sense of competency in doing criminal justice research.