The American Library Association's (ALA's) Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) strives to educate librarians and the public about the nature and importance of intellectual freedom in libraries, and it will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 2017. Libraries are a forum for information and ideas (under the First Amendment), and librarians are…

Building a personal learning network (PLN) for intellectual freedom has long been an important role of a school librarian; however, in the steadily increasing onslaught of digital information that librarians face today, and in the future, the task has become mission-critical. Personal learning, it stands to reason, requires an appropriate dialogue…

Advocacy is not optional for libraries. Libraries need advocacy because so much of what goes on in them is invisible to the public eye. If the public thinks that circulating books is all that librarians do and all that they have to do, then how can they expect them to be impressed by the influence within the school community? If those people are…

In this article, the author traces her journey from fulfilling her evolving job duties to an increased sense of awareness that advocacy was an integral part of her work. The author started her career by doing the best she could do for the library media program she managed, and evolved to become an advocate for school libraries in general. Through…

While a positive attitude for librarians helps, there is a knowledge base and a research base in the field, a structured set of protocols, and a range of skills that have to be taught and practiced at the preservice level. In this article, the author discusses the importance for librarians to exude more enthusiasm about their work. She offers…

While the need for a data retention policy is rapidly becoming clear to schools, little guidance is available for crafting one. Most schools depend on backup and recovery plans that generally focus on individual servers or devices. However, retention policies also need to focus on the type of data contained on those servers and how it will be…

In this article, the author shares her experience during her practicum for her master's in library science wherein she had the opportunity to work in a school library that was moving toward combining with a local branch of a public library. Combining the public and school libraries meant integrating these two related yet distinct missions, or at…