Before the Web existed, anyone who wanted free information had to use the library. Now, a wealth of information on every possible service is accessible online. To compete in the digital age, libraries must provide outstanding customer service to their virtual users. But, where can they turn to learn how to do that? Serving Online Customers: Lessons for Libraries from the Business World is a practical guide to steps libraries can take to adopt the best practices of e-business to their own online operations. Donald A. Barclay has carefully examined business literature to identify the best customer service practices of online companies and shows readers how to adapt these to the library environment. Chapter coverage includes these critical areas: *Improving the Self-Service Experience *Bringing Reference Service to the Online Customer *Adding Libraries to the Distance Education Mix *Designing Library Websites for Both Trust and Pleasure *Implementing Recommendation Agents and Avatars into Online Services *Linking Continuous Assessment to Online Service Improvement This book will help any library greatly enhance their online users' experience and help bring new users to the library.

Before the Web existed, anyone who wanted free information had to use the library. Now, a wealth of information on every possible service is accessible online. To compete in the digital age, libraries must provide outstanding customer service to their virtual users. But, where can they turn to learn how to do that? Serving Online Customers: Lessons for Libraries from the Business World is a practical guide to steps libraries can take to adopt the best practices of e-business to their own online operations. Donald A. Barclay has carefully examined business literature to identify the best customer service practices of online companies and shows readers how to adapt these to the library environment. Chapter coverage includes these critical areas: *Improving the Self-Service Experience *Bringing Reference Service to the Online Customer *Adding Libraries to the Distance Education Mix *Designing Library Websites for Both Trust and Pleasure *Implementing Recommendation Agents and Avatars into Online Services *Linking Continuous Assessment to Online Service Improvement This book will help any library greatly enhance their online users' experience and help bring new users to the library.

Does the idea of a world in which facts mean nothing cause anxiety? Fear? Maybe even paranoia? Disinformation: The Nature of Facts and Lies in the Post-Truth Era cannot cure all the ills of a post-truth world, but by demonstrating how the emergence of digital technology into everyday life has knitted together a number of seemingly loosely related forces-historical, psychological, economic, and culture-to create the post-truth culture, Disinformation will help you better understand how we got to where we now are, see how we can move beyond a culture in which facts are too easily dismissed, and develop a few highly practical skills for separating truth from lies. Disinformation explains: -How human psychology-the very way our brains work-can leave us vulnerable to disinformation. -How the early visions of what a global computer network would and should be unintentionally laid the groundwork for the current post-truth culture. -The ways in which truth is twisted and misrepresented via propaganda and conspiracy theories. -How new technology not only spreads disinformation but may also be changing the way we think. -The ways in which the economics of information and the powerful influence of popular culture have contributed to the creation of the post-truth culture. Unlike the far-too-numerous one-sided, politically ideological treatments of the post-truth culture, Disinformation does not seek to point the finger of blame at any individuals or groups; instead, its focus is on how a number of disparate forces have influenced human behaviors during a time when all of humanity is struggling to better understand and more effectively control (for better or worse) challenging new technologies that are straining the limits of human intellectual and emotional capacity.

Are you overwhelmed at the amount, contradictions, and craziness of all the information coming at you in this age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles? Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies will show you how to identify deceptive information as well as how to seek out the most trustworthy information in order to inform decision making in your personal, academic, professional, and civic lives. * Learn how to identify the alarm bells that signal untrustworthy information. * Understand how to tell when statistics can be trusted and when they are being used to deceive. * Inoculate yourself against the logical fallacies that can mislead even the brightest among us. Donald A. Barclay, a career librarian who has spent decades teaching university students to become information literate scholars and citizens, takes an objective, non-partisan approach to the complex and nuanced topic of sorting deceptive information from trustworthy information.

Are you overwhelmed at the amount, contradictions, and craziness of all the information coming at you in this age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles? Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies will show you how to identify deceptive information as well as how to seek out the most trustworthy information in order to inform decision making in your personal, academic, professional, and civic lives. * Learn how to identify the alarm bells that signal untrustworthy information. * Understand how to tell when statistics can be trusted and when they are being used to deceive. * Inoculate yourself against the logical fallacies that can mislead even the brightest among us. Donald A. Barclay, a career librarian who has spent decades teaching university students to become information literate scholars and citizens, takes an objective, non-partisan approach to the complex and nuanced topic of sorting deceptive information from trustworthy information.

The early American West has been depicted in art as a land of harsh struggles, a place of heavenly miracles, and everything in between. Different Travellers, Different Eyes records impressions of life on the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American frontier by twenty-one artists better known for their paintings, sculptures, and photographs. Most but not all the selections come from journals or diaries kept during trips to the West.

Thomas Moran, for instance, notes what others must have felt, that "the impression then made upon me by the stupendous and remarkable manifestations of nature's forces will remain with me as long as memory lasts". That impression of grandeur echoes the vast and dramatic canvasses Moran created on his trips west.

Different Travellers, Different Eyes is not an art history book. The narrators are not art historians. Their works adorn the walls of museums, fill the pages of art books, fetch large sums at auction, and (as reproductions) illustrate histories of the early American West. Chances are slim, however, that the casual reader has read a word these artists wrote. This gathering brings the best of this literary art out of the shadows.

"La Turca" is a stage play loosely based on the "entrada" (expedition) lead by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. From 1540 to 1542, Coronado's army of some 300 soldiers (plus a few thousand Indian allies and servants) wandered from what is now Compostela, Mexico through Arizona, New Mexico, Northern Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and back to Compostela. The non-Indian members of the expedition, most of whom had gone into debt to finance their participation, were looking for cities of gold, of which they found none. Although they passed through what are now considered some of the most spectacular landscapes in the world, to the members of the expedition it was all a vast wasteland. "La Turca" weaves together the West's past and present in a raw drama that explores the ideas and emotions driving individuals and cultures into conflict. The characters are unforgettable and the stakes are high in this fictionalized telling of the first "illegal immigration" into what is now Arizona.

Not just an exploration of our early Western European roots, these rich chronicles read as literature, first-person narratives of the greatest exploration adventures in historic times.

From the Platonic vision of Atlantis to Arthur's Avalon, pre-Columbus Europeans imagined fabulous lands to the west--and after 1492, initial reports of a new world filled with golden El Dorados, warrior queens, and Fountains of Youth merely provided confirmation.

Although these dreams were soon tempered by reality, explorers continued to set off with expectation that shaped what they say, how they saw, and how they reacted. This complex of attitudes continues to affect the way we view our world, and these accounts provide an excellent source for insight into the metaphorical systems that have permeated European and American writing about the West since the Sixteenth century.

"Into the Wilderness Dreams" draws from the best of three dozen accounts by the Spanish, French, English, and American explorers who came before Lewis and Clark, and explores the roots of present Western Euro-American culture.